The Church celebrates the annual World Day for Consecrated Life
on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, February 2.
This year, it will be recognized in parishes over the weekend of February 5-6, 2022.
Please pray for all those who have made commitments in the consecrated life, and be sure to thank them on their special day. Know a young person who would make a great consecrated religious in the Church? Tell that young person about it, and what gifts you believe they will bring to that life!
Our Minister Provincial’s original Provincial Visitation with the friars of our Blessed Agnellus of Pisa Custody was cut short. Friar James headed back to England to finish up visits with the rest of our friars in London, Walsingham, Liverpool and Oxford, during his January 23-30, 2022 visit.
London is the location of St. Patrick’s Friary; the Curia House for the Order in Great Britain & Ireland, including the office of the Custos (Very Rev. Ciprian Budău, OFM Conv. – center right) and the Bursar (Fr. Rory Doyle, OFM Conv. – center left). It is also home to Fr. Mario Sant, OFM Conv. and Fr. Joseph Formosa, OFM Conv., who both serve in Hospital Ministry.
Affectionately known as “England’s Nazareth,” the Catholic National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady, at Walsingham, includes three of our friars on staff: Friar James M. McInerney, OFM Conv. serves as Guardian & Local Superior (center left), with Fr. Colin Mary Edwards, OFM Conv. (right) and Fr. John Delaney, OFM Conv. also serving as staff friars.
In Liverpool, Friar James was able to visit with: Fr. Kevin Hanley, OFM Conv. who serves as Guardian & Parish Priest at St. Anthony of Padua Parish, Fr. David Young, OFM Conv. and Fr. Vincent Kennedy, OFM Conv.
In Oxford, the Blessed Agnellus of Pisa Friary is a Formation House, home to Fr. Giles Zakowicz, OFM Conv. – the Guardian, Formation Director (center right), as well as Fr. Maximilian Mary, OFM Conv. (Prefect of Formation & MI Assistant – 2nd from left), Fr. Jarek (Jarosław) Zachariasż, OFM Conv. (not pictured), Fr. Andrew Hochstedler (Custody of the Orient) – Visiting for Studies – 2nd from right), and student friars ~ Friar John Paul Banks, OFM Conv. (left) & Friar Peter George Flynn, OFM Conv. (right)
Prayer over Friar Manny as he is installed into the Ministry of Acolyte: “God of Mercy, through Your Son, You entrusted the Bread of Life to Your people. Bless Emmanuel, who has been chosen for the ministry of Acolyte. Grant that he may be faithful in the service of Your altar and faithful in sharing the Bread of Life with his brothers and sisters. May he grow always in faith and love, and so build up Your Church. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen”
Friar Manny reads the Word of God, after being installed into the Ministry of Reader (Lector)
During the January 29, 2022 Livestreamed Saturday Evening Liturgy, presided over by Fr. Dennis Mason, OFM Conv. (pastor of our Toronto, ON pastoral ministry – The Franciscan Church at St. Bonaventure), Br. Emmanuel Wenke, OFM Conv. was installed into the Ministry of Reader (Lector) and the Ministry of Acolyte. Friar Manny is currently in study for the priesthood, at Regis College, University of Toronto – Toronto School of Theology. Installation into the Ministries of Reader and Acolyte are vital steps in his formation. (Can. 1035 §1. Before anyone is promoted to the permanent or transitional diaconate, he is required to have received the ministries of lector and acolyte and to have exercised them for a suitable period of time.) Following the opening prayer, Br. Tom Purcell, OFM Conv. (Friary Guardian) called forth a joy filled Friar Manny to receive the Ministry of Reader. He then proclaimed the Scriptures of the day (at right), followed by Fr. Peter Knaapen, OFM Conv. (parochial vicar) proclaiming the Gospel. Our student friar Fabian Adderley, OFM Conv. (Apostolic Year of Formation) led the faithful in the General Intercessions, followed by special vocation intentions led by Friar Dennis. During the Communion Rite, Br. Tom again called forward Friar Manny, who then received the Ministry of Acolyte (above) and ministered the Eucharist to God’s People.
“Friar Emmanuel, take this vessel for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Make your life worthy of the service you will perform at the Table of the Lord and of His Church.”
All are encouraged to share in Friar Manny’s happiness, as you view the Liturgy, found on the parish YouTube channel:
Also available in The Shrine of St. Anthony Gift Shop, Franciscan Soy Candles feature a 3-part wood wick system, is hand poured into a 12oz Libbey Status glass jar with a lid, in a specially designed gift box.
