Wishing you all a very happy Labor Day weekend! This Monday we honor all workers and laborers, paid and unpaid. Hopefully, by our labor we build up the Kingdom of God as we support our families and ourselves and benefit society. Happy Labor Day to all who labor in any way.
This past weekend we had a very successful Parish Pastoral Council Retreat. New members coming onto the Council as well as those going off joined together to talk and explore about our parish’s commitment to evangelization. We were also joined by the other clergy of the parish: Deacon Billy Atkins and Frs. René Constanza and Bob Cary.
Evangelization is a word that is slowly becoming more familiar to Catholics. Simply put it is the effort to share the Good News of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. It is introducing others to Jesus, and giving witness to the life, the love, the joy that knowing Him brings into our lives, within the community of His people, the church.
We do evangelization because 1) Jesus commanded us to do so, and 2) we have something very wonderful, precious and life-giving that, out of concern for others, we want to share.
In the past we have always had evangelization in the Catholic Church, but we often used different words for it, such as missionary effort, or apostolic action, or “apostolate,” or something like that. Recent Popes have called for a “new” evangelization. Whereas in the past evangelization was a missionary effort to bring the Gospel to people who had not yet heard it in foreign lands in Africa or Asia, today the new evangelization is directed to countries that are nominally Christian but not active in the faith today.
All Catholics are called to be evangelizers, giving witness to our Faith by our lives. But as members of a parish staffed by the Paulist Fathers, a group founded to evangelize North America, we have a special reason to be doing evangelization. So our Parish Pastoral Council decided to focus on how we as a parish, concretely and practically, can evangelize. We came up with many good ideas, and I hope that soon you will be hearing more about this as we focus on just a couple of practical efforts we can accomplish as a parish.
The members of the Parish Pastoral Council (PPC) who have gone off are: Kerri Kallus, Mark Harrison, Susana Campos, and Karla Basham. THANK YOU to all of you for your service to our parish!
The new members coming on the PPC are: Patrick Hunt, Josie Barrett (Recorder), Shannon Frangenberg and Jennifer Kirsch. Welcome!
Continuing on the PPC are Ray Mechler (Chair), Kennedy Columbo, Susan Cimino, Mary Kay Hemenway, Ed Anderson, Emily Kleine, Kathy Airel and Frank Morris (Vice-Chair). We as a parish are blessed with a diverse and active group of parishioners on the PPC. Please keep the PPC and our parish in your prayers.
God bless!
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