First Sunday of Lent 2023

02-26-2023Letter from the PastorFr. Don Kline, V.F.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

“Lent is a privileged time of interior pilgrimage towards Him Who is the font of mercy. It is a pilgrimage in which He Himself accompanies us through the desert of our poverty, sustaining us on our way towards the intense joy of Easter.” (Pope Benedict, XVI, Lenten Message, 2006) We all need a “spiritual tune up” from time to time. Lent provides God’s faithful a time for conversion and an opportunity to grow in one’s faith.

This Lent, Pope Francis invites us to ascend “a high mountain” in the company of Jesus and to seek to grow in our spiritual discipline, as God’s holy people. He also encourages us to see our Lenten discipline or our Lenten penance as he calls it, as “a commitment, sustained by grace, to overcoming our lack of faith and our resistance to following Jesus on the way of the Cross.”

In his Lenten letter, the Holy Father points to the Second Sunday of Lent, we hear in the Gospel about the Transfiguration of Jesus. This moment for the disciples shows us Our Lord’s response to the failure of His disciples to understand Him. Shortly before this event, there had been a real clash between Our Lord and Simon Peter, who, after professing his faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, rejected His prediction of the Passion and the Cross. Jesus had firmly rebuked him: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a scandal to me, because you do not think according to God, but according to men!” (Matthew 16:23).

Following this, “six days later, Jesus took with him Peter, James and John his brother and led them away to a high mountain” (Matthew 17:1). This is precisely what Peter and the other disciples needed to do. As Pope Francis reminds us, that if we are “to deepen our knowledge of the Master, to fully understand and embrace the mystery of His salvation, accomplished in total self-giving inspired by love, we must allow ourselves to be taken aside by Him and to detach ourselves from mediocrity and vanity.” We need to set out on the journey, an uphill path that, like a mountain trek, requires effort, sacrifice and concentration.

The Lenten pilgrimage is also a time for us to focus more intentionally on the corporal works of mercy - to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to give shelter to homeless, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned, and to bury the dead. Thankfully we have so many ways to reach out to others at our parish by feeding their bodies and spirits. Our efforts at St. Bernadette parish and St. John XXIII school are a part of a great fabric of ministries in the wider Church that make the Catholic Church the greatest vehicle for charity in the world. In the United States alone, for example, well over 7,000,000 people are served through our Catholic food services. The church educates well over 2.6 million grade school and high students, as well as 720,000 collegiates yearly. 1 in 6 hospital patients are treated in our Catholic Hospitals in each of the 50 states. These amazing numbers didn’t happen by Catholics standing around and patting themselves on the back. Instead, it is our history of asking, “What more can I do for Our Lord?” Particularly this Lent, I hope you ask that question yourself.

I am grateful to God for the many generous ways that you respond to Our Lord’s invitation to serve Him by serving one another.

God Bless,

Fr. Don Kline, V.F.
Pastor

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