Earth Awakens From Its Own “Tomb”

My Dear Parishioners,

It is so nice that the days are getting longer, that birds are returning, and that flowers and trees are showing signs of life. This is such a magical and beautiful time of year, as the Earth awakens from its own “tomb,” the tomb of winter, and comes back to life. Which is why it is also fitting that Spring is the time of year that we celebrate the most important event in the history of the World, and that is the event of the Resurrection.

Next weekend we will be observing Palm Sunday, and then the week after, we will celebrate Easter Sunday and the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So, I am certain that many of you are making your final preparations for the celebration of Easter and making sure that our children and grandchildren will be overjoyed that the Easter Bunny has visited them, and then have that opportunity to celebrate the Resurrection here in our beautiful church.

We thank all of those who are preparing our beautiful Church and preparing for our Holy Week and Easter Liturgies. We are so blessed to be part of St. Joseph’s.

Of course, as we are looking ahead towards Easter, we still are in Lent, and this weekend we are observing the Fifth Sunday of Lent and will be entering into a very busy Fifth Week of Lent.

Our first reading comes from one of my favorite chapters in all of the Old Testament: chapter 37 of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel prophesied during a period when Israel had been humbled by the Babylonians. God, through Ezekiel, then promised that the nation’s humbling would lead to a great period of renewal.

Humility is the virtue by which we get real about ourselves. It is a virtue that allows us to shed any inflated opinion about ourselves that comes from the capital sin of pride. It is a virtue that reminds us of our continuous need for God, and His Grace, and the intercession of His Angels and Saints. It is a virtue that reminds us that God wants to give us all of the good gifts that we need, and that He does so because He loves us so much. It is the virtue by which our hearts are opened to receive His Love and all of the good gifts which He wishes to bestow on us. Thus, humility is not a virtue for the weak; no, pride is the vice of the weak. Humility is a virtue for the strong. We rejoice, moreover, that God gives us all of the graces that we need to be strong in Christ Jesus.

This coming Wednesday, we will celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. We will celebrate that Jesus actually entered the world nine months before Christmas as we recall when the Angel of the Lord declared onto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit. We also remember the gift of freedom and that Our Blessed Mother Mary freely said yes to God, beginning the unwinding of Adam’s free act of saying no to God: When our first parents were created, God gave them a conscience, a moral law, and an original justice. They were not compelled to follow Him as the director of the symphony of creation. Yet they chose to rebel, and that sour note of original revolution was passed on to humanity, through human generation. How could that original disorder be stopped?.   Now we come to the greatest act of freedom the world

has ever known – the reversal of that free act which the Head of humanity performed in paradise when he chose non-God against God. It was the moment in which that unfortunate choice was reversed, when God in His Mercy willed to remake man and to give him a fresh start in a new birth of freedom under GOD…… Here, then, is freedom of religion; God respects human freedom by refusing to invade humanity and to establish a beachhead in time without the free consent of one of His creatures. Freedom of Conscience is also involved: before Mary could claim as her own the great gifts of God, she had to ratify those gifts by an act of will in the Annunciation. And there is the freedom of a total abandonment to God: our free will is the only thing that is really our own. Our health, our wealth, our power – all these God can take from us. But our freedom he leaves to us, even in hell. Because freedom is our own, it is the only perfect gift that we can make to God. And yet here a creature totally, yet freely, surrendered her will, so that one might say that it was not a matter of Mary’s will doing the will of her Son, but of Mary’s will being lost in that of her Son, Later on in His life he would say: “If the Son of Man makes you free, you will be free indeed.” If this be so, then no one has ever been more free than this belle of Liberty, the lady who sang the Magnificat (The World’s First Love by Blessed Archbishop Fulton J Sheen).

Then Thursday, we will welcome the Most Reverend Christopher Cooke, Auxiliary Bishop of Philadelphia, who will Confirm our Children. We thank our Coordinator of Religious Education, Mrs. Danielle Staffieri, our SJR School Principal, Mrs. Jennifer Durkin, our catechists and our teachers who prepared our children for this day. We also thank those who are to be Confirmed and their families for placing a priority on their relationship with Jesus. We pray as a parish family that our Confirmandi will openly receive the Graces of the Sacrament and will be drawn ever closer to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and will be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.

Blessed Archbishop Fulton J Sheen writes of Confirmation: Confirmation is the Sacrament of Combat. Every sacrament is related to the death of Christ, but Confirmation intensifies that resemblance. Baptism gives the Christian a treasure; Confirmation urges him to fight to preserve it against the three great enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil…..The forehead is anointed with chrism in the sign of the cross. The cross, by its nature, evokes opposition. The more one crucifies his passions and rejects the false teachings of the world, the more he is slandered and attacked. Calvary united not only the friends of Our Lord; it also united His enemies. Those who were opposed to one another merged their lesser conflicts for the sake of the greater hate. Judas and the Sanhedrin, Pharisees and Publicans, religious courts and Roman overlords–though they despised one another, nevertheless they rained common blows of hammer and nails on the hands and feet of Christ……. So, in Confirmation, the Christian is marked with power and boldness on the forehead, so that neither fear nor false modesty will deter him from the public confession of Christ…… The combative character of Confirmation is further shown by the fact that its ordinary minister is the bishop, who is, as it were, a general in the military of the Church. Because Confirmation gives an increase of the Holy Spirit over Baptism, it is fittingly administered by the one who has the fullness of the priesthood. When the bishop extends his arms over those confirmed, as a successor of the Apostles, he imitates Peter and John who laid hands on new converts of Samaria, so that “they received the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:1). He also imitates Paul at Ephesus: “When Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them” (Acts 19:6). The bishop is not a hoarder of his authority; he is a dispenser of it, as was Our Blessed Lord Who told His Apostles that they were to make disciples of all nations (Matt. 18:19-20). The bishop, as the authority in the Church, incorporates the one confirmed into adult responsibilities. From now on, the one confirmed does not lead an individual Christian life: he becomes commissioned in the army. Confirmation is, therefore, the first great manifestation of the relation established between the authority of the Church and Christian personality…… The person who is confirmed always has a personal and, in some instances, a canonical mission. He has a personal mission inasmuch as, through his own personal contact, he must help bring other souls to Christ–just as Andrew brought Peter, Philip brought Nathaniel, the Samaritan woman brought her townspeople, and Philip converted the eunuch of the Ethiopian court. But the mission given by Confirmation requires a wider outlook than the personal work of witnessing and converting. It is not only individual souls, but also the milieu, the environment–the whole social order in all its political, scientific, journalistic, medical, legal, recreational, and economic structures which also has to be Christianized (These are the Sacraments by Blessed Archbishop Fulton J Sheen).

This coming Saturday will be our last Confessions before Easter. Confessions will be heard Saturday morning after morning Mass and Saturday afternoon before our Vigil Mass.

Let us continue to encourage each other to faithfully finish Lent with eyes directed to the Resurrection. May this last full week of Lent be a time of great blessing for us all!

St. Joseph, Patron of the Church and our Patron, pray for us!

Fr. Michael J Pawelko,
Pastor