Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Now that things are settling down a little bit, I’ve begun reading Pope Francis’s new publication Amoris laetitia. There is a very simple logic to what he writes—really, to everything that he writes—that makes it accessible and obvious. I often find myself thinking how Pope Francis puts into words the basic truths that we all know, but sometimes find hard to express. In this Apostolic Exhortation he does it again.

He talks about simple processes of just being a human being and his words take us by surprise. It is startling.

His insight touches on the foundation of our life and faith, how we express the faith that we have to other people. It is the process of the Gospel, evangelization in its purest form. Especially today when the so-called “new evangelization” is necessary because there are so many people who have either left the church, or don’t understand the treasure of faith that they have received, we must learn to use our gifts of reaching out, touching others: So many people floating, seeking, maybe even sitting next to us in the pews (if we are lucky) waiting for something to happen, trying to make it all make sense. Many people are “stuck” because there have been generations of faithful who have not realized that the core of everything we do as Catholics must have its origin in that personal relationship with God. One generation cannot pass on to the next something they, themselves, did not receive.

Pope Francis says we discover the relationship first of all in the moment of encounter that we have with one another.

In order for an encounter to happen you must be open. Where is my heart when I encounter another person? The people I like? —and the people that I don’t like? Toward people that agree with you, as well as for people who do not agree? What about those whose lives might not reflect the perfection of the faith that we would like to see in ourselves? Our hearts must be open for that encounter to take place.

The next step after encounter is dialogue. Dialogue, by its nature, requires an openness to communication—you might say, as have the previous popes, that any true interest in giving and receiving in dialogue necessarily requires an openness for both parties to change. This does not mean that Catholics have to become non-Catholics—it doesn’t even mean that non-Catholics have to become Catholic. But the encounter with truth in one another, in the communication of that truth, forms the basis of learning about one another. Misunderstandings are resolved. We grow deeper in our own faith, in our own identity, our learning about one another. In dialogue, we must be honest, we must be who we are, and we must accept one another as we identify ourselves for a real conversation to begin.

Once dialogue is underway, the final step of this process is relationship. We come into relationship with one another having learned about one another. True knowledge always is the open door to love in any relationship, a mutual respect, a reverence for the truth and beauty that are the seeds of God’s life we find in each other.

Relationship is not real without a commitment.

So, having studied this dynamic of human relationship from the point of encounter through dialogue, we now can understand more deeply the process of relationship  that we seek with God. God wants exactly the same from each of us. We encounter him with openness, we dialogue with him in prayer and he speaks to us through his Holy Spirit, and finally we enter into a relationship with a commitment for him to the best of our ability—though imperfect as that may be, knowing that his commitment to us is perfect.

It is said that perhaps 60% of Catholics who practice their faith today—not the ones who don’t practice, but the ones who do—don’t believe that such a personal relationship with God is possible. The same studies have shown that the sense of emptiness of this meaningful relationship is also the greatest factor that causes people to go seeking—often outside our Catholic Church—or simply to drift away, becoming inactive with no actual religious affiliation. This is the most powerful ministry in the Church for you, lay people—to be witnesses of your joy and fulfillment through faith, shown to others through a greeting, a sharing, a walking together.

Let the love of Christ be the love behind the smile, the welcome, and begin the encounter.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

This week as I write this bulletin article I am in Louisville, Kentucky, and we are hosting the National Workshop on Christian Unity.

As you probably know, I’ve been serving as the President for CADEIO, or the Catholic Association of Diocesan Ecumenical and Interreligious Officers, for the past six years. My job has been to coordinate the efforts of diocesan ecumenical officers across the country, to help facilitate the teachings of the Church, bring the developments of national dialogues to the local level, and to provide formation and education for those whom bishops appoint in their dioceses as ecumenical officers. This year also will be the eighth year that I have served on the National Planning Committee for this National Workshop. This Wednesday, at our General Assembly Meeting, we will elect a new President for CADEIO. Our Constitution requires  that the President serve only two three-year terms; I will have completed these on Wednesday of this week. I’m retiring!

So, as you might imagine, the work going into finding new leadership, charting the next course for a new president, and defining our next goals for the Association is underway.

To be honest, I must say that the idea of retiring from this role at this particular moment in time, for me, is a relief. I have found so much travel taking a significant chunk out of our  parish life. I want to thank you for your patience while I have been doing this work outside of the parish, it is important. I will still be involved in the work of ecumenism and  interreligious affairs locally; I simply will not have a national leadership role any longer and probably will get to stay closer to home.

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Again soon, we will begin the celebration of parish First Communions during Sunday Masses. Last year we started a new program where, instead of celebrating First Communion at one  large Mass for a large number of children, we spread more than 200 children’s First Communions during Sunday Masses over a four to five-week period.

Sometimes, large parishes are referred to as “sacrament factories.” So many people receiving so many sacraments can tempt us to try to provide the most expedient solutions for sacraments, and often times we discover this is not ideal. Over the past years, our First Communion Masses have become so impersonal, sometimes even irreverent. Our church size limits the number of family members who can participate in each celebration, and we find that families no longer celebrate the sacrament of Eucharist in the context of the Sunday  Mass. By scheduling our First Communions to a Sunday Mass, we discover that The community is better able to celebrate the sacraments with the families of those receiving First Communion.

Beginning the first weekend in May, if you attend a Mass where children receive First Communion with their families, please be sure to stop them after Mass and congratulate them.  Tell them how meaningful it is that you are able to witness their First Communion, and how it reminds you of your First Communion when you were young. Tell them how significant it is that you’re able to celebrate with them in their lives.

