Letter from the Pastor

                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 […]

          Two thousand years ago, Jesus came to the village of Bethlehem.  He was born there.  But for most of the people in Bethlehem that night, it was as if He did not come at all.  They missed it.  He also came to the village of Nazareth.  That was His hometown.  He lived there most of His life.   But for the majority of the people of Nazareth, it was as if He did not come at all.  They too missed it.            This same situation was repeated over and over again throughout […]

               How long has it been since you attended a formal banquet?  For some it’s possibly been a long time.  Maybe it even goes back to high school and the senior prom.  However long it’s been, I suppose there are certain things about the occasion that you still remember – the person with whom you attended, the dress or suit that you wore, the flowers that you kept and may even still have, pressed between the pages of a book.                 I hope everyone has at least one memory like that.  For one thing, […]