Letter from the Pastor

Today I raise, once more, a very important question: Is it proper for a Christian to vote precisely as a Christian?  That is, to make political choices based primarily on Christian values and principles?  I would answer yes.  Emphatically Yes! We Catholics, have let the secular society in which we live give us a kind of inferiority complex. We too often speak and act as if the biblical understanding of man and woman and human society were in some way inferior, or as if it were somehow unfair for us to advance our Catholic views and values in the public […]

Have you ever noticed that prayer can appear to be a simple exercise for some   people?  Not so for others.  Many people find it difficult, if not impossible, to pray.  Even some who have come to church for years may pray only rarely.  Often they have no sense of a personal participation or little awareness of the presence of God. Most Catholics would like to learn to pray more effectively.  They believe that God wants and welcomes their prayer.  So then how does one talk with God? Will my words be acceptable? Of course, prayer is not a performance.  It […]

We can become sensitive to God’s presence, alert to the ways He reveals Himself in the daily occurrences of life.  Often the problem is that we simply don’t know what to look for, or we don’t take the time in our hurried lives to be aware of our Father’s presence.  It’s like going out to a forest in the dead of winter.  All we can see are bare limbs of trees, a blanket of snow; the fullness of summer is still there, tucked away just out the reach of careless observation.  If we know what to look for, we can […]

Some time ago, a newspaper article was entitled, “Simple courtesy facing extinction in America.”  The writer told of four different instances in which he had gone out of his way to be helpful, and not one of the persons he had helped even bothered to say “thank you.”  I guess that most of us can recall similar experiences.  You held a door open for someone carrying an armload of packages, and he passed through and hurried away without saying a word.  You paused to let a driver pull into your lane of traffic, which he promptly did without so much […]