Adult Initiation & Sacrament Preparation

This Sunday marks the beginning of the new Liturgical Year with the First Sunday of Advent.  Advent is the season wherein we ask ourselves, “Are we ready for the coming of Christ?”  While our secular culture is frantically running around making sure that everything is ready for Christmas (which they think is just one day), the Church is asking us to slow down, take a pause, and look into our own hearts to make sure that we are ready to meet the Lord when he comes again. The Word for the 1st Sunday of Advent         Isaiah 2:1-5         Psalm 122:1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9         Romans 13:11-14         Matthew 24:37-44 Our first reading comes from the second chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah.  The book of Isaiah is one of the longest of all the prophets, and spans a period from before the Assyrian attack on the Northern Kingdom,...

This Sunday marks the end of our Church year with the Feast of Christ the King.  By church timelines, this feast day is very much born in the modern era.  In response to the growing nationalism and secularism of the early 20th century, Pope Pius XI instituted this feast in his 1925 encyclical letter Quas Primas.  At the time the world was still recovering from the Great War (World War I), but as we all know, the turmoil that followed created the economic and social instability that would eventually bring on the Great Depression and World War II.  Revolutions in Russia, China, and Spain were sparking unrest worldwide, and calling into question the their models of governance and economics.  It is in this chaos that Pope Pius understood the need to refocus our attention on who it is that we must serve. The Word for the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe         2 Samuel 5:1-3     ...

Here are two interesting emails you can sign up for and receive a little reading everyday to help you learn more about the Catholic Faith. Read the Catechism in a Year Read that little bit each day & you'll have covered the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church in a year. Saint of the Day Receive an email daily featuring information about a Saint.

As we near the end of the Liturgical year the church takes a pause to focus on the most basic of questions:  “what’s all this for anyway?”  The simple answer is, eternal life… but to me that answer is kind of a cop-out, because life itself is rarely simple, especially when you consider that our lives our played out in the context of our environment.  For some people, that environment is so difficult that all hope can be lost.  It is out of that reality that divine justice is best understood:  That all will be made right in the end. The Word for the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time Malachi 3:19-20a Psalm 98:5-6, 7-8, 9 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12 Luke 21:5-19 This week’s readings continue our topic of the afterlife, reminding us that God, the just judge, will make everything right in the end.  Those who do evil in this life will be destroyed, and those that are on the side of light will be saved.  , Starting with a short reading from the prophet Malach...

For these past weeks and months as we've been traveling through this long stretch of Ordinary Time, we've been following Jesus through Luke's Gospel as he began his ministry, traveled all around Galilee, and ultimately heading for Jerusalem.  As we wind down this season Jesus has finally made it to the city of Jerusalem, but we also see the forces of opposition are pushing hard to find fault in Jesus and his teachings... The Word for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time         2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14         Psalm 17:1, 5-6, 8, 15         2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5         Luke 20:27-38 or Luke 20:27, 34-38 This week our readings focus on the afterlife.  We start with a story from 2 Maccabees, a book written about 100-150 years before Christ, which tells the story of a family being tortured and killed by their Greek Seleucid overlords....