January 21, 2022: Our Minister Provincial ~ the Very Reverend Fr. James McCurry, OFM Conv. (left) and our Province Vocation Director ~ Bro. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv. (2nd from right) joined our friars attending and serving in Campus Ministry at The Catholic University of America, and with 100+ students of CUA, along with the over 50,000 March for Life 2022 participants who marched from the Washington Monument on the National Mall to the Supreme Court, in bitter cold temperatures, in a family-friendly spirit of hope for the future of the unborn and their mothers.
At the end of the March for Life, Friar James had a grand reunion with old friends – the 25 students and chaperones from Ville de Marie Academy in Phoenix, Arizona, which he helped to found in early 1990s; and with Most Rev. James D. Conley, D.D., S.T.L and his 250 youth and chaperones from the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Consistent with our Franciscan charism and tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, our province is promoting opportunities to more fully tap into a devotion from our Kolbean heritage, through the example of St. Maximilian M. Kolbe, OFM Conv., and the continued efforts of his Militia of the Immaculata’s (M.I.) unconditional Consecration to the Immaculate. In order to better promote M.I. among the faithful served through the ministries of our friars of Our Lady of the Angels Province, Fr. Jobe Abbass, OFM Conv., our Province MI Assistant, has completed the 34th successful and rewarding stop on our Province M.I Initiative Tour of our pastoral ministries. Friar Jobe’s revised scheduled stops on this tour will continue through February of 2022. Keep him and all those he greets in your prayers, as he continues to preach at the Masses to encourage the faithful to consecrate themselves to the Immaculate, and to enroll in the M.I.
On the weekend of January 22-23, 2022, the M.I. Initiative to promote Consecration to the Immaculate and membership in the Militia of the Immaculate made its 34th stop at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Burlington, North Carolina. Despite the continuing effects of COVID, and an infrequent snowstorm in the area, Friars Paul Lininger (pastor), Vincent Rubino (associate pastor) and Peter Tremblay (campus minister at Elon University) warmly welcomed the Initiative as brothers. At the five scheduled Masses (three in English and two in Spanish), the parishioners were very appreciative and enthusiastic to make the prayer of entrustment to the Immaculate. As a result, we added 300 new members of the M.I. and are still counting. In the photos are a number of the parishioners and new M.I. members who attended the Masses at Blessed Sacrament.
The May 3, 2019 news item on our Province Website, “The Journey of a Relic of St. Philip the Apostle” is a reference point for a new post about the history of St. Philip the Apostle Roman Catholic Community, on their parish website. Both of these posts refer to the July 2, 2018 presentation of The Relic of St. Philip to the pastor by our own Friar Alex Cymerman, OFM Conv. (at left), with the aid of our Minister Provincial, the Very Reverend Fr. James McCurry, OFM Conv.
Friar Alex’ brother, Richard is a very active member of Cheektowaga, NY parish and the reliquary housing the relic was a gift to the parish, by the Cymerman family.
Lost Innocence and Courage in a World Changed 1 Cor 1:3-9
…grace of God enriched you with all discourse and knowledge.
Christ will keep you firm to the end ….;
Lk 1: 39-56
“the infant in my womb leaped for joy.”
Magnificat….
God’s outcomes are God’s. Courage admits lost innocence that we have different thoughts, that thinking itself has changed and what is called thinking has changed. Courage stands for the sanctity of life and to call out those who have vacuumed out the recognition that everyone knows. Religiously speaking, it is still possible to see that Christ has done something for us by becoming Incarnate and dying on the Cross and His Resurrection out of love not because of sin. Courage reclaims Christ as Savior and Redeemer. John Locke reduces Him to being an example.
Truth wins because it is truth. “We have rights because we have duties.”[1] St. John Henry Newman could not be clearer. Look deeper. On the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of the Unborn, all who believe in the rights of the unborn, without exception, remember forward with calm, courage, hope and joyously, the sanctity of life. The remnant remembers the need in modernity for a “thick form” of reason, science and morality to rebuild what Christianity can be. Christianity’s innocence is gone. To many, Christianity has been neutralized, left to a remnant, too often with artifacts that satisfy aesthetic appeal. To be Christian is reduced to decoration.