Too often the temptation is to think that when we receive a sacrament, it is meant for us alone. The reality of sacramental theology, however,  teaches us the sacraments are intended for the community itself. Not for the individual—it is an opportunity for the community to celebrate the grace of God and the reception of those gifts as something that bring the  community to life. None of us received a gift from God without the instruction to also share it.

Allow these celebrations with children in our parish to restore in you the memory and the understanding of the great gift of Eucharist that you have received. Of course, it is the  Eucharist that draws us together. It is the Eucharist that provides for us the meaning of our life. It is the Eucharist that calls us to our final goal, and the temporary celebration of thanksgiving until that gratitude is perfect and fulfilled in heaven.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Time for our parish to turn our thoughts to what we can do with our wonderful school, Holy Cross Academy. Our staff and faculty recently finished the year-long “Design for Excellence,” a re-accreditation program that the diocese requires every five years, and received evaluations at the top in every category. We thank our Sisters, teachers and aides in the school for such a quantity of work that often goes unnoticed, and unrecognized.

As you know, in two short weeks we will have our every-other-year Holy Cross Auction—you’ve probably seen the promotions for it as we’ve been running it in the bulletin for several months. This auction provides extraordinary possibilities for capital improvements and investment in equipment that our annual budgets could not begin to include. As it is, our parish subsidy covers about $350-400 tuition per student, and tuition only covers the expenses of children’s education. So anything above and beyond is something with which the community must provide assistance.

The history of our church and school is interesting. When I first came to Saint Mary, after Holy Cross was already four years in existence, parishioners had been told that Holy Cross was not our parish school—and many at Saint Mary were not even aware that it was there. When it was built, it was designated as a regional school because the plan was to build a new parish in south Stafford County called Holy Cross Parish. When I arrived, however, residential zoning and permits had just changed drastically in Stafford County, requiring either large acre lots per house or over-55 years of age, that the growth slowed to a crawl, where it had been a boom previously. The new construction all went south to Spotsylvania and Massaponax as a result, so we decided to start the new parish there, called Saint Jude.

But people remained largely unaware that Holy Cross was our responsibility. Although still designated a “regional” school, Saint Mary has always been the only parish who has supported it. The designation was finally changed last year by Bishop Loverde, and Holy Cross Academy is now the parish school of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception parish. It has been a priority for Sister and me, all along but especially now, to make sure that the relationship between school and parish is strong—it is stronger than most parishes where the school sits across the parking lot from the church.

So it is with great excitement that we would like to announce to you that Saint Mary is beginning the work of completing the school, by adding facilities that we always knew would be necessary in the future when we could make it happen. The school was built very quickly within one year of the announcement that the Daughters of Wisdom were going to close Montfort Academy— and as a result immediate needs became apparent. For example, there is no cafeteria— so the physical education program and school sports compete with the gym for lunch hours and the after-school program. There are regular sized classrooms for art and music which simply aren’t large enough. And our computer lab fits 30 children and 30 computers and monitors, screen-to-screen into a space that is 20 x 30. By adding a cafeteria, and larger spaces for music, art, science and technology, we will be able to enlarge our small library and provide dedicated spaces for a primary grades resource center, middle-school special mathematics and world language rooms, and finally have a chapel on the premises where groups can go and pray, or celebrate Mass as a class.

I will include the floor plan of what we hope to accomplish in the bulletin next week.

But the fundraising is beginning. Some parishioners have invited a group of other parishioners to attend a special dinner for donors to kick off the effort, but response has been very small. These things usually are, and if we have learned anything at Saint Mary over the years, it is that we don’t survive on major gifts—never have—but  on the modest generosity of so many whose gifts add up to enough.

There are two ways you can get involved right away: April 23 is our biannual Holy Cross Auction. Come, bid on items in the auction and join the effort. And on May 3, donate to Holy Cross Academy as a part of the Community Foundation’s Community Give. On May 3, the more people we have participating, the more cash awards and other incentives are available. We will have more about the Community Give in the bulletin next week. You can also find out more about local giving for the Community Give at www.thecommunitygive.org.

God bless all of you,

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Happy Easter! I hope the joy of Jesus’ resurrection can carry forward in your life into the coming weeks, especially this Season of Easter, but beyond as well! What  Easter is to the year, Sunday is to the week—what the Church has always called “Little Easter” each week—when we recall this central fact of our faith and Church’s life,  that Jesus calls us to die and rise with him to new life all the time.

This week we thank everyone for everything they have done to make our parish expression of faith in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus such a beautiful and profound  experience in time. The sheer number of hours that are spent in planning, publications, music rehearsing, decorating, loading and unloading, and then the hundreds
of people on hand to do what is needed for the liturgies themselves, our ushers/greeters, ministers  of Word and Eucharist, vocalists, choirs and instrumentalists, altar servers and deacons and priests. The week after is often compared to what a mother sometimes goes through after having a baby—now what? So much goes into the big
event, you almost have to reinvent what comes next because there was so much going on we weren’t thinking about Easter Monday!

Someone said I should have kept track of the number of hours people spent, that nobody would believe it. Well, that is true, if it were even possible, but someone would have to spend a lot of hours just counting a lot of hours.

So, to all of you, thanks. I hope your participation filled your hearts with Easter joy and that your tired is a good tired. I know mine is. And hat you are getting good and regular sleep. God has got to be pleased with the hard work, the sharp use of gifts, the big work of praise and thanks. We all acknowledge that these things just don’t happen, and it is thanks to all of you that it did this year. I think our liturgies were more beautiful this year than they have ever been.

In a particular way we owe a debt of thanks to people who really did spend countless hours: Rick Caporali, David Mathers, Chris Lanzarone, our Sisters and pretty much all musicians: Thank you for generously using your gifts.

God bless all of you, happy Easter!