Sunday March 30th, 2025 – 4th Sunday of Lent
Happy Lent! Happy Laetare Sunday!
Laetare is Latin for “rejoice.” Here, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, we are reminded that all our Lenten practices should lead us to rejoice in the anticipation of the resurrection. We are called to join Christ on the cross through sacrifice, so that we may rejoice and share in His resurrection.
The weekend is also a reminder that we are close to the end of Lent. Lent is a great time to return to the sacrament of reconciliation. As a priest, this beautiful sacrament is one of the greatest aspects of my
priesthood. I rejoice every time I encounter someone in the confessional. It is a humbling experience to be with people as they confess their sins and offer God’s mercy in the darkest moments of their lives.
Has it been too long since you have been to confession? I encourage you not to let another Lent go by without availing yourself of the sacrament of reconciliation. In addition to offering confessions seven days a week in our parishes, we have several upcoming opportunities to receive the sacrament. On April 9, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is offering “Pray, Reconcile, & Rejoice: 12 Hours of Reconciliation.” You can find locations and times here: https://www.archmil.org/Pray-Reconcile-Rejoice. Furthermore, we are offering two additional times during Holy Week at Old St. Mary: Wednesday, April 16, from 5:00 to 8:00pm and Thursday, April 17, from 7:00am to 1:00pm. We encourage you to take advantage of these additional hours.
Please know of our prayers as we continue our Lenten journey.
God bless,
Fr. Joseph
Sunday March 23rd, 2025 – 3rd Sunday of Lent
Dear friends,
This is now the third Sunday in Lent and a beautiful passage from the Gospel of John is presented to us at
Mass, the one about the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.
I have only viewed a couple of episodes of the series, The Chosen, but the one episode on this encounter
brought me to tears.
The Samaritan woman’s self-esteem was at its lowest. She had been through five romantic relationships. Perhaps she fell in love those five times or maybe was forced into one of those five relationships. She had been disappointed, hurt and covered in shame. Why was she not drawing water from the well in the morning, like other women would do to avoid the heat of midday? She only dared to go to the well around noon because no one would be there to shame her and call her names.
One day, however, Jesus meets her at the well. The water her heart was thirsting for, the love she had been looking unsuccessfully in those five husbands had gone out of his way to meet her and tell her, “I am as thirsty for your love as you have been for mine”.
Jesus, in fact, longs to love each of us wherever we are at. He longs to give us the water that will satiate our deepest longings. I bet it has been tiring to go around looking for love in wells that have only provided us with momentary relief. Now, Jesus is the one going out of his way to look for us and say to our face, “I thirst for you”.
May this Lent and Easter be a time for us to quench the Lord’s thirst for our hearts. Why not give our hearts to Jesus? We have given them to others in the past, and many times we have been left thirstier than ever before. Jesus, on the other hand, has given us in the cross a proof of his love for us.
With love,
Fr. Carlos
Sunday March 16th, 2025 – 2nd Sunday of Lent
This is my chosen Son; listen to him.
Lk 9:35
Sunday March 9th, 2025 – 1st Sunday of Lent
“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.”
(W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety)
Dear Friends,
And so we begin Lent!
I quote from a poem named “The Age of Anxiety,” because it seems that is us! But if we are honest, every age of history, from the very beginning, has been filled with anxiety in different forms. Be it personal or communal, anxiety, fear, worry are as common as the air we breathe. Sure we count our blessings, but in the course of an ordinary day, most of us are kind of “glass-half-empty” folks.
That is why the season of Lent and the fine-tuning of conversion it offers is so important! Through spiritual and physical discipline, we discover treasures of being a disciple. We are given the “full” message that anxiety in any form is not the final answer, but that the final answer is Jesus Christ, who climbed the Cross freely for us, who is also the Christ raised up on Easter in the triumph of hope and a new way of living for his followers.
Lent is not a time of misery like a workout that most of us, especially myself, dread. It is a 40 day-at-a-time plan of small steps that lead us to a great victory.
My prayer for you is not that you have a powerful, successful Lent, but a day-at-a-time Lent with one small accomplishment of prayer, fasting, almsgiving each day. May it be a gentle Lent of a step-at-a-time climbing whatever Cross is in your life, so that when Easter comes, and we all gather on a spring Morning with family and friends and fellow parishioners and a ham in the oven, we rejoice at the renewal of our experience of the triumph of hope over anxiety, life over death!
Know of my prayers and love.
Fr. Tim
Sunday March 2nd, 2025 – Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Happy Sunday!
Today is the final Sunday in Ordinary Time before Lent. Wednesday begins the great season of Lent. As a child, I hated Lent. Why? I did not understand its purpose.
Lent is a great time to remind ourselves that we have an amazing God who entered into our humanity and offered his life for us all so that we could have communion with the Father. Without Jesus, we would still be disconnected from God, and our lives would end in death. Now, we are in communion with God, and our lives end with eternal life.
In the season of Lent, we increase our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving practices. I encourage everyone to pray, asking God to guide them in determining the best practices for their lives. We are all different and on a different part of the faith journey; therefore, our practices will differ.
The other suggestion is not to try to overdo it. Sometimes, we have great ideas for a great Lent but choose too many things. After a few days, we begin to slowly drop some of the practices until we end up doing nothing by the middle of the second week. Pick a few things that will challenge you but will not over-tax you. It is better to do a few things well rather than many things poorly.
I pray that everyone has a happy and blessed Lent!
