Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Express Announcements ~ 18 October 2015

October 17, 2015 St Mary Fred

* This weekend we welcome Rev. Paul W. Farin and Rev. Msgr. Ted Bertani who will speak at our Masses on behalf of Cross Catholic Outreach.

* The second collection this weekend supports World Mission Sunday. Your ongoing support is vital to the missionaries serving in 1,150 dioceses throughout Asia, Africa, parts of Latin America and Europe, and on the Islands of the Pacific.

* Parish Photo Directory sign-up continues. Be a part of a book that will help us all get to know each other! You will receive one free print of the portrait, other copies may be ordered only if you wish. Please visit our parish website to schedule your portrait sitting / appointment.

* Saint Mary Volunteer Appreciation Dinner is Thursday, October 22: RSVPs are due this Monday, October 19.

* Confirmation teams 1-11 travel to the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Saturday, October 24 for their confirmation retreat.

* On Wednesday, October 28, Catechist training will be held in the Parish Life Center.

Bishop Loverde’s Anniversary Mass ~ 7 November – All Saints Catholic Church

October 13, 2015 St Mary Fred

Bishop Loverde will celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving in honor of his 50th Anniversary of Priestly Ordination on November 7, 12pm, at All Saints Catholic Church (9300 Stonewall Road, Manassas, VA). This Mass will allow the faithful of the Diocese of Arlington to unite in prayerful thanksgiving for Bishop Loverde and his service as a pastor of souls in our diocese and beyond.

A light reception will be held in the parish activities center of All Saints Church immediately following the Mass. Since seating is limited, tickets have been proportioned to parishes in the diocese. Saint Mary will receive 24 tickets and we will need to have this list to the diocese soon. For this reason, we will hold a raffle for those in the parish who would like to enter their names in a drawing to attend this Mass. Please call the office and have your name entered in the drawing.

Meditation on October 11, 2015 readings

October 12, 2015 St Mary Fred

Direct link to audio file: 2015-Oct-11_07-12-24

Reading 1
Wis 7:7-11

I prayed, and prudence was given me;
I pleaded, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.
I preferred her to scepter and throne,
and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her,
nor did I liken any priceless gem to her;
because all gold, in view of her, is a little sand,
and before her, silver is to be accounted mire.
Beyond health and comeliness I loved her,
and I chose to have her rather than the light,
because the splendor of her never yields to sleep.
Yet all good things together came to me in her company,
and countless riches at her hands.

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 90:12-13, 14-15, 16-17

R. (14) Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain wisdom of heart.
Return, O LORD! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
R. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
Fill us at daybreak with your kindness,
that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days.
Make us glad, for the days when you afflicted us,
for the years when we saw evil.
R. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
Let your work be seen by your servants
and your glory by their children;
and may the gracious care of the LORD our God be ours;
prosper the work of our hands for us!
Prosper the work of our hands!
R. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!

Reading 2
Heb 4:12-13

Brothers and sisters:
Indeed the word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.

Gospel
Mk 10:17-30

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples,
“How hard it is for those who have wealth
to enter the kingdom of God!”
The disciples were amazed at his words.
So Jesus again said to them in reply,
“Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves,
“Then who can be saved?”
Jesus looked at them and said,
“For human beings it is impossible, but not for God.
All things are possible for God.”
Peter began to say to him,
“We have given up everything and followed you.”
Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you,
there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters
or mother or father or children or lands
for my sake and for the sake of the gospel
who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age:
houses and brothers and sisters
and mothers and children and lands,
with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”

From Our Pastor ~ 11 October 2015

October 11, 2015 St Mary Fred

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

You might not believe this, but as I was cleaning out our basement in Kansas there were a lot of things that my mom and dad just never threw out. A lot of things from our youth were still there as reminders of a long-distant past. Sometimes you realize how different things are today revealed in the simplest things.

I found my old electric typewriter that my parents gave me when I went away to college. It had its own plastic case that looked like a lumpy briefcase. My older brother John, who was ne year earlier in technology, had a manual return (this means you had to raise your hand and hit the return arm on the carriage to return the position of the drum to the left margin and advance one line lower on the typing paper in order to start typing another line on the page). My electric typewriter, one year more advanced, had a modern and sleek electric return button.

It still turned on, I thought I would give it a try. I made a lot of mistakes. My typing fingers have grown weaker. Confronted with my mistakes, I used a correction cartridge that was still inside the case, but it was dry with age. I remembered how difficult it was to type before these cartridges were invented and you had to line up the striker with the typed letter on the page. It got a whole lot more complicated if you were typing carbon copies (you see, we didn’t have copiers or liquid white-out yet in those days).

I realized how much harder we used to try not to make mistakes, because they weren’t easy to fix. I studied typing in high school, and was pretty proud of my 110 words per minute with a minimum of typos. I loved those IBM Selectrics.

Typing on a computer today you can be a whole lot more careless, fixes are just a delete or backspace button away. I have allowed my skills to get sloppy. We get to make a lot of mistakes today and it is so easy to hide all of them, still giving a good impression with our work.

Our lives have gone this way, too. Most people today don’t even know how much discipline might be required to achieve excellence, we settle for “good enough” all too often. We don’t even have to learn how to spell anymore, or write by hand, the machine even takes care of matching subjects and verbs for us. There is a great deal of typing being done today, people writing about how machines are replacing our skills, our excellence, our relationships. Isn’t a conference call as good as a meeting, anyway? I knew a young man who attended ecumenical meetings who told me one time that his best friends were actually Facebook friends. I asked him if he ever met them face-to-face, in person. “No,” he said, “don’t need to.”

And yet I’m pretty sure they said the same thing about the printing presses and calculators, we need them all. All good gifts come from God, but always require that we still engage our brains when incorporating such tools in our lives. Gifts are intended to enhance, strengthen, expand our human abilities, not replace them.

The keynote speaker at my college graduation commencement was a university president from California, I believe. He commented about the advances and new trends of thought that were transforming our society—this was 30 years ago before the personal computer was even invented. Some were good, some were bad, he said. It is important to keep an open mind…as long as you don’t open it so far that your brains fall out.

God bless you.