The deeply charged issue of life was opened up long before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973. It rests upon us, clearly a remnant of Christianity, to carry forward the argument for the sanctity of life to be articulated with ever greater clarity because the “gift” of modernity enables us to understand life in the womb like never before. Cheerers at the gift of greater scientific recognition are met with weepers who refuse to accept what everyone knows about life and is verified by scientific truth. Opposition to belief and to reason persists. The failure is to admit what everyone knows, the unborn have a right to life. Fortunately, not only Christians believe that God is the giver of life.
The initial attractiveness of systems of thought in the formerly Christian and now secularized western world are rooted in the desire for self-affirmation. “My conscience is absolutely supreme as the norm of truth in practice.” Such a mindset tolerates God to the degree that God is like me, shares my experience, especially of suffering and passion, rejection and abandonment. Once my experience is identical with this, I too am holy, I am God, because there is no radical difference between being finite and infinite. My conscience is auto-justified. The exact opposite is the intellectual and affective humility of the contemplation of Mary, of her pondering all in her heart, her willingness to stand at the foot of the Cross. Every person in and out of the womb is incommunicable existence.
On 22 January, let’s turn to Judge Ken Starr, Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty.[2] His readable account of what the U. S. Constitution says about religion and religious liberty and how the U. S. Supreme Court interpreted it, what they got right and where the justices erred is a must for all who believe in life. I join Judge Starr in his courageous critique of President Biden:[3]
a stalwart defender of religious liberty for virtually his entire career,
dramatically changed his tune during the course of the 2020 campaign. …
Even though he is a practicing Catholic,
Biden vigorously attacked the Little Sisters of the Poor
for their conscience-based objection to providing
the venerable order’s employees with contraception services.
Judge Starr concludes that President Biden has reinvented himself and now looms as a potentially dangerous enemy of religious liberty.[4] However, not all is bleak to Judge Starr.
Notwithstanding the ever-growing menace of hostile secularism,
seemingly embraced in his latter years by the nation’s new 46th president,
with Justice Amy Coney Barret’s ascension to the High Court bench,
the future of religious liberty in America
—protected in our constitutional republic by the Supreme Court of the United States—
now seems ever more secure.
Thoughts? Trust your own thinking! I recognize, as never before in my life, that our innocence is gone. Courage is needed in the face of hostile secularism. Judge Starr analyzes the judicial effect of secularism from his own personal involvement. Without saying it, Judge Starr’s Religious Liberty in Crisis recognizes the modern condition and the need for the Christian tradition in the United States to remember prior responses. History includes the sacredness of life. History attests to carrying prior responses forward as part of protecting those rights and innate appeal to take a more active role in advancing the cause of liberty. His approach is compelling in recognition that we seem cast into a stormy sea. “Stay sober and alert” (I Pet 5:8). Judge Starr’s constitutional analysis aligns with Newman’s historical-theological analysis. Both Judge Starr and St. John Henry Newman exemplify “do well what God calls you to do in the time God gives and to leave the rest to God.” Lament lost innocence but act with courage. That is cause for jubilation!
On this Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of the Unborn, 22 January 2022, I inaugurate brief reflections historical and theological, “remembering forward.” Memory[5] recalls what needs to be recalled and puts aside for another day what is not of use. However the Christian past may have been valorized, is not the lived historical response to a God of the future as well as the past. God who we trust and count on in all of our individual and communal trials is God who surprises us. Tradition, tradio, as “handing on” fortifies, recharges, and charges us to deal with what is to come with courage and hope. It surmounts the forgetting that seems the adopted code of modernity with a forgetting sanctioned by the Holy Spirit and what I have happily discovered, “remembering forward” licensed by the Holy Spirit.
Veni Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium,
et tui amoris in eis ignem accende:
qui per diversitatem linguarum cunctarum,
gentes in unitate fidei congregasti.
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful
and enkindle in them the fire of Your love.
You, even in the diversity of languages,
have gathered them in the unity of the faith.
Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conv. Univ. of Notre Dame, Remembering Forward.
_____________________________________________
[1] J. H. Newman, “Letter to Norfolk” (1874-1875). E. Ondrako, Freedom Within the Church:Newman and Gladstone (Syracuse University: Diss. 1994.
[2] Ken Starr, Religious Liberty in Crisis (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).
[3] Starr, 177.
[4] Starr, 177-178.
[5] C. O’Regan, “Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Beauty of Forgetting” in Church Life Journal, McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame (24 August 2020).
Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conventual
Research Fellow Pontifical Faculty of St. Bonaventure, Rome
Visiting Scholar, McGrath Institute for Church Life
University of Notre Dame
January 22, 2022
“Postulancy” is the first year of initial formation in the Order of Friars Minor – Franciscan Friars Conventual. It is a year of introduction to and immersion in the Franciscan lifestyle. For the four provinces of North America, there is one Postulancy (Chicago, IL) so that all those in this stage of formation can live in community together, for the year. There are currently eight Postulants, of which two are of our Province.
Over the Christmas Break, our Postulants – Marvin Paul Fernandez and Connor J. Ouly – took the opportunity to stop and pray in the Portiuncula Friary Chapel, at our Provincial House, while on a visiting tour of several province ministries in MD, DC, NJ, NY and PA. The grandeur of the Christmas decorations had recently been put away. Bathed in the afternoon sun, this peace filled chapel is an example of one of the simplicity of Ordinary Time‘s extraordinary moments in the life of the Church and in our “living” Franciscan Charism.
For more information on Discernment,
and the stages of Formation for Franciscan Friars Conventual,
visit Vocations – Franciscan Voice or contact our
Province Vocation Director, Br. Nick Romeo, OFM Conv.
at vocations@olaprovince.org.
Continue to keep Marvin Paul Fernandez (Canadian Delegation or our Province), Connor J. Ouly (our Province), Colden Fell (Our Lady of Consolation Province), Israel Garcia Alderete (Our Lady of Consolation Province), Andre Miller (Our Lady of Consolation Province), Paul Utterback (St. Bonaventure Province), Eric Rewa (St. Bonaventure Province), and Jessy Cuevas (St. Joseph of Cupertino Province), in your prayers, as well as all of the student friars in formation. Please also pray for an increase in vocations, especially for our Province and our Order around the world.
A Friar’s Vocation Prayer
May my life of prayer and service, O Lord,
show those I serve the reality of Your Love.
Make me poor, chaste and holy
that I may be an example to all who cross my path.
May everything I do tell others I am happy serving them;
may my life be a sign to Your people,
especially to those who so carefully observe me,
of the joy that should be mine in my vocation.
Use me and my work, O Lord,
that I may be the means of bringing
dedicated vocations to my Franciscan family.
St. Julia’s parish family is blessed to have about seven young adults who have participated in the lay evangelization program of the Missionary Servants of the Word. These young adults, who are wonderfully formed and educated in holy scripture and evangelization, are truly a treasure in our community,
About three months ago, I gathered them together and advised them to support one another in their common formation and experience. I also invited them to share the fruits of their missionary evangelization formation and experience with the parish. These trained missionaries have responded generously and have taken up the challenge to reach out and reignite their commitment to an evangelizing ministry.
Before I knew it, I was being contacted by the director of the seminary where the religious members of the congregation study philosophy in Michuacan, Mexico. In dialogue with our lay missionaries, I accepted the congregation’s willingness to send two seminarians to minister at St. Julia for 15 days. Apparently this is a vital element of their formation program that keeps alive the initial call and strengthens the charism of their congregation. The generosity of our people made it all happen.
Luis and Jonathan, both second year philosophy students, arrived on Dec. 18th. With both being bilingual, the entire parish community was able to enjoy the gifts of their congregation’s spirituality and mission that they shared with us. They both had participated in the congregation’s lay missionary program, like our own young parishoners had, that led to their discernment of a priesthood vocation. In the short time they were with us, they visited many families, looked in on the sick and home-bound, brought comfort to many through the sharing of the Word, preached at Mass (or should I say: “shared a reflection”), conducted workshops for married couples, and conducted discussion and prayer sessions with our teenagers and young adults. We are now reaping the fruits of their ministry among us.
These young men were sent to us totally dependent on Divine Providence. They go to their missions with this spirit of total trust in God as demonstrated through the generosity of the people of God. At St. Julia, one family welcomed them into their home where they lived during those 15 days. Another family lent them a car for their use. Family after family invited them to their homes for breakfast, lunch and supper. Families also pitched in to supply them with the funds to pay for gas for the car and whatever needs they had. The parish also rented them a phone and gave them a financial gift at that was well deserved.
I was highly impressed by Luis and Jonathan’s maturity and genuine commitment to their vocation and ministry. Their humility and dedication were living sermons. Their work ethics is strong and exemplary and they were untiring in their ministry. The sense of peace and joy with which they went about everything was contagious.
Will I miss them? I already do. Their presence was the spark that our own missionaries needed to reignite their vocation and ministry. Now, it’s our turn to get going on this ever-ancient-ever-new thing!
The Church celebrates the annual World Day for Consecrated Life
