From our Pastor’s heart 10/12/25
I want to begin this week by saying “Thank you” to all those who filled out our parish demographic surveys. Your participation is already helping us better understand the people who make up our parish family and the unique gifts and perspectives each of you bring. As we prepare for next weekend’s Listening Sessions, your continued participation will allow us to go even deeper helping us to identify the spiritual needs of our parish family by discerning who we are as a people, and more importantly, who we are in Christ.
For those who remember their Baltimore Catechism, the three lenses I have been discussing over the last six weeks of bulletin articles might sound familiar: Who made you? God made me. Why did God make me? God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this life so as to be happy with Him in the next. What we are trying to do with these three lenses is give a focus for our particular parish family on how we are already and how we are going to continue to invite everyone within our parish boundaries into friendship with Christ.
As we have discussed communing in the Lord’s beauty, then sharing that knowledge of Christ and His Church by evangelizing through catechesis, we now conclude with how the Lord is calling us to in flesh His life in our own. Last week I spoke about the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. One of the areas that is eminently important in our life of faith is our own growth in the moral life. As Catholics, we sometimes think of morality as only the “hot button topics.” What we mean by the moral life, however, is the growth in virtue and the removal of vice in our lives. This is known as the ascetical life where we grow in what St. Gregory said is “the way in which we become like God.”
At the school, we have implemented the Education in Virtue curriculum. They describe virtue as “a habit which enables us to know what is true and love what is good easily and consistently.” The growth in the life of virtue is one of the key ways that we can know whether we are growing properly in our Christian life or not. We as humans have three parts to our uniquely human soul: memory, intellect, and free will. While all animals have memory, only humans have an intellect that can properly orient these memories to the transcendent and contemplate God. And our free will is so uniquely human!
On a practical level, we see this growth of virtue as the way we properly orient our interior life our life of the soul towards God. And we all know how easy it is to orient ourselves toward things that aren’t God! In our Listening Sessions, our questions will be oriented toward our friendship with Christ and how we see these three lenses in our own lives to share with one another how our faith has been formed and focused in these ways, and how Christ is calling us to unify around Him and His Church during Partners in the Gospel. I am truly excited for us to share more deeply in this life together. Please continue to fast and pray for the fruitfulness of our parish family that the love and intimate, concrete friendship Jesus Christ desires with each and every one of us might be brought to fulfillment.
