On June 26, 2020, Fr. Ricardo Antonio Cortez Martínez, rector of the St. Óscar Arnulfo Romero seminary in Usulutan, El Salvador, sent a request to the Subcommittee on the Church in Latin America for financial aid for 42 seminarians in the philosophy stage of their formation. Less than two months later, on August 7, Fr. Ricardo was found assassinated. Tragically, three priests were slain from 2019 through August 2020 in El Salvador as drug cartels control the country and drug lords feel threatened by the Church’s call to peace and […]

It has been almost a year since I wrote to you about Next Generation Parish, an initiative that the Catholic Leadership Institute is introducing to 15 select parishes in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.  You may recall that CLI is a 25-year old national apostolate that provides training and formation for the purpose of creating more vibrant communities rooted in Jesus Christ.  It was founded and is still headquartered here in our archdiocese but has worked with (arch)dioceses throughout the country.  We accepted CLI’s invitation to engage in this four-year process […]

“You are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Cor 12:27).  Each of us is a unique, unrepeatable reflection of God’s presence in the world and, as we hear so powerfully declared in today’s second reading, each of us is Christ’s body.  And, God calls each of us to live according to his plan, not our own.  This past Saturday, we commemorated that dark day, forty-nine years ago, when the United States Supreme Court handed down the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, legalizing abortion for any reason.  Since that […]

After a delay of almost two years, I am excited to announce that our new pipe organ is on its way from Padua, Italy!  You may recall that we had contracted with Fratelli Ruffatti, one of the finest organ manufacturers in the world, to construct a new organ for us; the contract was signed in April 2018 and the organ was completed in March 2020.  It was scheduled to be installed over the summer of 2020 but we all know why that didn’t happen.  Like so many aspects of our […]

On this, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we all realize that Christmas is just a few days away!  And, you will notice that the two Christmas trees – one at the St. Therese Shrine and one in the baptistery – that had been filled with about 300 tags suggesting gifts for women and children who will be spending Christmas at Mercy Hospice and Women of Hope – are gone; so are all the tags!  Over the past few weeks, so many of you have so generously taken the tags and […]