Giving Gratitude to God! Thanksgiving Day is coming!

Dear Parishioners:We know the story of Thanksgiving very well. In fact, we learn it in school at an early age. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves of its importance. This is especially true as its significance is lessened in our culture and the day itself is cheapened with the crass commercialism of holiday sales and Black Friday bargains. Sadly it seems Thanksgiving Day has become merely another day to shop rather than give thanks to God! But we must remember that in the autumn of 1621 after a rich harvest, the men, women and children who had survived that first year in the New World gathered for a feast to offer thanks. One of those pilgrims wrote at the time: "By the goodness of God, we are so far from want."

What was that First Thanksgiving Day like?  Well it was not necessarily about turkey and pumpkin pie. Historians think the pilgrims and their guests probably ate fowl and venison not turkey. And the food was probably a lot fattier than we are used to as cholesterol was unheard of. They were more worried about plague and the pox than about heart attacks! They didn't have much sugar, so sweets and deserts were probably not on the menu. So, forget the pumpkin pie!

The First Thanksgiving Meal left us with an enduring and venerable tradition: a gathering around a table with family, friends and guests, giving thanks to God for surviving in an uncertain and difficult new place. Maybe, it has been suggested, the pilgrims weren't thankful because they had survived. But maybe they had survived precisely because they were thankful and grateful to God.

After all the pilgrims were a people who lived their lives in faith and hope. They were grateful for everything: the hard winds and deep snows, the frightening evenings and hopeful mornings, the long journey that had taken them to a new place. They certainly knew how to express their gratitude to God. But we know that gratitude doesn't always come so easily.

We know that generosity - the giving of a gift - means thinking more about others than about ourselves. It represents an act of love. But so does being thankful and grateful. To give thanks is to extend ourselves and to truly remember where the gift came from. This may be what helped the pilgrims to thrive and prosper: a humble appreciation for whatever God gave them and trusting that God would give them what they would need to survive. Theirs was an optimistic spirit with a grateful message. Maybe this kind of spirit can teach us something today as we endure our own hard winds and deep snows and attempt to survive the storms of our own lives. Maybe we can understand that to survive we need to be thankful!

On Thanksgiving Day wherever we find ourselves let us stop to offer Grace and gratitude. The grace of thanking God for whatever gift He gives us. Thanks for what we have, and thanks for what we have been given. On Thanksgiving Day may we show our deep love for the God who so generously gives it. Because like the pilgrims of old, no matter how fierce the winds, or how unforgiving the storm, we need to remember that God is always near.

I invite you to join us at Mass at 9:00AM on Thanksgiving Day as we gather to give thanks and praise to Almighty God. Bishop Evans is to celebrate the Mass and we are to joined by a small delegation of young Pilgrims and Indians. There is no better way to prayerfully offer thanks to God than celebrating Mass together as a Parish Family!

I wish to thank the parishioners who spoke at Masses last weekend. They are taking the lead in our Increased Giving Campaign. As I have said, this is very low-key mail campaign. We are simply asking every parishioner to consider their level of support for the parish. Thank you for your support! I wish you and your loved ones a Happy Thanksgiving . May God Bless and protect you and may your travels be safe. Enjoy the holiday! God Bless. Go Pats, Go Gray!!

Where Your Treasure Is, There Will Be Your Heart Also!

Dear Parishioners: As your heard from parishioners today, Bishop Tobin has required that every parish in the Diocese of Providence conduct what is called an “Increased Offertory Campaign.” This has proven to be very successful at parishes across the state as parishioners have taken the time to seriously pray and reflect about their level of giving. It is a low-key mail campaign that asks each parishioner to consider a modest increase in their weekly support of the parish. The program is a time for all of us to reflect on how we support the parish financially.

Has our level of support increased over the years? We all know that inflation has increased and the costs of running a large parish with a sizable physical plant have also increased. Simply put, if each parishioner gives a little more, the results will be superb. This coming week, you will receive my letter asking for an increase. Most importantly, whatever you decided to do after prayer and reflection, please return the enclosed envelope. This will stop all future mailings for you!

