Pastor’s Corner

Cost of Discipleship: big decisions require calculated thought. We calculate the gains and losses of selling our home. We calculate the positives and negatives of accepting a new job. We calculate the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate when voting. “Great crowds” were following Jesus. Did they have any inkling of the cost? Did they remain a great crowd or become drifters? What about us? Do we calculate the cost of Baptism, and everything that this commitment implies? The cost of discipleship is this choice: to be Jesus’ companions, or drifters.(Read, discuss, reflect on Luke 14:25–33).

Labor Day: today we give thanks for those who labor, as well as those who are unemployed or underemployed. Pope Leo XII’s encyclical , Rerum Novarum, was a watershed papal document, written at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. This Church teaching set forth principles for labor and work, focusing on the dignity of the human person. We are especially grateful for those who labor and work around the parish, especially the support staff and all who minister behind the scenes.

Do you see your work as noble, participating in creation, and helping to build up community. You are invited to participate in our 9:00am Mass, September 5. (On holidays the 7:00am Mass and the 12:05 noon Mass are combined into a 9:00am Mass).

Peter Claver: while serving as a missionary, he ministered to the slaves by providing them with food and medicine, washing their wounds, preparing them for Baptism, and witnessing their Marriages. This Spanish Jesuit priest spent his life tending to the needs of African slaves in Columbia, South America. He actively pursued lawyers to plead the cases of imprisoned slaves and prepared criminals for death. Not only did he care for the slaves, but he also preached missions to plantation owners and sailors. The “saint of the slaves,” as Peter Claver (1580/1–1654) is often called, died after contracting a plague. We remember him on Friday, September 9.

Why not choose to participate in Eucharist today to intentionally pray for an end of racism, prejudice, and all shadows of partiality seeded within our hearts. St. Peter Claver, pray for me.

“Some of you said: this system can no longer be endured. We must change it; we must put human dignity again at the center and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need. It must be done with courage, but also with intelligence, with tenacity but without fanaticism, with passion but without violence. And among us all, addressing the conflicts without being trapped in them, always seeking to resolve the tensions to reach a higher plane of unity, peace and justice.” 

— Pope Francis, 10/28/14