Weekly insight and thoughts from Fr. Damian Zuerlein
Pastor’s Letter 10.21.18
Dear Friends, Welcome to the Spaghetti Dinner weekend! The fall Dinner always happens in the midst of falling leaves and football. I hope you can come over and join us for some great food and friendship. The team always needs your help to serve others, so if you have...
Pastor’s Letter 10.14.18
Dear Friends, A couple of weeks ago we had two young women from the John Paul II Newman Center at Masses to talk about the Archbishop’s Annual Appeal. They both read a beautiful quote at the beginning of their talk from an Italian American female saint which spoke of...
Pastor’s Letter 10.7.18
Dear Friends, You may not have heard the news. A recent study from the University of Maryland has shown that members of the generation born in and after the mid 1980s are divorcing at a lower rate than prior generations! Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the...
Pastor’s Letter 9.30.18
Dear Friends, Our world seems to be deepening the divisions between people on a daily basis. There are divisions between countries, divisions between political parties and within parties, divisions between neighbors, divisions within families and divisions within...
Pastor’s Letter 9.23.18
Dear Friends, For the past month, we have had parishioners talking at each of the Sunday Masses about their experience of living discipleship through involvement in different ministries. Today, I will be offering you our Annual Report. You can pick up copies at the...
Pastor’s Letter 9.16.18
Dear Friends, One of the great outcomes of the Second Vatican Council was the realization that the laity were a holy and essential part of the Church. There were two or three layers prior to the Council and after the Council there was only the one layer of Church. We...
Pastor’s Letter 9.9.18
Dear Friends, Some have been asking questions about the holiness of the church given the recent revelations about Cardinal McCarrick and the investigations into past abusive activity of clergy. I’d like to share with you some thoughts from a book published fifty years...
Pastor’s Letter 9.2.18
Dear Friends, With all the chatter on social media this week concerning the ongoing revelations about the cover-ups in the church with regard to criminal conduct by clergy, it was impossible for me not to think and pray about it. Therefore, I reflected on sin and evil...
Pastor’s Letter 8.26.18
Dear Friends, This weekend you will hear a letter from Archbishop Lucas read at all the Masses. In it, he expresses his thoughts about the most recent revelations concerning Church leadership and the sexual abuse crisis. You may have heard that Pope Francis also wrote...
Pastor’s Letter 8.19.19
Dear Friends, I am reading Joshua Gibbs new book about teaching the virtues to young people. In it, he reflects on his own personal struggles and those of his students to live the good life. I appreciated one of his discussions where he reflects on the common pattern...
Pastor’s Letter 8.12.18
Dear Friends, In the social media spectrum, there has been a lot of discussion this past week about Pope Francis and what he said about Catholic teaching on the death penalty. Many have made the mistake of saying that Pope Francis has changed 2,000 years of Catholic...
Pastor’s Letter
Dear Friends, This past week, Pope Francis clarified Catholic teaching on the death penalty. During the past fifty years, there has been an ongoing movement, within the teachings of the Church, to limit the use of the death penalty by governments around the world....