Pastor’s Weekly Letter

Let me ask this question, and try to answer it honestly:  Who or what is the most important thing in your life?  That is not an easy question to answer.  Our lives are involved with so many things and include so many things that it is difficult to isolate just one as central and supreme.  But someone or something is.  All our lives are organized into a hierarchy of commitments and concerns, and at the top sits one supreme thing or person to which we subordinate and would even sacrifice all the rest. For some people that person or thing […]

What exactly was, or is, demon possession? How did it happen?  Was it voluntary or      involuntary?  Did it occur through guilt or ignorance or accident?  Are there parallel instances  today? All of these are questions, the answer to which, I do not know.  Yet despite the mysteries, there is one area in which the New Testament communicates clearly and effectively.  It speaks to us about the  tragedy of divided living. We all have horns and halos, strengths and weaknesses.  We are both good and bad.  All men of insight have felt this same conflict within themselves.  St. Paul wrote, “It […]

It seems that every person shares or has shared dreams of a future of peace and tranquility.  We are all sick of the insanity of war and terrorism.  We are exhausted by man’s inhumanity to man.  We are tired of crime and violence.  We are fed up with greed and injustice.  We long for a world of peace and righteousness, where people and  nations settle their differences through cooperation instead of conflict.  But many, I fear, have recently stopped believing that such a world is possible.  Many more are deeply discouraged.  Though still believing in a better world, they feel […]

Recently, as you may recall, I wrote to you that it is certainly appropriate for we Catholics to vote as Catholics.  But this still leaves a number of difficult questions for us to consider.  It is one thing to say that we will let the principles of our Catholic faith be our guide.  It is quite another thing to apply those principles to real political choices today. Simply stated, the Gospel of Jesus is universal. Its principles apply equally to all    people, in all places, at all times, in all cultures, and under all forms of government.  The Gospel which […]