Pastor’s Weekly Letter

          A number of years ago, do you remember seeing the bumper sticker: “If it feels good, do it!”? In many ways, that slogan characterizes the approach of so many people today.  A stream of books, articles, commentary, advertisements, and dialogue points to feelings as the basic measure of happiness, as the truest aspect of one’s true self.  Feelings are continually represented as central to self-fulfillment and the development of one’s potential.           A popular psychiatrist-author states the “modern” perspective in no uncertain terms: “Being in touch with your feelings is the […]

          Are you ready for a deepening of your motives, attitudes and thought patterns?  Have you discovered that you have limited Jesus to the safer parts of your life?  Have you allowed the Holy Spirit to be set free to probe the deeper areas of your life?                       So to all fathers:  Have you as a father been working on ways to strengthen your family?  Many fathers are devoting far more time and energy to worldly achievements than to their responsibilities as a husband and father.  Oftentimes a strong achievement orientation has […]

                Have you ever wondered or thought about how people got their names?  With us, the explanation is fairly obvious.  We were given our first names by our parents.  And we inherited our last names from our fathers, just as they did from their fathers.  But there was a time when most people had only one name.  The world was younger.  The population was smaller.  People moved less – spent all of their lives in the same place.  One name was enough.                 If two people in the same village ended up with […]

            Central to our Catholic Faith is a conviction that human personality is sacred, and that human life has meaning both now and forever.  That is one thing that makes the Christian Gospel the most redemptive force on earth – it believes in and proclaims the eternal worthwhileness of all human life.  So, we have schools and hospitals and orphanages and rest homes; we send missionaries all over the world, we feed the poor; we befriend the lonely and forgotten.  Why this tremendous expenditure of time and effort and money?  It is because we believe […]

          In NY Harbor there stands a famous statue, the Statue of Liberty.  In her one hand, Lady Liberty is holding a tablet bearing the date July 4, 1776.  In her other hand, she is holding aloft a torch, symbolizing liberty enlightening the world.  In the harbor, the Statue of Liberty stands right next to Ellis Island, our nation’s largest immigration station for many years.  Millions of immigrants made the long sea voyage from Europe in those days and came through Ellis Island.  They came seeking freedom.  They came seeking better days.  And so for those […]