Fr. Jim's Blog

The following reading appeared in the Office of Readings for today. The author is St. Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of St. Basil. He vigorously fought against Arianism and was exiled until after the death of the Emperor Valens. He writes to encourage and form leaders in their duties to be a good example to those they serve. I know I have read it before, but it really inspired me this time. This is probably partly due to a number of things the program Good Leaders/Good Shepherds  has been teaching us.  Here is the reading:  Whoever is in Christ is a new creation; the old has passed away. Now by the “new creation” Paul means the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a heart that is pure and blameless, free of all malice, wickedness or shamefulness. For when a soul has come to hate sin and has delivered itself as far as it can to the power of virtue, it undergoes a transformation by receiving the grace of the Spirit. Then it is healed, restored and made wholly new. Indeed t...

Tomorrow morning, I will be making my first official visit to the school for this new year to bless all of the classrooms for the upcoming year. I pray for all of the students, faculty, staff, and all families  to put God first in their lives and that our Catholic School will be a place to form mature disciples who know Jesus Christ personally as their Lord and Savior and who experience Baptism of the Holy Spirit to empower them to rise up to meet all of the challenges that lie ahead.

This has been a very busy summer and I am looking forward to my vacation which will begin a week from today. I will be joining my parents for a fishing trip on Vancouver Island. We won't be returning to Tofino, BC but are going to try a new fishing spot on the north side of the island.  I have couple of things today I need to tend to but will hopefully find time this afternoon to do an extensive blog. I need to spend some time in prayer and try and figure out how and what to share about a recent presentation I attended. I am going to be making a number of changes to how I pastor the parish with the hopes of applying some clarifications the Lord is giving me on what activities are necessary and which give Him glory and those that are simply distractions from the enemy. Let's just say there are many distractions. We live in very exciting times and I hope all of my brothers and sisters are taking adequate time for prayer and reflection. The Lord has direction and graces for th...

I will be leaving this afternoon for a Project Rachel Retreat and would greatly appreciate your prayers.  I haven't done a retreat for two years. It is a very intense weekend but also an incredibly powerful time to see the Lord at work undoing the damage from women and men who have suffered from the trauma of abortion.  I am so proud (not in a sinful way, course!) of our Church for having this ministry and pray it gets more support as there are so many people who are hurting and in need of the healing power of the Divine Physician. He never disappoints!

This weekend I decided to give a sermon on Pope Francis' new encyclical Laudatio Si.  It is a very well-written reflection on our relationship with God, creation, and one another. It greatly highlights the tensions and conflicts we are experiencing because of our ever-increasing secularized and relativistic world. As I read through the document I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict XVI where he stated, "Mankind wants to control everything except himself."  I found a really good introduction to the encyclical by Fr. Robert Barron that will give you some background on the what influenced the Pope to write this document.  You can read Fr. Barron's commentary as well as the document itself by clicking here.  

“There are very dear people in the life of each one of us to whom we feel particularly close, some of whom are already in God’s embrace while others still share with us the journey through life: they are our parents, relatives and teachers; they are the people to whom we have done good or from whom we have received good; they are people on whom we know we can count. Yet it is important also to have “travelling companions” on the journey of our Christian life. I am thinking of a Spiritual Director, a Confessor, of people with whom it is possible to share one’s own faith experience, but I am also thinking of the Virgin Mary and the Saints. Everyone must have some Saint with whom he or she is on familiar terms, to feel close to with prayer and intercession but also to emulate. I would therefore like to ask you to become better acquainted with the Saints, starting with those you are called after, by reading their life and their writings. You may rest assured that they will become good gu...

The following is an excerpt from a homily given by Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron  to more than 160 priests and 800 members of the faithful gathered for the Chrism Mass on  Holy Thursday, April 2, 2015. These words are powerful and this servant of God hits the nail right  on the head for one of the major spiritual diseases of our time. And for that I’d like to begin with some phrases from the sequence in Pentecost, when in the liturgy we say to the Holy Spirit, “Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness, pour your dew. Melt the frozen, warm the chill.” Being dry, being frozen, being chill — that seems to me to be a condition which is very particular to our time. Has there ever been a time like ours when a people who once heard the Gospel, living in a culture that had over time been shaped according to the principals of the Gospel, has so willingly become asleep about the Gospel, and shed the Gospel, and become indifferent to the Gospel?  Are we ...