January 24th, 2021

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, We find ourselves liturgically back in ‘Ordinary Time’.  On one hand, you might look at the news and our community and ask, “What’s ordinary about any of this?”  But for Catholics, the word ‘Ordinary’ comes from the Latin ordinal, which means ‘to order’… or more practically, to order all things towards Christ.  And that is something our community and nation needs, always. Inauguration Earlier this week, we witnessed only the second time that a Catholic has been inaugurated as the President of the United States.  When JFK was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, it felt for Catholics like a ‘coming of age’ in our nation.  For much of our country’s history prior, Catholics had often been viewed with suspicion at best and outright persecution at worst.  (Fun fact: many of the old churches in Philadelphia only have windows very high up… this was so as to make it difficult for members of the ‘Know-Nothing’ party to break them with stones and bricks.).  With JFK as president, we felt like we finally had acceptance at the highest political [...]