Today, March 30th, our new Divine Mercy Adoration Chapel is being blessed by Bishop Nevares, before it opens to our community later in April.

The Chapel will, through your help, become a Perpetual Adoration Chapel, where members of our community unite by spending an hour to adore Jesus truly present in the Most Blessed Sacrament, during the day and throughout the night, seven days a week, so that every hour of every day, someone is there with our Lord.

It has been nearly 800 years since perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament began in Avignon, France, a practice that has now spread throughout the world. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, perpetual adoration refers to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament without interruption or with pauses for only short periods of time.

We are only about halfway through Lent, but I wish to look forward to what awaits us at the close of this season: Holy Week and Easter. Holy Week begins on April 13 with Palm Sunday and continues to Holy Saturday, when we celebrate the most important, elaborate, and beautiful Mass of the year: the Easter Vigil. Beginning with the first day of Holy Week, Palm Sunday is when we remember Christ’s entrance into the Holy City of Jerusalem, days before His crucifixion, with people greeting him with palm fronds as may be custom for a victorious king. Later in that same Mass, we recount our Lord’s Passion on the Cross during the Gospel.

Dear friends,

“If you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” (African Proverb)

This month of March is dedicated to women all over the world in recognition of their invaluable contribution to the upholding and liberation of society. The official celebration of this day began on March 8th with the celebration of International Women’s Day. That day got me still in Uganda, and I was struck by how, with great excitement and fanfare, the day was celebrated. Men took turns cooking food, washing dishes, and generally spoiling their wives and mothers to commemorate that day. Not to be outdone, politicians and religious leaders made great but generally hollow speeches about women's emancipation at rallies.

During this season of Lent, we are asking everyone to depart the church after our Masses in silence, to better contemplate the mystery of the Mass and understand the sacredness of the action we just partook in.

Dear friends,

In the midst of this rich season of remembrance, repentance, and preparation it is providential that we also anticipate the opening of our perpetual adoration chapel. Lent offers us a time to slow down and spend time with the Lord in the desert, and nothing facilitates this better than time spent before the blessed sacrament.

“The main current of Lent must flow through the interior man, through hearts and consciences. The essential effort of repentance consists in this. In this effort, the human determination to be converted to God is invested with the predisposing grace of conversion and, at the same time, of forgiveness and of spiritual liberation… Penance is not just an effort, a weight, but it is also a joy. Sometimes, it is a great joy of the human spirit, a delight that other sources cannot bring forth.

Dear friends,

Whether you grew up with the practices of faith or came into the Church later in life, it can be easy to take things for granted or overlook the deeper meanings of the Church’s practices and devotions. This applies to Lent, a season of repentance, penance, and preparation. We may be familiar with the annual 40 days of fasting but not question or understand the core practices of Lent. Considering this, I would like to share a few interesting facts and insights about Lent that may be helpful as we partake in this purpled time of penance.

In just a few days, we will enter into the Liturgical Season of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent is a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. It calls us to reflect on the blessings God has given us and how we should journey to be more united with Him. Below are two perspectives on how to encounter God during Lent: one from Pope Francis and another from Pope Benedict XVI.

Dear friends,

There is a strange phenomenon that occurs at the beginning of Lent every year. Seemingly out of nowhere occurs a sudden spike of mass attendance and a fervent display of devotion as many Catholics and, in some cases, non-Catholics attend the Ash Wednesday masses and word services. It is strange since the celebration of Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of our season of repentance and serves as a reminder of our sinfulness and our absolute need for the love and mercy of God.

Dear friends,

I do not like Garfield… the cat. I do not really like cats in general, but on a personal level, I hold disdain for the lazy, lasagna-loving feline. I grew up reading comic strips in the Sunday paper and was always disappointed when I read Garfield. In many ways, humor is subjective, but I never found Garfield amusing. Over time, I grew to resent Garfield.

This will be a brief overview of the roles of the various people you may see ministering at the altar at OLMC.

Starting with the one in the middle seat whom everyone should recognize is the priest. The priest, during the celebration of the Mass, wears a chasuble, which matches the liturgical color of the Mass and often contains a single vertical stripe down the middle, sometimes splitting into three branches at the top of the chest. During the Mass, the priest is responsible for offering the Sacrifice and confecting the Eucharist. Only a priest (bishops are also priests) is capable of doing this, and the other ministers assist him in properly celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Every Sunday after the homily at Mass, along with Catholics all over the world, we recite the Profession of Faith, known as the Nicene Creed. During this Jubilee Year 2025, we celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which is the basis of the Creed we still use today. Just imagine 17 centuries during which, using these same words, billions of Christians have expressed their belief in God as the One who loves, the One who is beloved, and the One who is the Love between them. The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in the city of Nicaea, now Iznik, in the country of Türkiye (Turkey). Around 220 bishops attended, mostly from the Eastern churches.

Dear friends,

One of the most misunderstood sacraments in the Catholic Church is the anointing of the sick. In the past the sacrament was known as extreme unction, or “the last anointing.” The Church changed the name from extreme unction to anointing of the sick in the 1970s to better represent the purpose of the sacrament. This is because the anointing of the sick, as a sacrament, makes visible the healing mercy of God. In this the healing ministry of our Lord experienced throughout the gospels continues through Christ’s Bride, the Church.

Why do we use candles at the altar? One basic explanation is an appeal to fittingness. Imagine a fancy dinner, a wedding feast. It’s natural to solemnize the occasion with candles on the tables. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest of nuptial feasts, so it makes sense we burn candles.

There’s also a prosaic explanation. The priest needs to see the text in the missal. In the days before electric light, stone church buildings without large, clear windows to admit natural light remained dim even on the brightest days. There’s also a more subtle explanation for the candles, which is that they are symbolic of Christ and His sacrificial nature.

Dear friends,

In the Catholic Church, we recognize two sources of authority: the written, inspired word of God (Sacred Scripture) and the living tradition of Christ's Bride, the Church. In this, there are two "fonts' that lead the faithful and protect the truth from being usurped by error. However, it isn't so clean-cut since tradition and scripture are intertwined. Going back to the Abrahamic tribe, the Word of God was passed on orally. In this sense, Scripture has its roots in the oral tradition of those who encountered the Lord and were inspired by God to write it down.

Each year on February 2nd is the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple, also known as Candlemas. The shortest and darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is the winter solstice, usually around December 21. From that day on, the daylight grows until matching the darkness and night at the spring equinox, roughly around March 21. The midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox revolves around—you guessed it—February 2.

Even before Christ’s coming and long after his ascension, nature knew of him—indeed, the sun, moon, stars, and earth announce his mystery in concert, as it were. Today’s liturgical calendar thus incorporates not only the historical facts of Christ’s life—such as his incarnation in the womb of Mary, his birth in Bethlehem, his presentation in the Temple, and his Paschal Mystery—but also elements of God’s own creation.

Dear friends,

This past Tuesday, we celebrated the memorial of Saint Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential and well-known doctors of the Church. A medieval scholar and Dominican priest, Aquinas is known for many titles, such as the Angelic Doctor, the Dumb Ox, and the Universal Doctor. He is most well known for his compendium of theological teachings known as the Summa Theologica, which can be translated from Latin as the Summary of all Theology. This, along with Aquinas’ other works and prayers, make up a treasure trove of writings that have served as building blocks in defining and understanding Church Dogma, the core teachings of the Catholic faith.