Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

This is a BIG weekend around here at St. Maria Goretti as our Parish Religious Education (P.R.E.) program kicks off for another super year. We welcome our young people back to class today. And then this evening, our high school youth group, T.R.U.T.H. kicks off their Fall schedule. It is a great day! There are so many good things happening at once.

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about Eucharistic Adoration. You have now heard from me many times in both this space, in homilies, and in announcements, just how important Eucharistic Adoration has become to life of the modern day Catholic. All of the Twentieth century saints were involved in and heavily promoted spending time in prayer with the Blessed Sacrament. Our current Pope, Pope John Paul II has said time and time again, just how essential he believes this time with Jesus, to be. The message is clear and is coming from multiple different directions: today if you want to be a follower of Jesus Christ in the Catholic tradition, you need to spend some time with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist in Eucharistic Adoration. The prayer that is going on in these chapels around the world has changed everything. It is time we ALL get on board with this.

Here at St. Maria Goretti, Eucharistic Adoration has always been a priority. Starting with Family Holy Hour and a separate, dedicated Blessed Chapel, we built this Parish upon our prayer in front of the Holy Eucharist. Then, a couple of years ago now, we started on-going, scheduled Adoration, with a plan to move to Perpetual Adoration as soon as possible. Our new church was designed and is being built with Perpetual Adoration in mind. Starting on Thursday evening, December 9 th, with the transfer of the monstrance from our current chapel into the daily Mass chapel of the new church, Adoration will take place in the Daily Mass Chapel. After our Bell Tower is built, hopefully in the next couple of years in Phase II, Perpetual Adoration will move to a specially designed chapel in the base of the Bell Tower that will be exclusively for Perpetual Adoration.

Collectively, then, we’re doing our part and keeping up. The opportunity for Eucharistic Adoration is there. Individually, we’ve got to do better. Our Adoration schedule has more “holes” in it now than ever. We must all make a serious commitment to our hour with Jesus, and then to keep the constant vigil going, we need to ALL be faithful to the time that we are supposed to be there. Are you really afraid that you can’t be there every week? Then how about sharing an hour with some one else? Again, if you do not currently have an hour each week that you are signed up for, won’t you please consider taking an hour now? If you already have an hour, now more than ever we need you to faithful to it! A Parish of our size should have no problem finding enough people to cover the hours of Adoration that we are trying to do. Together and individually, we need to be committed to this. Anybody can say that they love Jesus. People who really do love Him want and need to spend time with Him. There is no better place to pray than in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Some of you may have noticed last week that Family Holy Hour has been dropped from our schedule. We have been doing Family Holy Hour on First Fridays for over seven years now. I would like to believe that this is because so many of us are already spending time in Adoration. Maybe, the usefulness of Family Holy Hour is something that we simply “outgrew” when we moved to scheduled Adoration. I hope so. I would like to believe that. I still wonder though. I am most concerned about how we are going to teach our children and our young people how important it is to pray in Eucharistic Adoration. Family Holy Hour was one way. I’m sure there are others. But this is a great responsibility. We can’t expect young Catholics to just wake up one day “sensing” the need for Eucharistic Adoration. Like the rest of our Faith, they have to grow up with it. The reality is that now Eucharistic Adoration is a part of our Faith lives. We must find new and better ways of teaching this to our children and our young people. I challenge our parents to take this on in your family.

Think about these things this week. Talk about this at home. Let’s see if we can’t do Eucharistic Adoration better here at St. Maria Goretti. Have a great week! God bless each one of you!

In Christ,
Fr. Kevin

“Normal” is a setting on a washing machine.