Pastor’s Corner — September 8th, 2024
This Fall: Stewardship for Saints and Scholars Campaign
As you may have heard, St Pat’s will soon participate in the Stewardship for Saints and Scholars Campaign. This effort is the result of many months of prayer and preparation following a successful planning study that concluded in the spring of 2023. All 70 parishes in our diocese will take part in this historic campaign, designed to benefit Catholics diocese-wide. Please see the insert in this week’s bulletin for more information. Jesus entrusts to us his gifts and calls us to invest them in order to advance the Kingdom of God. A pledge to the Stewardship for Saints and Scholars campaign is a great way of doing this. Your pledge to the campaign will:
• Strengthen our Catholic schools by enhancing teacher and administration compensation.
• Increase the financial aid capacity to serve more families by growing the financial aid endowment.
• Attend to the special needs of some of our scholars in our Catholic schools.
• Support each of the four diocesan high schools that each may attend to local needs.
• Support our parishes to attend to their local needs for their school and faith formation programs.
Funding each of these initiatives with the financial resources we have been blessed with will, in turn, multiply those blessings back to us and to God. The Diocese of Lansing is fortunate to have thousands of Catholic families who actively participate in the stewardship way of life. As disciples, we have an obligation to make our diocese, and our world, better for those who follow us. The diocese will soon invite all to participate as missionary disciples to impact future generations. Stay tuned for more information!
I am grateful to parishioners Nancy Coffey, Michael DeMeyere, Shane Gadbaw, and Nicole Kuklewski for serving as chairpersons helping to lead the Stewardship for Saints and Scholars campaign at St. Pat’s. If you feel called to volunteer to help our parish in this landmark effort, please let me know.
Gathering Space Project Started This Week
As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, we are finally completing the gathering space area with wood finishes to match the interior of the Church. The project will also feature some additional glass in the cry room area so there is more visibility in the Church. See Ryan’s column for some digital renderings and more information.
“Welcome To Canada, The Doctor Will Kill You Now…”
“…Assisted suicide was sold as compassionate. In practice it has turned out to be monstrous.” This is from a Wall Street Article published last week. From Catholic World News: “In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Nicholas Tomaino examines the rise of assisted suicide to “at least the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, claiming a reported 13,241 lives in 2022, up from 1,018 in 2016.” “In 2022 more than 81% of petitions resulted in death, including for vision/hearing loss’ and ‘diabetes,’” Tomaino writes. “The percentage of denied written requests has been falling for years, from 8% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2022, even as the number of applications has increased. The upshot has been that 44,958 people have been put to death between 2016-22.”
Wow. Mark my words: assisted suicide will increasingly become more common in the United States in the next decade. Why? It’s not just because people will simply apply more frequently the “life-is-only-valuable-when-we want-it-to-be” logic of the pro-abortion (pro-choice) ideology to the elderly and the suffering. But it’s also because we are living in an increasingly secular culture where the transcendent meaning of life in the midst of suffering is outright rejected. Think about it. If life has no intrinsic value and there is no real meaning or hope in life, then we shouldn’t be surprised people would turn to the hopeless and evil practice of assisted suicide/euthanasia. It’s important for us and the world around us not to be naïve to the deadly consequences of rejecting the Christian worldview.
May we also never take for granted that we know life has value and meaning because we were created by God out of love in his image and likeness. That this very God who revealed himself and united himself with us in Christ also suffered for us so that we might have his divine life. Knowing this God helps us to remember that our decision to suffer well with Jesus, out of love of God and our neighbor, can bring about incredible fruit in this life and the life to come.
Net ministries
We have a NET Missionary team returning to St. Pat’s next week for the third and final year of our partnership with NET Ministries. If you have room for a few missionaries to stay in your home, please consider volunteering to host them. These are Christ-centered young men and women who serve the youth of our parish and school. Please see page 4 of the bulletin for more information and to sign up to host.
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias