It is upon us already – Lent begins this Wednesday.  There is no religious education, but PLEASE come with your children.

      I wish to broach a sore spot – what makes for a good fast?  What good thing I gave up as a child is likely no longer fitting for me as an adult.  No chocolate may seem like a big thing for a child, but for an adult?

      To fast is to intentionally offer to Jesus some good thing that he might draw us more closely to himself.  It is also great practice in sharpening our will to say “yes” and “no.”  If I must practice in saying no to chocolate, how can I say no to a really, really good and desirable thing?

      Please join me in asking Jesus for the grace to know what he wants us to offer to him this Lent.

I grew up believing that our constitution and First Amendment rights were near sacrosanct: we cannot mandate pacifists to shoot a gun nor require a Jew to eat pork.  Now, however, by executive order, this amendment will change??  The attack on the Church with the mandate that institutions provide contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortions for anyone on their insurance is frightening.

      Bishop Swain has joined 136 other bishops in a petition to revoke the HHS mandate.  I have included his statement within your bulletin.  On the reverse of that I have included my message to our Representative Noem as well as a way to contact your Congressman and President.

      All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke.  You are good people; please do not fail to act.

I was heartened by the Feb. 5th, USA Today editorial that joined voices with our Bishops to protect freedom of conscience.  If you want to read it, it is linked on my Facebook account “Bob Lacey      Please remember, this is not a question of contraceptives but of religious freedom which is fundamentally a question of conscience.  Our founding fathers saw it as a necessary role of our government to serve the people, not to have the people serve the government.  The government is now attempting to tell America what does and does not qualify as “religious.”

      As Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put it, "When you go to a Jewish deli, you are not expecting pork chops."

      This bears repeating: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke.  You are good people; please do not fail to act.

_  While watching TV this week, I noticed that a particular actress received a lot of attention for a statement she made while not feeling well: “What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me…”

      She has said out loud what many think today:  “I am not loved or lovable.”  Young girls think this during adolescence, mothers during pregnancy, and men of every age when rejected.

      This is not Jesus message; it is of the evil one who wants to destroy human nature in its goodness and beauty and integrity.  The evil one’s two main lies are these:  You are not loved or lovable AND you are alone.  Reject them and ask Jesus for help.  He came to set us free.

_

      I hope that you will come to the Catholicism Series by Robert Barron beginning this Sunday, Jan 22 at 6:45pm in the Community Room.

 

God has given us the wonderful gift of this our Catholic Church to help us in our journey home to Heaven with Him. For some Christians who are not part of the Catholic Church, this will be an opportunity to learn some of the unique aspects of the Catholic Church that are so powerful and spiritually moving. For those “cradle Catholics”, this will be an opportunity to learn more about who you are as a member of the Church and why we do what we do. The meetings will be active and modest in time (about 1 hour). Please come and feed your soul.

_     Christmas concludes with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on this Monday.  I will offer Mass on this Monday, a change from ordinary, to honor our Lord.

        I will be here this next weekend for the Saturday evening and Sunday morning Mass, but then I will be traveling to the Univ. of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL for a week of deepening spiritual direction training.  I do ask for your prayers.  I will return for Masses the following weekend.

        I invite you to come on January 22nd, right after the 5:30pm Mass for our Catholicism Inquiry session.  I will keep them to no more than an hour as it is an important time of readying for the week to come.

        Anyone is welcome to come, especially if you have questions about our faith, have always wondered ‘why do we believe that,’ or thought ‘that doesn’t seem right.’  Fr. Robert Barron’s Catholicism series of movie presentations present Catholic beliefs from architectural, art, and musical sources, giving us a insight rarely found in typical books.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Inheritance – what an awesome thing.  To have a piece of furniture, a cherished gun, a fine china set, or large cash fund be dropped into your lap is really a shocking event.  We do nothing to earn it, but we still receive it.

After receiving the inheritance, we can ding the chair, rust the firearm, chip the dishes and squander the money and they are forever damaged.  Some restorers can repair them, but they are never quite the same.

It would be nice if someone could, but someone can restore damages. 

Jesus came in the flesh to restore our damages and make us whole.  He came as a humble little child; with great gentleness, he comes daily.

If you’ve been away from the Church and sacraments for a long time, give a call or drop in.  I’d like to see you get restored. 
– Fr. Bob Lacey

No Room at the Inn … or seemingly so but not in reality. 

If you have had exposure to large families, you will find a welcoming spirit, an undefinable but tangible expression of hospitality: there is always room for one more at the table, there is always soup enough to go around.  One mother said, “well, I’ll just through another cup of water in the soup!”

We approach the great feast of our Church, of our Christian faith, that God who has everything, wanted to share his abundance with our lowly humanity and did so by sharing in our humanity.  He then was born in the rudeness of a stable, in a sense, sharing in our most abject poverty.

I invite you to share your abundance with the unfortunate at Christmas time in these, if not other ways:  offer something to the Advent Baby Shower in the entryway; OR to give financially to the hospital in Haiti, the poorest country in the world.  We will not fix the pandemic corruption, but we can share in their poverty.

At the Christmas Masses, our second collection, UNLESS MARKED AS FOR  BUILDING FUND will go to Haiti mission relief.  Thank you for your generosity.

It is all about the hands….

        I want to Thank Bishop Swain for coming to our parish to give the gift of the Holy Spirit to our confirmands.  Giving a gift requires hands – hands to fold paper, to apply tape,  to hand it over to the recipient – and this only for a physical thing.

        The gift of the Holy Spirit at confirmation is a very tangible sacrament: it requires hands to apply the oil of Chrism and for the laying on of hands.

        To think, the apostles “laid hands” and imparted the Holy Spirit, then those successors did the same to their successors.  There are hundreds of pairs of hands passing the Holy Spirit through the ages.  It is no mere chance or coincidence that Bishop Swain is here to give the Holy Spirit to our confirmands, he is here by the providence of God and I am thankful to be a part of this tradition!