We also ask parishioners to consider giving through the Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) online giving program. The use of this online giving option enables you to give to the parish securely and regularly. So when you are away from the parish or cannot get to Mass, you can still support the parish. We have many parishioners currently using the EFT and we encourage more to consider it. The use of the EFT means you won’t have to write out 52 checks or prepare 52 envelopes!

I wish to thank the many parishioners who were so generous with this month’s Outreach Collection. We are donating November’s Outreach Collection to Catholic Relief Services for their End Hunger Now Program. Also thanks to your generosity to the Outreach Collection we are able to give donations of $1,000 to McCauley House, St. Patrick’s Soup Kitchen, and Assumption Parish Food Pantry for Thanksgiving Day. We are also able to distribute Thanksgiving Food Baskets and gift cards here in the East Greenwich area. Thank you for your tremendous support of OLM Outreach!

This week we begin OLM Altar Server Boot Camp! About 11 of our parish children have signed up to be trained to serve at God’s Holy Altar. Each afternoon this week Fr. Connors and I along with Nancy Wray, our faithful Parish Sacristan, are training the new recruits. Once they have been trained they will be scheduled for regular service. We currently have 60 Altar Servers at OLM and this new class will only add to the great job they do. We are grateful for our Altar Servers, many of whom remain faithful to serving all the way through High School. We thank them all for taking the time from their busy lives to serve God and Our Lady of Mercy Parish.

We continue in this All Souls Month of November to pray for our beloved dead and all the souls in Purgatory. The All Souls envelopes inscribed with the names of your beloved dead remain on the altar and we continue to pray for them at Mass. It is a work of mercy to prayer for the dead and so we remember all those who have died especially the poor souls who have no one to remember them or pray for them. Pope Francis reminded us in his homily at All Souls Day Mass in Rome: “The memory of the dead, care of graves, and prayers for the dead bear witness of a confident hope, rooted in the certainty that death does not have the last word over human destiny.”

I thank you for your generous support for the parish and hope you prayerfully consider supporting the Increased Giving Campaign. We are among the last parishes in the diocese to conduct the campaign but I am confident that it will be as successful as it has been across the state. I thank the members of our parish who spoke on behalf of the Increased Giving Campaign this weekend. As we begin this campaign I ask for your support and understanding but most importantly your prayers. St. Matthew reminds us in his Gospel: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” God Bless. Go Pats!!

Helping Hands at Our Lady of Mercy!

Dear Parishioners: What a tremendous turn out we had for our “Helping Hands” Event for Catholic Relief Services and End Hunger Now. A couple of hundred parishioners of every age came to the OLM School Gym to help pack meals for the poor and hungry in West Africa. An assembly line of these volunteers packed 20,000 meals in just an hour and half! I wish to thank Dudley and Kathy Bennett who helped to organize this great event for our parish. All of the meal packages are to be sent to West Africa where each can provide six meals. I am grateful for the many people from our parish and school who volunteered to put mercy in action at OLM. In the name of the poor and hungry, I thank all those who contributed so generously to this OLM Outreach effort.

This week enclosed in the bulletin is the Annual Parish Financial Report which was approved by the Finance Committee and sent to Bishop Tobin last month. I wish it were a more positive report but unfortunately due to a large drop in enrollment at our parish school last year and a major increase in healthcare costs we ran a deficit of $100,000. On the positive side our income has remained consistent and some of our expenses last year were one time expenditures. The Annual Collection was strong last year and helped pay for one time projects. I am grateful to our Parish Finance Committee and Parish Auditors for helping with this report. Their guidance and advice are helpful in securing the future of our parish financially and fiscally. I hope you are able to review the enclosed report in the coming week.

Also sent to the Bishop with the Annual Financial Report is the Status Animarium Report. This report is about “the status of the souls” in the parish. This report includes the census of the parish and the number of people receiving the sacraments over the year from September 2013 through September 2014. We presently have 2,245 registered families at Our Lady of Mercy. There are 375 students in our parish school and 400 students are registered in our Religious Education Program. We baptized 50 new Catholics this year and received 4 adults into the Catholic Church. This is an increase from last year’s 40 baptisms. This year 83 children received First Holy Communion and 93 young adults received the Sacrament of Confirmation. These are great signs of growth and vitality for our parish. We don’t track the number of Confessions but we know that 83 First Communion Candidates went to First Confession. We estimate that nearly 30 people come to Confession a week. We offer Confessions on Saturdays at 3:00PM and Mondays at 6:00PM.

We had only 4 weddings this year and that is a sharp decrease from the previous year’s 12 weddings. The number of weddings both in churches and even civilly are down across the country. Many young people are choosing to either not get married and cohabitate before ever getting married. In other cases many Catholics choose to get married outside the Church with the increased popularity of “destination weddings.” We administered the Sacrament of the Sick to over 100 people this year. This includes people at Kent Hospital where Fr. Connors and I cover two days a month. And sadly we celebrated 46 funerals this year as we commended to God these faithful souls.

Again I would remind you that if someone is sick at home or hospitalized to please call the Parish Office to let us know. Due to privacy laws we are not notified when parishioners are hospitalized. We are happy to visit and offer the Sacrament of the Sick. If you know of someone who is homebound we can also arrange for them to regularly receive Holy Communion. I am away this weekend attending the Annual Winter Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops where I serve as a consultant to the Marriage Committee. Let us continue to pray for the souls of the faithful departed during this All Souls Month of November. The Pats are off this week but what a game last week. God Bless.

Praying for Newly Confirmed, Remembering the Dead and Voting as a Catholic!

Dear Parishioners: What a wonderful celebration of Confirmation we had last Sunday. Ninety-three young adults were confirmed in their Catholic Faith and received the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We hope and pray these young people stay close to Christ and His Church. Pope Francis at a Confirmation Mass last spring invited the newly confirmed to: “Remain steadfast in the journey of faith, with firm hope in the Lord. This is the secret of our journey! He gives us the courage to swim against the tide. Pay attention, my young friends: to go against the current; this is good for the heart, but we need courage to swim against the tide. Jesus gives us this courage! There are no difficulties, trials or misunderstandings to fear, provided we remain united to God as branches to the vine, provided we do not lose our friendship with him, provided we make ever more room for him in our lives.”

We are grateful to Bishop John Noonan for celebrating the Confirmation Mass and for his great homily. We also thank our Parish Music Director, Henri St. Louis, our Parish Soloist Deirdre Donovan and the Parish Choir for the tremendous music they provided for the celebration. The Sacristans, Ushers and Altar Servers provided exemplary service for the celebration and we are grateful. Also I wish to thank all those who helped make the Confirmation Reception a spectacular affair. We thank Doug Green and Mickey St. Jean for leading our RE Program and the RE Teachers who helped to prepare these young people for this special occasion in their lives of faith. I am grateful to the parents and sponsors of our newly confirmed for being part of our Parish and for their commitment to ensuring their children grow in the Catholic Faith.

This weekend we celebrate All Souls Day, a day on which we commemorate all the faithful departed. We do so by praying for the dead and most especially by offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the dead. The Church teaches us that the souls of the faithful departed if upon departing from the body are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins, or have not fully atoned for past transgressions must enter a time of cleansing or purgation before appearing before the Beatific Vision of the Godhead. So we the faithful on earth help them by prayers, alms-giving and having Masses offered. We remember all the souls in purgatory and in charity pray for all the dead on All Souls Day. The importance of All Souls Day was made clear by Pope Benedict XV (1914-22), when he granted all priests the privilege of celebrating three Masses on All Souls Day: one for the faithful departed; one for the priest's intentions; and one for the intentions of the Holy Father. Only on a handful of other very important feast days are priests allowed to celebrate more than two Masses.

