Greetings,

One of our parishioners composed this prayer for the restructuring process going on right now in the archdiocese. I believe the prayer to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and I would like to ask all of us to pray it often over these next three months. There will be decisions made about our two parishes and we certainly want God to be the author of whatever is decided. I think that we can fall into feeling a little bit out of control because it is really out of our hands. But we can always petition God to help us be more docile into doing things His way. It is a letting go process, a surrendering to whatever God wants, for He knows what is best for us anyway. I would like to share this prayer with you all. It is the prayer we have prayed at Mass already and will continue to pray throughout the next couple of months…

Good and gracious God,
you created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.
Hold us, your people, in your loving hands, as we experience the restructuring
of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Holy Spirit, guide with wisdom those who are charged with the task of
making the decisions about how the parishes will be clustered or even closed.
Such a task will have lasting effects on the lives of all our people.
May it be your Will that guides the decision makers.
Lord Jesus, during uncertain times like these, we especially need your love.
Help us to accept with gracious hearts the decisions that affect us.
Help us to be kind to those who receive in this process what we wanted but did not get.
Help us to give our very best to the new parish structure,
and to work with full hearts and strong hands to make our parish
and diocese a communion of faith, hope, and love.
Blessed Mother Mary, help us to be like your Son, Jesus, as he accepted his cross,
and through it brought glory and eternal life to those
who have faith in God.
Amen

Let us keep our parishes and our parishioners as well as the whole archdiocese, especially the Archbishop whose final authority lies the final decisions to be made. Let us pray that we be docile and open to whatever is chosen and wherever that leads us. Be His Name all glory and honor!

Peace, Fr. Tom

Greetings,

I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who helped make our festival last Sunday at St. Mary’s such a wonderful success. What a beautiful day God gave us. It was a day full of fun and fellowship and I really enjoyed myself. There were sightings of Fr. Livingston and Fr. Cloutier. I think the take out for our dinners was just phenomenal in numbers. In fact, it seemed like everyone I talked to just love the pork chops and beef dinners we have at St. Mary’s. Our dinners are very popular in the area and people come from all around to eat at our festival. Sunday was kicked off with the beautiful Sacrifice of the Mass. We proclaimed the gospel and then received our Lord going out and living our faith through the generous giving of our time and energy. We shared our love for each other by building up the kingdom of God in our fellowship and fun while raising money to pay the bills.
I want to give a special thanks to Bill Horsch and Joe Swartzer who both gave many hours to the organization and implementation of the many different needs of making this day so good. I want to say thanks to everyone who helped at the games, with the food, money counting, set up and clean up, those who sold their raffle tickets, those who bought them, and especially to God who I think really enjoyed watching us have fun… Let us take a few moments this next week thanking God for the many gifts He has given to us especially in our family, friends, fellow parishioners and even our clergy. Our Lord is so good to us, let us return His goodness a hundredfold!

Peace, Fr. Tom