Pastor’s Corner — October 8th, 2023
FROM THE PAROCHIAL VICAR
Safe Haven Sunday: Equipping the Family, Safeguarding Children
The family home is to be a safe haven. But the inappropriate use of technology in the home deprives it of this role, and is the greatest threat to the sanctity of marriages and families today. Pornography and other online threats are often one click away, and parents can feel overwhelmed with not knowing how to best protect their children in our fast-paced digital world.
In response, St. Patrick’s parish together with the Diocese of Lansing is setting aside this weekend, Oct. 7-8, as Safe Haven Sunday. “Safe Haven Sunday” is a diocesan-wide event held annually to directly address the harms of pornography through teaching and resources that will support and protect individuals, marriages, and families in making all homes a safe haven. The theme for this year’s Safe Haven Sunday is “Equipping the Family, Safeguarding Children.”
After Mass, we will be handing out the book to our parish families called, Equipped: Smart Catholic Parenting in a Sexualized Culture, which equips parents to prepare their children for the overlysexualized culture on screens and the world around them. This book also includes text The Safe Digital Family Challenge which provides practical tips any caring adult can take to create safer digital environments for themselves and our young people.If you’re a parent or in charge of children, please consider taking a booklet and teaching your children and grandchildren how to be safe online.
God Bless,
Fr. Miguel
FROM THE PASTOR
Stewardship of Treasure: Three Things
For some reason the audio from my homily on Sunday wasn’t recorded, but the video was. So I’m likely going to do some sort of voice over or podcast teaching going over some of my main points and post it to our channel.
a. The Challenge. In my homily I challenged all families to actually calculate how much they give to the charities and the parish and to pray about increasing some percent of what they give to them. I’ve already received feedback from several parishioners that the challenge really convicted them to see how much how much or little they were in fact giving to the parish and to charities. Have you done this calculation yet? I know I’m going to increase my giving this year as well.
b. Two Additional Ways to Give: Last week in the bulletin we also listed that we have two additional ways of giving to the parish. First, we have our new Capital Improvement Envelopes that Ryan wrote about in this column, which is a new way of contributing to the updating of our physical plant. There are so many things we need to do to update our buildings since we’ve paid off our debt. Please see Ryan’s column on page 8 for more details of the kinds of things we’re talking about. As you may have seen in last week’s bulletin insert (more info in this week’s bulletin on page 6) another way of being good stewards with our treasure is planned giving to the parish in terms of retirement disbursements, stocks, estate planning, etc. In fact, we are hosting a Planned Giving Seminar on October 16th at 6:30pm with Michael Demeyere and Deacon Patrick McDonald who are both experts in finances and the law on this topic. They are here to help. We have new folders of information that will be available to give out which helps explain what the process is as well.
New National Survey on the Eucharist Shows Previous One Was Flawed
Remember that study back in 2019 that said that only 31% of Catholics believed that the Holy Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus? Yeah, so a new survey from CARA that was published last week found a serious methodological issue with that prior survey and found instead that it is actually about 64% of Catholics who believe in Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist. And when you get specific to how often people go to Mass the study said that “95% of weekly Mass attendees and 80% who attend at least once a month believe in the Real Presence.”
According to the latest survey we did at St Pat’s (Disciple Maker Index in February) about 95% of people coming to Mass here at St Pat’s believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Remember we took this survey during Mass, so Mass going people took it. Strangely most questions on the survey had a large number of people not answer them. This question had 59 people who didn’t answer it, which made up part of the 5%. So we might really have more then 95%.
The Disciple Maker Index survey results were discussed with the pastors and their teams a couple of weeks ago in a strategic planning session. We’ll be publishing some of the basic reports at some point in the future. Either way, there are some clear opportunities for growth and for celebration on our discipleship here at St Pat’s.
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias