Throughout the year, you are invited to support a wide variety of Catholic organizations and activities through our second collections.  The Catholic Charities Appeal, which is the most important collection each year, allows the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to serve thousands of people in the Archdiocese.  Every year, you are very generous in response to this appeal.  To provide guidance, the Archdiocese sets goals for each parish.  Last year, our parish goal was $152,390 and, once again, we exceeded our goal; we contributed $169,782!  Our goal this year (2018-19) remains the same as last year – $152,390.00 – and contributions to date total $90,123.  If you have already sent in your contribution, I thank you.  If not, you still have a little time; the appeal for this year ends on 30 June.

 

The Seminary Appeal is also very important since it provides essential support for our seminary which prepares men for the priesthood.  As you might have heard or read recently, our seminary is moving to the grounds of Neumann University in Aston in the next five years.  Using the funds from the sale of our current property on City Line Avenue to Main Line Health, we will be building a facility that better meets our current needs.  And, we have partnered with Neumann University so that the seminarians will be able to use their facilities and take courses for their college degree at the University; specialized theology courses will be taught at the new seminary.  Your ongoing support is especially important now as St. Charles Borromeo Seminary continues to prepare men for the priesthood in our Archdiocese as well as several other dioceses throughout the country for upcoming generations of Catholics.

 

You respond to several other appeals throughout the year which provide very important aid to mission work, both here in the United States and around the world, care for retired and infirm clergy and religious and charitable support for people both locally, nationally and internationally.  Again, you are very generous – in this past year, our parish contributed more than $108,000 to these various appeals.  Due to your ongoing response to these appeals, many Catholic organizations here and worldwide are able to show God’s love to those in need.

 

But, there is one annual appeal that comes directly from our Holy Father because it provides a burse that allows him to respond to emergency needs.  This appeal is called Peter’s Pence because it is taken to support the Successor of Peter in his charitable outreach and because the 9th century King Alfred of England collected a “pence” from landowners for the pope.  The Peter’s Pence collection is traditionally taken up on a Sunday close to the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, celebrated on 29 June; this year, it will be taken up next weekend.  Its purpose is to provide the Holy Father with the financial means to respond to those who are suffering as a result of war, oppression, natural disaster, and disease.  For example, our brothers and sisters in Haiti – the poorest country in the western hemisphere – have faced tremendous challenges as they struggle to recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.  Millions of people were left homeless and without the basics – including clean water – to survive.  Your generosity to the Peter’s Pence collection has allowed Pope Francis to provide much-needed support for many of these desperate people.

 

In his apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, Pope Francis has called each of us to “respond with faith and charity” as we see in each person “a human being with a dignity identical to my own, a creature infinitely loved by the Father, an image of God, a brother or sister redeemed by Jesus Christ” (§ 98).  Through the Peter’s Pence collection, we unite with the Holy Father as he reaches out to our brothers and sisters in need in Haiti and around the globe.  We stand in solidarity with Catholics all over the world to support the charitable works and outreach of the Holy See.  In Pope Francis, we have a joyful witness of charity.  By supporting this collection, we can experience more fully how “mercy is the force that reawakens us to new life and instills in us the courage to look to the future with hope” (Misericordiae Vultus, § 10).

 

Please prayerfully consider supporting the Peter’s Pence collection and please be generous next weekend as we take up this longstanding collection for the Successor of Peter.

 

 

FATHER’S DAY

In June of every year, we take a Sunday to honor our fathers.  Like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is not part of the Church’s liturgical calendar.  In fact, liturgical directives state that “this secular observance must in no way diminish the primary focus of Sunday as the celebration of the paschal mystery.”  Yet, this national holiday allows an opportunity to reflect on the essential role of a father in everyone’s life.  Every human being has a father.  No one is born except through a father’s cooperation with a mother to conceive.  The late Pope John Paul II provided us with some very important reflections on the vocation of a father in his apostolic exhortation, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World:

Within the conjugal and family communion-community, the man is called upon to live his gift and role as husband and father.  In his wife, he sees the fulfillment of God’s intention: “It is not good that the man should be alone, I will make him a helper fit for him,” and he makes his own the cry of Adam, the first husband: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”

Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: “You are not her master,” writes St. Ambrose, “but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife…. Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love.” With his wife a man should live “a very special form of personal friendship.” As for the Christian, he is called upon to develop a new attitude of love, manifesting towards his wife a charity that is both gentle and strong like that which Christ has for the Church.”

Love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood. Above all where social and cultural conditions so easily encourage a father to be less concerned with his family or, at any rate, less involved in the work of education, efforts must be made to restore socially the conviction that the place and task of the father in and for the family is of unique and irreplaceable importance. As experience teaches, the absence of a father causes psychological and moral imbalance and notable difficulties in family relationships, as does, in contrary circumstances, the oppressive presence of a father, especially where there still prevails the phenomenon of “machismo,” or a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships.

In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family.  He will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife, by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church. (§ 25)

I continue to be greatly impressed by the presence and active participation of so many fathers in the parish and particularly in our school.  It is evident that many of you understand and embrace your essential role in your families and in our faith community.  And, your children and our parish benefit from it so, in the name of your children and your parish, I commend and thank you!

As we worship God, who has revealed himself as our heavenly Father, let us honor and respect our fathers, not only today but every day, as they share with their wives the very important role of growing into a loving family, caring for their children and sharing in the life and vitality of the parish.