“Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another.” – Pope Leo XIV, Homily at Mass for the Beginning of his Pontificate, May 18, 2025
From his first appearance after his election in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV has called upon Catholics to live in peace and unity with one another within the Church and to share this invitation to peace and unity with the whole world. Throughout history, Catholics have shared the peace and unity of Christ with the world by proclaiming the Gospel and performing works of mercy that bring comfort to the poor and vulnerable. For centuries, Catholics have expressed our unity with the Pope by giving to the Peter’s Pence Collection. This annual collection supports the pope’s mission to proclaim Christ’s message of unity and peace to the world. Our gifts to the Holy Father are concrete signs of hope to Pope Leo XIV that fulfill the two aims of Peter’s Pence:
– to support the Holy Father’s mission, which extends throughout the entire world, from the proclamation of the Gospel to the promotion of integral human development, education, peace, and brotherhood among peoples; and
– to support the numerous charitable works in aid of people and families in difficulty, populations afflicted by natural disasters and wars, or who are in need of humanitarian assistance or support for development.
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 unite with the poor vulnerable as it serves 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 $90,000 and contributions totaled $134,828; that’s 150% of our goal! Our goal this year remains the same as last year – $90,000 – and contributions to date total $37,075. If you have already sent in your contribution, I thank you. If not, please remember to contribute to this very important appeal before the end of the year.
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 $85,000 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.
As we prepare for the annual Peter’s Pence Collection next week, allow me to thank you for your ongoing generous support for it and all of the other appeals. Through them, we respond to Pope Leo’s call to share the peace and unity of Christ with the world by proclaiming the Gospel and performing works of mercy that bring comfort to so many who are poor and vulnerable.
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. Pope Saint 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 so 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. To all of you great dads –