This Tuesday is election day and I encourage everyone to go out and vote. It is our civic duty and a moral obligation to be good citizens and vote. There are many important elections this year for federal, state and local offices. As Catholics we must prepare our vote by praying for guidance from God and prepare our conscience by properly understanding the Church’s teaching on the issues especially foundational issues that concern the right to life. We must also learn where candidates stand on these most important issues and what policies they might enact or support once in office. When we have done this kind of preparation we can then go into the voting booth and cast a vote as a conscientious and informed Catholic citizen. Remember that the right to life is not merely one among many urgent issues, but rather the foundational one.  It provides the cornerstone for a whole architecture of human dignity found in such issues such as poverty, immigration, education and economics. So vote on Tuesday but do so as a Catholic with an informed conscience not a party member, union member, family member and not out of self-interest but rather vote for the common good especially for the unborn, the poor and the marginalized. God Bless! Go Pats!

Celebrating Confirmation at OLM! Preparing for All Saints and All Souls!!

Dear Parishioners: We celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation this weekend for 100 young people of our parish. These students have been studying over the last year at RE Classes and have taken a Retreat in preparation of this milestone in their faith lives. On Monday night they came to October Devotions where Father Chris Murphy, the Chaplain at Bishop Hendricken High School, spoke to them about the importance of Confirmation in their lives. They also had the chance to receive God’s mercy and forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession. I ask you to please pray for these young people that they may continue to stay close to Christ and His Church in the years ahead.

We welcome Bishop John G. Noonan, the Bishop of Orlando, to Our Lady of Mercy for the celebration of Confirmation. I first met Bishop Noonan when he was the Rector of the St. John Vianney Seminary College in Miami where two of my priesthood classmates teach philosophy. A few years ago when he was then the Auxiliary Bishop of Miami he visited my last parish in Albion for the celebration of Confirmation. It was that very weekend in October 2010 that he was appointed the Bishop of Orlando, Florida.

He is a native of Limerick, Ireland and studied for the priesthood in Florida. He is priest of the Archdiocese of Miami where he served as a parish priest, high school principal, and seminary rector. His Episcopal motto “God before me and God with me” originates in Exodus when Moses was leading the chosen people out of slavery and into the Promised Land. That same prayer was spoken by St. Patrick as he preached the Gospel in Ireland. Confirmation is an important event in the life of our parish and I am grateful to Bishop Noonan for taking the time from his busy schedule and the warm weather of sunny Florida to be with us. We also offer our gratitude to the newly confirmed young people of Our Lady of Mercy for their commitment to the faith. In your name, I offer our congratulations and prayerful best wishes to them all.

Daylight savings time ends next Sunday, November 2nd at 2:00AM as our clocks fall back one hour. Our 5:00PM Saturday evening Mass moves to 4:00PM beginning next Saturday. This also means that Confessions on Saturday afternoon move to 3:00PM beginning next Saturday. Next weekend we also celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints on Saturday. It is a feast that honors the saints both known and unknown, the obscure as well as the famous. This year it is not a Holy Day of Obligation because it falls on a Saturday. Therefore, the only All Saints Mass to be offered is Saturday at 8:30AM.

During November we are called to remember in a special way “our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection.” The Feast of Souls, a day in which we remember all the faithful departed, falls on a Sunday this year. So next Sunday, November 2nd we remember in particular all the Our Lady of Mercy parishioners who have died since last November. Their families have been invited to join us at the 10:30AM Mass as their deceased loved ones are remembered. Following the Mass we are to process to St. Patrick’s Cemetery to pray for the faithful departed who rest in that sacred ground. The Church has encouraged prayer for the dead from the earliest times as an act of Christian charity. "If we had no care for the dead," Saint Augustine noted, "we would not be in the habit of praying for them." I encourage you to pray for all the dead during the Month of November. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

I hope you can join us next Saturday night in the OLM School Gym following the 4:00PM Mass for our OLM Outreach “Helping Hands” Event for Catholic Relief Services . It is a great way for all parishioners to celebrate All Saints as we strive to be saints! Again we say congratulations to the newly confirmed of OLM! Also we thank Bishop Noonan for being with us for this special day. Have a great week. God Bless. Go Pats!

Praying for Vocations, Making Pligrimages, and Helping Hands at OLM

Dear Parishioners: It’s been a busy week this week even though we started with the Columbus Day Holiday on Monday. On Tuesday, Fr. Connors joined with Fr. Chris Murphy, the Chaplain of Bishop Hendricken High School, and Fr. Joe Upton, the Prout Chaplain, and took a bus of high school students to St. John’s Seminary in Boston. These young men were able to tour the seminary, pray with the nearly 100 seminarians, and join them for a meal. They were also able to meet with Seminarian Brian Morris who is from Our Lady of Mercy Parish, and Nick Robenhymer, who served as our Summer Seminarian this past summer. It was a great opportunity for this group of young men to see first hand what life in a major seminary is like, but also to meet many other young men who are presently preparing for the priesthood. I am grateful that Fr. Connors, Fr. Murphy, and Fr. Upton took time out of their busy schedules to arrange this Vocation Awareness Trip.

However, vocations are everyone’s business not just the young priests of our diocese. Bishop Tobin has asked for all Catholics to pray with devotion and fervor for more vocations to the priesthood. He is holding monthly Holy Hours for Vocations across the Diocese. The next  Holy Hour for Vocations is scheduled for Thursday, October 23, 2014 at 6:30 PM at St. Joseph Church, 1200 Mendon Road, Woonsocket.  Bishop Tobin has called us to unite in prayer that many more men respond to God's call to the priesthood in the Diocese of Providence.

Bishop Tobin was with us on Wednesday night for Mass at Our Lady of Mercy and we had a great crowd. He came at the invitation of Fr. Connors as part the Diocesan effort to outreach to Young Catholics. Fr. Connors has been working with the Diocesan Office of Catholic Youth Ministry to develop programs for Catholics in their 20s and 30s. Bishop Tobin not only celebrated Mass here but following the Mass he joined many of these Young Catholics for a time of questions and answers.

On Thursday nearly 50 of our OLM Parishioners made a Pilgrimage to the Divine Mercy Shrine in beautiful Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They had a great day of prayer and devotion that included Mass at the Shrine, a talk by Fr. Michael Gaitley, who serves at the Shrine and is a noted spiritual writer, and also some time of private prayer at the beautiful shrine. It was truly a tremendous day of faith and a wonderful way to come together as a parish community.

Our parish community has a great opportunity coming on Saturday, November 1st. It is the Feast of All Saints but because the holy day falls on a Saturday it is not a holy day of obligation. However, we can celebrate our faith in the communion of saints by putting our efforts to be holy into action. OLM is hosting a “Helping Hands” Meal Packing event co-sponsored by Catholic Relief Services and End Hunger Now. We need volunteers to serve in one hour shifts from 5:00PM through 8:00PM on Saturday, November 1st as we pack meals in the OLM School Gym. We must package 10,000 meals to be shipped to the people of the West African country of Burkina Faso. An assembly line of packing takes place after a brief presentation by the folks from CRS. It is a event open to anyone in the parish, of any age, and a great way for a whole family to celebrate All Saints Day. Each of these 10,000 meals costs just 50 cents and we need to purchase them. So if you cannot attend the All Saints Day Event and would like to sponsor some meals please know that our monthly OLM Outreach Collection for November is dedicated to this worthwhile effort. Also, if you would like to donate some of these meals just make a check payable to OLM Outreach and mark “Helping Hands” in the memo line. I am grateful to OLM Parishioner Kathy Bennett for organizing this opportunity to put our mercy and faith into action. Have you come to October Devotions yet? Why not join us on Mondays at 7:00PM as we pray the Rosary before the Eucharistic Lord. It’s a wonderful way to start your week with prayer. Have a great week. God Bless.