Pastor’s Weekly Letter

Two days after Christmas this year we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. This feast tends to be lost in the glory of Christmas. It deserves a better fate. The family is the place where we first learn of faith and love. The family is the first place where we meet Jesus. As our Baptismal rite says “(parents)…are the first and best teachers of their children in the ways of faith…” From the Holy Family of Nazareth we learn the value of obedience. Jesus went down to Nazareth and was obedient to Mary and Joseph. We learn also the […]

Sometimes it seems that babies pick the most inconvenient hours of a day in which to be born. They seem to delight in awakening their parents in the middle of the night for that hurried trip to the hospital and that happy celebration of a new life. In this regard, the baby Jesus was no exception. Of course, there was no trip to a hospital. But the records do show that His birth took place in the middle of the night. When Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem, they found the place of lodging filled to capacity, suggesting that other […]

One of the best loved of all Christmas carols is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, written more than a hundred years ago. The first part of the song is primarily historical, celebrating those events that surrounded the birth of Jesus. But the last verse makes Christmas a very personal thing. It says: “O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend on us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” We have never understood Christmas until it goes beyond a historical fact and becomes a personal experience. It is true, of course, that all of us […]

One of the most obvious facts about our world today is fragmentation, separation, people divided into separate, warring, and competing groups. This tragic condition prevails at almost every level of life. We can observe it on a national and international scale. Today our own nation is at war. Hundreds of thousands of our young men and women are defending our nation on foreign soil. They are putting their lives on the line for our safety and freedom. Hundreds of thousands more are risking their lives to provide homeland security. Sometimes we speak of this as a crazy world. That is […]

As we are all aware a right objective can never be reached by the use of wrong means. Most of us are too young to remember the days of World War I; but we have read about it in our history books, and we remember what it was called. It was “the war to end all wars;” it was “the war that would make the world safe for democracy”. That wars over 90 years ago; and in the meantime we have had another world war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and other wars including now the war against terrorism. […]