Dear Parishioners,

            This weekend is Pentecost weekend, and it ends the Easter Season for us.  We enter Ordinary Time until Advent, which means we have together completed another cycle of liturgical celebrations of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.  This causes me to reflect on the experience and my heart is filled with gratitude for being here in Prince of Peace.  The parish is filled with people who know how to celebrate the life of Christ, which is a great inspiration for me and it helps me build my own faith.  I know that as the priest it is my ministry to maintain a level of faith and spirituality in parish life, but for sure, priests are greatly affected by the faith and spirituality of the people around them.  There are many of you who are filled with the Holy Spirit, and only wish that you all knew each other.  Because our parish is so big, often the priests know people in the many different pockets in the parish, but the people do not know each other.  I am always surprised when two very active people introduce themselves to each other because I would have thought that they would have known each other because of their mutual love for Christ and his Church.  Hopefully, we can make a greater effort to build a great community of Catholics in our parish because it does strengthen the faith of us all.

            We are starting to find appropriate places in each of our Churches for our AED or defibrillators.  These are the machines needed to help if people are experiencing a medical emergency with the hopes of saving lives.  Once they are in, we would like to have local medical personnel host training sessions in all our churches on how to use these machines.  It would also be good to learn other life saving actions to help others in their time of need.  If you are interested, please watch for information in the bulletin.  A very special thanks goes out to the 5 people who helped to purchase the AED’s for the Churches.  Your generosity, your caring, your concern for others and the parish are all amazing.

            Finally, I would like to make one last push for completing the 2023 Census before we begin the hard work of sifting through those who are not active or present to see how we can reach out to them.  In the end, it would be wonderful if every Catholic heard from the parish at least once in these days even if they have no intentions of going to Mass.  They belong to our faith, and they should know that we care enough to connect with them and to check in on them.  More to come.   Peace — Fr. Daniel