Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

This season we are in the middle of one of the most spiritually powerful times that a parish can experience. How many sacraments have we received this year! I consider the shower of grace and blessings we have experienced as God has given us so many gifts. Nearly 200 children with Confirmation—that is a lot of Holy Spirit! About 60 adults and children who were fully initiated in the Church at the Easter Vigil. We watched  throughout the season of Easter as over 200 children in our midst received Holy Communion for the first time, week after week we were reminded how the parish grows in grace.

We are constantly reminded that God doesn’t give sacraments for the sake of individuals alone (in fact, individualism is what is eroding the fabric of religious practice in the world today), but he gives the gifts of the sacraments that the whole Body of Christ is built up “to full stature,” as Saint Paul says, to fulfill the plan of God for his people. Each one of those sacraments was a gift to all of us, we are all touched by hundreds of gifts in these past weeks.

Often we see that the reception of a sacrament in a family touches all the members in a spiritual,  beautiful way. Hearts are turned back to God, old differences are reconciled, a knowledge of the love of God comes under our roof and we are more deeply aware of his presence with us.

This year, one of our own parishioners is being ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. By the time you are reading this, Fr. Joe Farrell will be a priest of our diocese of Arlington. But not only him: others we have gotten to know in their summer assignments will also be ordained. We will have the privilege of celebrating and thanking God for the gift of priesthood also for Fr. Rich Miserendino and Fr. Kevin Dansereau, who spent summers with us.

We look to welcome back our parishioner Joseph Townsend who currently attends the Josephinum this summer, and will welcome another seminarian to our parish for this summer, Joseph Rampino, who has one more year at the North American College in Rome. Like many priests who have spent their last seminarian assignment with us, Joseph Rampino will be ordained a deacon in Rome this October.

I have a reason behind listing all of these priests and seminarians who have been with us over the years (let’s not forget also Fr. Jeb Donelan, Fr. David Dufresne, Fr. Steven Walker and Fr. Tony Killian): God has blessed us. And we grow in Christ, specifically in our common priesthood of the faithful, these sacraments are showered not only on the priests themselves, but their families and their communities. We don’t pray intentionally often enough that God will multiply these vocations in our midst: this weekend, this is our task. To ask God to allow the grace of this sacrament to touch every person in this parish.

Five years before I was ordained I was driving from Dallas to Lincoln, Nebraska for my brother’s ordination. I was angry that he might be throwing his life away, he had a very promising career as a physicist and I wasn’t so sure that he was making the right decision. I wasn’t a big fan of the Church, there had been too many confusing messages in the first two decades of my life. To whose Catholic Church were we supposed to belong, anyway?

But I arrived at the ordination, the liturgy began. We got to the point where my brother and his classmates prostrated (lay face-down on the floor), a sign of them giving their life to God, dying to themselves. We sang the litany of saints.They rose from the floor, new creations. I saw it all so clearly, tears came. He hadn’t given himself to the Church, he had finally given himself to God and the people who God placed in his life. To make a complicated story short, I returned to Dallas, did what was necessary to close my advertising design firm, had a big yard sale and reported to seminary by September of that same summer.

To all you young men and women who might still have persevered in reading this far: I challenge you to respond to the call you hear. I have not looked back. Sure, there have been times when I wondered if I did the right thing, or I have known great frustration and even difficulty. But I don’t know a married person who wouldn’t say the same thing. That is life. But this life is so great. I have a family of 15,000+ people and more  opportunity than I ever might have imagined in the summer of 1989. And God is truly good.

Pray that even the tiniest piece of all this ordination goodness might touch your heart this week.Let God’s grace do its work, and open to him.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

It’s that time of year, transitions are taking place all over the place. Already many plans are taking shape for what a lot of our family members will be doing at the end of the summer, which goes faster and faster each year. Already people who are being relocated for their jobs are saying goodbye, students graduating are looking forward to their next steps in life, most people are just hoping for a break this summer to catch their breath and step back and sit down and put up their feet. A mom, standing next to her son after Mass last week told me her son was getting ready to go away for college. “Tell him,” she said, “that he isn’t going away to college to find himself. He already knows who he is!”

Free time isn’t necessarily a good thing, either, unless you have a plan. Idleness can get you into a lot of trouble! If you go to places you shouldn’t be or you allow erosion to take place in the discipline that you have established in your life, then free time can become laziness. Life doesn’t have to be a two steps forward, one step back experience. How about three steps forward? Perhaps we were all so conditioned by the education system that once summer came we grew accustomed to forgetting what we learned. At one point I realized I was becoming a person who just learned for the test, if you know what I mean. Once the test was over there was a big delete button that you could push. What was it all for anyway? A grade? Or did I become a better student, better person, because of it?

So, this summer, let’s make a plan to challenge ourselves to be a better person when it’s over than we are at this moment.

Let’s start making plans for next fall. As the calendar starts filling up remember you have to keep time in the calendar for your spiritual life as well. Stay in touch with God. Don’t adopt an attitude of vacation from God like you might from your boss. Many people do this. And they teach their kids this technique. It doesn’t work in the long run.

Make sure you include Religious Education for your children in the fall schedule. You can start registering soon. Tell all your friends who are Catholic that we have this obligation to our children—that our life with God isn’t something that we just fit in when it works with everything else. I was doing a little research to see who lives in our parish and whether or not our programs were reaching everyone.

What I found was staggering. This year we had 962 students in Religious Education, which is actually down from previous years. Add to that more or less 350 registered Catholic children (probably fewer) enrolled at Holy Cross, that means we are serving 1,312 children. The real number is quite a bit less than this, because we have many families in our Religious Education program from neighboring parishes.

According to our database, 2,558 children and youth between first and 12th grades live in our parish: only 51% of the children of registered families in our parish are being formed in our Religious Education program.

If we have, roughly, 200 children per age/grade, that would mean that our high school Youth program should include 800 students who are currently attending a high school in our parish. We probably reach 100, many of them only occasionally during the year.

If the numbers are correct, we are missing the opportunity with these young people: of the men ordained to the priesthood this year, 80% of them said they were relatively sure of a vocation while they were still in high school. And of all the Catholic students who go away to college this year, 70% of them will graduate with no affiliation to a church and no regular practice of religion.

Our parish must renew our commitment to these children and young people. We have come a long way but we have so much farther to go! First thing is to somehow reach out to all the families we know in our schools and neighborhoods and tell them of the need for religious formation. It is a blessing, and young people are more equipped to deal with the secularization and unfaithfulness of the world. On our part, we also have to make holiness and faithfulness a real part of our visible lives so our words are believable.

We also must sign up to help in the programs we need to grow. We have always wondered what we would do if suddenly everyone came to Mass…15,000 people would need 23 full Masses every Sunday. If we seek out the other 1,246 students we will need teachers, and spaces, and a lot of love and patience. Let’s start planning.

God bless you,