Letter from the Pastor

If you were asked to sum up your life to this moment in one brief statement of twenty-five words or less – How would you do it?  What would you say?  Think about that for a moment.  You have been living now for fifteen years, fifty years, or however long it’s been.  Those years have contained a combination of good and bad, success and failure, fulfillment, and disappointment.  Now you want to summarize them in one brief statement.  How would you go about doing that? Admittedly, it would not be easy to do.  Most of us would need quite a […]

               A poster from the 1960’s offered an excellent commentary on human nature.  Two babies in diapers about the same age sat facing each other.  One was reaching out to the other as though to establish contact.  The caption underneath said, “At last I have found someone exactly like me.”  One of the babies was black; the other was white.  That strikes me as an interesting comment on the similarity and dissimilarity in human beings.  Sometimes we get to thinking that our needs and problems are unique to us, that no one else in […]

Some say that people today are losing, or perhaps have already lost, a capacity to be deeply moved by human suffering.  The kind of world we live in inevitably has a numbing effect on the human spirit.  One hour with a newspaper or thirty minutes in front of the television exposes one to an overwhelming amount of tragedy.  Day in and day out, we are served a steady diet of war, murder, terrorism, kidnapping, rape, robbery, and torture.  The more we see of man’s inhumanity to man, the less we seem to be shocked by it. Then we come to […]

Catholics Invited to Pray an Act of Reparation on Solemnity of the Sacred Heart  (June 12, 2023)   Washington – On June 16, the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  Most Reverend Timothy P. Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee for Religious Liberty joined by Archbishop Jose` H. Gomez of Los Angeles, have called on Catholics to pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart, and make an act of […]

One of the most heated debates these days concerns the use of the death  penalty.  One side is for it; the other side is against it.  One says it is moral; the other says it is immoral.  One says it serves as an effective deterrent to crime; the other says it does not.  And even among those who favor its use, there are areas of discussion and disagreement.  To what crimes should it apply?  What should be the age limit?  What method should be used? The debate goes on.  The questions are many.  The answers are few. As we all […]