Did You Know

What a joy it was to see so many of us present in the SRO crowd! Our Seminarian Deacon Carlos Nagore was the Deacon of the Word at the Mass and proclaimed the Gospel! The Mass was livestreamed and is now available on our website for your viewing! We look forward to our new shepherd, Bishop Misko, being with us for many years! (Bishop Misko will be at St. Andrew’s on 19 April to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation!) AND last Sunday, Bishop Misko welcomed the Catechumens from St. Andrew’s along with almost 900 Catechumens and candidates from across the Diocese for the Rite of Election at the Cathedral! At the Easter Vigil this year (4 April) 16 women and men will receive the Sacraments of Initiation in the Catholic Church (Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist) and 16 Candidates (those already Baptized in other denominations) will be received into the Church and Confirmed! This is the largest group to have come through the Order of Christian Initiation at St. Andew’s in our 68 years! Congratulations to Gerry Gabel and his outstanding OCIA team in preparing these men and women for their full initiation and participation in the life of the Church! It is being reported that world-wide there is a tremendous number of people joining or returning to the Church and that what we are seeing in terms of the increasing numbers here at St. Andrew’s is simply a local expression of a universal phenomenon! Again, it is important to remember that these new (and returning) Catholics are not simply joining an organization, but are claiming the place to which God has called them in a living organism: the Body of Christ! In 1928, the Lutheran theologian Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was martyred by the Nazis in 1945) wrote: “There is a word that, when a Catholic hears it, kindles all their feeling of love and bliss; that stirs the depths of their religious sensibility -- from dread and awe of the Last Judgment to the sweetness of God’s Presence; and that certainly awakens in them the feeling of home; the feeling that only a child has in relation to its mother, made up of gratitude, reverence, and devoted love; like the feeling that overcomes one when, after a long absence, one returns to one’s home, the home of one’s childhood. But that same word is a word that to Protestants has the sound of something infinitely commonplace, more or less indifferent and superfluous; something with which a sense of boredom is so often associated, or which, at any rate, does not lend wings to our religious feelings— And yet, our fate is sealed if we are unable to attach a new, or perhaps a very old, meaning to that word. Woe to us if that word does not become important to us again, and soon. The word to which I refer is “Church”. . .”