Dear Parishioners:
How is your Lent going? We are entering our Third Week of this Holy Season and so let us review. How well is our prayer going? How frequent and faithful is our fasting? How generous and sacrificial is our alms giving? Don’t give up! Stay the course! And if you’ve fallen off, pick up the prayer, fasting and alms giving again!
Pope Emeritus Benedict XV teaches that: “In Lent, each one of us is asked by God to mark a turning point in our life, thinking and living in accordance with the Gospel, correcting some aspect of our way of praying, acting, or working and of our relations with others. Jesus makes this appeal to us, not with a severity that is an end in itself but precisely because he is concerned for our good, our happiness and our salvation. On our part, we must respond to him with a sincere inner effort, asking him to make us understand which particular ways we should change.”
Yes Lent is a season of change! It is a season of conversion to Christ! We take up our cross daily and we follow him. So let us strive to make Lent a time of welcome change and joyful conversion. It’s only three weeks into the season, if you haven't yet begun to pray, fast and give alms, start today! A truly joyful and helpful way to change and convert to Christ is to make a good Confession. How long has it been since your last Confession? A month? A year? Ten years? Thirty years? Fifty years? Then why not make the necessary change in your life to trust in God’s love, mercy and forgiveness.
Every Monday we have Confession at 6:00PM here at OLM. In Lent, we invite a guest priest to help us with Confessions on Monday. A great chance to change from sin to grace, from fear to faith, and from despair to hope! Pope Francis says: “Be courageous! Go to Confession!”
Next Saturday, March 21st, OLM hosts All Day Confessions. We’ve invited the most kind and merciful priests from across the state to help us. Four priests are to be available from 9:00am until 3:00pm to hear Confessions here at OLM No lines! No waiting! Come one, come all! Take some time amidst the busyness of life to experience God’s mercy and forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession. I promise you will not regret it! I ask you to please pray for all those making their Confession during Lent especially those who have been away from the Sacrament awhile, may it be a true time of conversion and grace; pray too for all the Priest Confessors, may they be as kind and merciful as God and of course pray for those who are avoiding making a good Confession, may they have the courage and faith to humbly admit their sins to God the Merciful Father!
St. Bridget offers sage advice on Confession. “Just as an animal becomes a stronger beast of burden and more beautiful to behold the more often and better it is fed, so too confession, the more often it is used and the more carefully it is made as to both lesser and greater sins. conveys the soul increasingly forward and is so pleasing to God that it leads the soul to God's very heart.”
We mark to great and important Feast Days in the life of our Church this week! The Feast of St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland and the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church! So remember to pray and celebrate these great feasts of faith! We turn to St. Patrick and St. Joseph in prayer as we seek their powerful intercession for us and our world. No matter our ethnic background let us celebrate our common faith and the heritage we’ve inherited! Remember Fridays are for fish and the Stations of the Cross! Be well. Do Good! God Bless.