Pastor’s Letter: September 1, 2024

Pastor’s Letter: September 1, 2024

30 Aug 2024 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear St. Philomena Parish Family,

Can it already be September? It seems like just a couple weeks ago that I made my Oath of Fidelity and signed my commitment to serve as pastor of our parish! As I begin my third month here, I’m joyful to say that the transition has continued to go very well! I finally made the move down the hall and am settled in the pastor’s suite. Fr. Daniel and I worked on setting up a nice first floor guest room in the rectory and are now ready to have our seminarians, Deacon Ben and Jonathan, stay with us on the weekends they are with our parish. We have been working on being present to greet our students in the mornings and Fr. Daniel has done a great job of checking in regularly with the sports teams. Our church and school staff have been terrific to work with and great at answering my many questions. I’ve continued meeting with different groups and learning more and more about the great community life here!

One of my favorite parts of getting to know our parish family has been visiting with the school students. I’m so impressed by our young people! They are respectful and attentive; they ask good questions; and they are very friendly and welcoming. Recently I attended the ShamROCK event at PND HS, where I was asked to lead a prayer before the football team scrimmage. As I was walking up through the parking lot, I was looking for some familiar faces—there were many! I met up with our PND Chaplain, Fr. McShane, (who I knew when he was a college student at University of Illinois) and we walked from the main gathering area out to the football practice field. While we were walking, St. Philomena students kept approaching us and saying, “Hi, Fr. Luke!” I didn’t count, but I’m going to guess about 50 students of all ages came up to say hello—Fr. McShane was really impressed!

That welcoming, joyful spirit is really at the heart of what I believe is fruitful life in Christ—and good evangelization. I know for some, that might sound like an intimidating word…or maybe we think of a television preacher…or maybe we think that is something priests or teachers do. But, evangelization is actually something that all of us who are baptized are called to—it is part of living our life in Christ. As I mentioned some time back, for our parish, the next part of the Growing Disciples Pastoral Planning for our Diocese will be focusing on the Five Foundations (Evangelization, Discipleship, Devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist, Promoting Vocations, and Continuing the Legacy of Archbishop Fulton Sheen) and working to strengthen even more our good parish life here. These next several weeks we’ll be reflecting on these Five Foundations in the homilies at Mass and sharing some practical examples that will give us ideas of how to grow our life in Christ. The hope for our reflections is that they will help us live our Faith more and more fruitfully and generously share the gift of our life in Jesus with those we come across each day.

How do we evangelize? What do we say? Do we need formal training and preparation? The secret of good evangelization is something that many of our young people naturally already know—all it really requires is growing in our life with Christ…the rest is simply sharing the joys of growing with Jesus. As given by our US Bishops’ National Plan for Evangelization, evangelization means bringing the Good News of Jesus into every human situation. As Bishop Lou has said, it simply means sharing the love of Jesus with others. Usually when I talk about evangelization, I ask a couple questions…first, I’ll ask how many of you consider yourselves evangelists? Usually there are just a few hands…then I next ask, how many of you have had a special moment in your life where you felt God was at work, a time when you felt God was close and was helping you? I usually see many more hands…then I ask, how many of you then told someone about it, maybe a family member or a friend? I usually see all those same hands again! I then tell everyone, you are evangelists and didn’t even know it! =)

In Christ,

Father Luke