Dear Friends,
This weekend we are celebrating another important landmark for our parish – the open house of our new Cabrini Parish Center, the former Christ Child building. We now have meeting rooms and offices and more classroom space. If all goes well in the future, we will also have a nice space to host larger meetings, funeral dinners, and small receptions.
Lots of work went into making this space ready and we are all deeply in debt to those who spent hours and hours of their time getting the space to this point. It is a powerful reminder to us of what can happen when we are all working together. The reason why Jesus formed a church instead of simply talking to individuals, is he knew that it would take all of us working together to get the job done.
Being a part of a church is a great blessing to us and to our faith journey. Our modern culture tends to attack institutions and to put all the emphasis on the individual, but I do not think that is a good thing. There is an immense psychological burden that comes with having to make every decision and to do everything by ourselves. Pushing aside the church and its traditions is a celebrated stance in modern shows and film, but in real life this does not lead to more freedom, but to confusion, anxiety and dread. If the ultimate value is self-discovery done on your own, it leaves everything you’re doing with an inevitable weightlessness. Admiring choice for its own sake means no choices really matter – you end up admiring nothing.
So many people today try to manage life without a point of reference. They want to be free of institutional burdens, but end up being perplexed and searching for all the answers themselves. They ignore the thousands of years of human wisdom gained through the experience of others and try to do everything themselves. The modern assumption is that limiting our options is limiting our humanity, we do not want to give credence to an “authority.” So we enter into a sea of willful confusion; we do not learn from others, we choose to make all the mistakes ourselves.
Some of this is not a new problem. St. Augustine spoke about it in his own day, “in practical life we owe our beliefs to authority.” Later he says, “Nothing at all in human society remains safe, if we determine to believe nothing, which we cannot grasp by full apprehension.” By being a part of a long tradition we actually gain in knowledge and freedom and love. We are a part of something greater, a greater wisdom and a greater experience.
Our new building is a clear symbol of what can happen when people are a part of a larger community and work toward goals that benefit the group. This new structure belongs to all of us. It is a part of work of the church to move the gospel forward. My deepest thanks to all who worked a little or who worked a lot to make it operational. We build on a long tradition as the first Catholic parish in Omaha. I have put the book of corporate resolutions on display in the waiting area in the new building. In the book are hand written resolutions that buy the land for the first St. Philomena’s and the resolutions to sell the land to John Deere and move up the hill to our present location. From 1855 until now our community has been a presence in the city of Omaha. More than 160 years of praying together and serving the greater good. We now take the next step in our long history and we trust that the God who has brought us this far will guide us into the future.
Peace,
Fr. Damian