A Note from Our Pastor,
Many thanks to all who made our Holy Week Liturgies and Easter Masses so beautiful and reverent. Our Art and Environment Team had to change the decorations in the Church multiple times from red back to violet to white then back to red, and finally to the white of the Easter Season, not to mention the multiple floral arrangements and all their other efforts to prepare the Church for the various liturgies. Julie Fay, the choir, the soloists, the instrumentalists, and the cantors in the Church, and Madison Hatten in the 2 Masses on the Patio gave us beautiful music to enable us to “pray twice!” Our two deacons (Dan and Kevin), lectors, Eucharistic Ministers, Parish Pastoral Council member Rosemarie Foley, ambassadors and other volunteers, all made the services flow smoothly and helped all who came to worship here Holy Week and Easter Sunday feel very much at home in our worship of God, especially given the health and safety protocols that we all had to follow. Many thanks also to Deacon Dan Sullivan and Noel Schaub for livestreaming our Holy Week liturgies and all the Easter Masses in the Upper Church. I’m very grateful to our custodial staff—Bill and Mike for their extra efforts in keeping the church clean and sanitized. I’m also very appreciative of my brother priests—Frs. Jay, Pat, and Tom—for their dedicated and joyful ministry here, and for their reverence and spiritual wisdom that they shared in their celebration of the Holy Week liturgies, and also kudos to Fr Jay for serving as Master of Ceremonies on Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday. Finally, I am deeply grateful to our parish staff: Beth Peterson, Helen Waring, Dale Blanchard, Julie Fay, Eileen Callahan, Kathy Monahan, and Jack Riley, as well as Deacons Dan and Kevin who were part of our Easter Planning Subcommittee and organized and set up the seating arrangements inside the church and the seating and standing arrangements outside for the 2 Masses on the Patio. Thank you as well to Jenn Caputo and the teens and others whom Jenn recruited to assist with the set-up and clean-up of the Patio area. And thanks be to God, for weather that could not have been better for our first attempt at having Masses outdoors!
We as a parish and I as your pastor are extremely blessed to have staff members and our other volunteers who are extremely talented, dedicated, and faith-filled in their particular ministries, but equally important in my opinion is the fact that they are clearly “team players” who help one another, work extremely well with one another, and keep a good sense of humor through it all.
It was a joy to have a good number of our parishioners participate in the Liturgies of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday, especially after our experience a year ago when we could not have in-person Masses during Holy Week and Easter. I pray that we all stay healthy and that we continue to gather together for Masses throughout this beautiful Easter Season. As we enter into the First Communion season and celebrate two more Confirmation liturgies next month, may our Risen Lord keep us all safe, and fill our hearts with the joy and peace that His resurrection provides us all. We’ll also have the Ordination to Priesthood of one of our parishioners: Deacon David Campo, and his Mass of Thanksgiving the next day—the Feast of Pentecost. In addition, we hope to celebrate on Pentecost weekend the full initiation and entrance into the Catholic Church of a member of our RCIA program of a year ago. So, May promises to be a month of many awesome sacramental moments for our parish, very tangible signs of the continued action of our Risen Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit in our lives!
Have a blessed Easter Season and a healthy and safe week!
Fr. Palardy
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