News - March 2024 RSS Feed

The Lord has risen as he said, Alleluia!

Welcome to all who are joining us today as we begin the holiest week of our Church year. Next Sunday, when we celebrate Easter, is a day when many people feel a longing to come to Church. I hope all of us will do all that we can to make people feel truly welcome. I want to encourage those of us who come to Mass here regularly to think about people who do not do so. Why not invite them to come to Mass with you next Sunday?

Jesuit Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade died on March 6, 1751 at the age of 76. We don’t know much about his life except that he spent his priestly life in a series of somewhat obscure assignments. One of his assignments was to serve as the spiritual director to a convent of Visitation nuns in France. In that capacity he prepared a series of conferences and wrote a series of letters for the benefit of the Visitation Nuns at that convent. Political events in France over the next seventy-five years or so kept things in a state of upheaval. It wasn’t until a century after Father de Caussade’s death that the nuns living at the convent thought to publish de Caussade’s under the title Abandonment to Divine Providence.

On February 15, 2024, the Maryland Catholic Conference picked six issues for their virtual Catholic Advocacy Day. Last week I summarized three of these items as presented on the Maryland Catholic Conference Website. This week I will present the other three items. But before I do that, I want to give you an update on one of the items mentioned last week.