Dear Parishioners,
This weekend we celebrate the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time. This week- end we return to reading from Saint Mark’s Gospel for most of the rest of this Liturgical Year. We are challenged to balance God’s laws with our love of others. Sometimes, like
the Pharisees, we place rules and conditions on how we share our love and who is worthy of receiving the gifts and love we have to offer. Jesus is both faithful to the law of Moses and to the immediate needs of the people before him. He is the perfect example of a hearer— and doer — of God’s word. Today we are called to be — and do — the same.
Next weekend we will celebrate the Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. We will gather next weekend as the blind person who does not see the suffering in our world. We are the deaf person who does not hear the cries of the poor and the mute who fails to speak up against injustice. We come to Jesus for healing so we may speak out against people and systems that oppress and silence the voices of the least among us.
I hope that you have a very happy Labor Day weekend and an “official” end of summer, although with school having started several weeks ago, and the temperatures still as hot as they are, it hardly seems to be the “end” of summer! Please remember that the Mass tomorrow, Monday, Labor Day, September 3, will be at 9:00 A.M.
MonicaFest: Our annual friendly parish get together will be this coming Friday evening. There are details elsewhere in the bulletin. Please note the change in “what to bring”! I hope that we have a good turnout. Competing with our celebration will be a special Mass at the Cathedral at 7:00 P.M. to be celebrated by Archbishop Carlson in reparation for the sins of the past regarding the sexual abuse of minors. Our date was picked LONG BEFORE the Archbishop’s … so I hope that many will be here for our annual, de facto, “Fall Festival”! It is a great time (at least my first two were very enjoyable … and I’m sure that this coming Friday’s will be too!
Ecumenical and Inter-faith Work in the Archdiocese, the area, and the entire church. As I’m sure most of you know I am the chairman of the Ecumenical and Inter-faith Com- mission for the Archdiocese of Saint Louis. As such I chair the quarterly meetings, but also am obligated to represent the Archdiocese in various Ecumenical and Inter-faith events. Javier Orozco is the “official” Ecumenical Officer for the Archdiocese and he serves on the Cabinet of the Inter-faith Partnership of Saint Louis. He is assisted in the office at the Rigali Center by two very fine staff members, James Comninellis and Ramona Neumann. Together with them the Commission serves the needs of the Church in the Archdiocese. “Our” Deacon Carl Sommer is a member of the Commission and has done a number of inter-faith events representing the Archdiocese.
This past week I was asked to participate in a “retreat” for a program getting off the ground here in Saint Louis called “My Neighbor’s Keeper.” It was a retreat / seminar for a priest (me!), a number of fundamentalist Christian ministers, Jewish Rabbis, and Muslim Imams. It was held at the Toddhall Conference Center near Columbia, Illinois, just across the River. The best reference I can find on the Internet right now is an article from the Washington Post earlier this year.
Here is the URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/02/08/ how-the-national-prayer-breakfast-sparked-an-unusual-meeting-between-muslims-and- evangelicals/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a59048b37edc
In this article the author speaks about how Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims could get together to dialogue with one another. The article begins: Texas pastor Bob Roberts has traveled to Washington before for the National Prayer Breakfast, a Christian-organized networking event where evangelicals come to schmooze about topics including their shared goal of bringing people to Christ. That was Roberts’s focus in the past. This year, he’ll attend with one of his closest current collaborators: an 85-year-old Islamic scholar visiting from Abu Dhabi.
Roberts and Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah are attending the Thursday breakfast following an unusual gathering that was held during the previous three days: Four hundred faith leaders coming together to forge ties, work that has been common for many U.S. faith groups for decades but often has eluded one particular pair: Muslims and evangelicals. White evangelicals have the most anti-Muslim views of any American faith group, polls show, and the meeting — timed so Bayyah could attend the huge prayer breakfast in Northwest Washing- ton — reflects the urgency an increasing number of imams and pastors feel at a time when the world seems especially tribal and explosive.
The sight of a massive hotel ballroom of evangelical pastors and imams — as well a smattering of Jews and Catholics — brainstorming on how to build ties showed how the stable of people doing such work has grown in recent years. As they met downstairs, TVs in the up- stairs lobby of the Marriott Marquis showed news reports of proposed restrictions from the White House on Muslim immigrants.
“Evangelicals are making it much worse,” Roberts said of the negative views many Americans have of Islam. The pastor, a tall man with a Southern drawl, spoke in a busy hallway at the conference. “And pastors are worse than the people in the pews.” …..
Given the make-up of the United States and our own particular area in this part of West County I am particularly happy to have been invited to participate in this event this past week. I will give more about this next week.
However, in planning ahead, I hope that you would mark Sunday, January 13, 2019, when the Archbishop will be here for a special Week of Prayer for Christian Unity service, beginning at 7:00 P.M. The details are not yet totally worked out, but the date, time, and place are set. Our own choir will be involved with this service, the theme of which will be following the “official” Week of Prayer for Christian Unity theme for January 18-25, 2019, namely, Justice, Only Justice, You Shall Pursue (Deuteronomy 16:20). Various leaders of Christian Denominations will be here to celebrate our unity as expressed in our faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.
May the Lord watch over us and keep us safe and strong in our faith during these troubling times.
Faithfully yours,
Fr Joe Weber