Pastor Letters
May 31, 2026
We have a lot coming up! This Friday is our next NightFire, when the church will stay open from 8pm until 11pm. The church will be candlelit with adoration and beautiful music. This is our 10th NightFire and if you haven't been to one yet now is the time.
May 24, 2026
Have a blessed Pentecost! Today the Holy Spirit descended upon the Church, bringing life to all believers. The Holy Spirit transforms our lives, raising us up to heavenly realities and leading us to union with God. The great saints would never have been great without the graces brought to them by the Holy Spirit and the Church would never have been anything without the power of the Holy Spirit flowing through her. As Christ resurrected after His Passion, so all the spiritually dead come back to life through the Holy Spirit. We can live lives of virtue and holiness only because of the gift given us at Pentecost: the coming of God into our lives in a new way.
May 17, 2026
Soon our parish will celebrate Confirmation for the Religious Education children. Bishop Whalen will celebrate the Mass and Confirmations on Tuesday, May 26th. Please keep the children of the parish who are preparing for Confirmation in your prayers. On a related note, our Religious Education children preparing for First Communion will receive the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday, May 31st, at the 9am Mass. Please keep them in your prayers too.
May 10, 2026
This Thursday is Ascension Thursday, when we celebrate Our Lord's Ascension into heaven after His resurrection. He opens the path to eternal life with the Father for all of us. This important feast is a Holy Day of Obligation so we must all attend an Ascension Mass to celebrate. We will celebrate an Ascension Vigil Mass at 7pm on Wednesday night, 5/13, and a 12:10pm and 7pm Ascension Mass on Thursday, 5/14.
May 3, 2026
Our Thomistic Institute series continues this Friday at 7pm in McGuire Hall. This week's speaker will be Professor Karin Öberg from Harvard. Her talk is entitled: "Overcoming the Science and Religion Divide." It will be a great event so please join us!
April 26, 2026
This Friday our Spring Thomistic Institute series will begin. For 3 Fridays in a row, we'll have renowned scholars speak about topics related to the Faith. The talks are each Friday at 7pm in McGuire Hall. The first talk is on May 1st, with the next 2 on the following Fridays. This Friday Dr. Lydia Dugdale, a professor at Columbia, will give a talk entitled "Making Sense of Physician-Assisted Suicide." It will be a great talk.
April 19, 2026
Happy Divine Mercy Sunday! Today we conclude the Octave of Easter by celebrating God's love for us, which has saved us from sin and death. This salvation is real and present to all who seek it: follow Christ and see.
April 12, 2026
Happy Divine Mercy Sunday! Today we conclude the Octave of Easter by celebrating God's love for us, which has saved us from sin and death. This salvation is real and present to all who seek it: follow Christ and see.
April 5, 2026
Happy Easter! Today Christ is risen! Our salvation is won, darkness is defeated, and heaven lies open. We need have no fear of suffering or death because Christ has risen from the tomb and shown their powerlessness. Let us draw close to Christ and His victory so that He can make His victory ours. Let us walk the path Christ opened to today, journeying together toward the life of heaven.
March 29, 2026
Today we enter Holy Week and we're about to enter the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday). Now is the time when Jesus won our salvation on the cross: this is the moment Christ saves us from sin and death and opens the path to eternal life with God before us. This sacred time makes available many powerful graces that we should take advantage of. There are many special liturgies this week and all of them help us enter into the mysteries of Christ's work of salvation. Attend as many of these liturgies as you can because they are a source of much spiritual strength and growth. Below is our Holy Week schedule.
March 22, 2026
This week is our annual parish mission! Fr. Stephen Dominic Hayes will preach Monday through Wednesday of this week, at 7pm each night. The topic is A Life of Holy Wisdom. It will investigate the Christian life, using the spirituality of the Egyptian Desert Fathers and the saints to elucidate and make concrete the living of the Christian Life and the origin of its grace in Holy Baptism, our Exodus towards glory in the Holy Spirit, and our nourishment and healing by our Eucharistic Jesus, our new manna. It should be a fascinating series and a good preparation for Holy Week and Easter.
March 15, 2026
This Thursday is the culmination of our Journey with Joseph! It’s the Solemnity of St. Joseph and we’ll have a 7pm Mass when we’ll complete our consecration to St. Joseph. We’ll have incredible music provided by Higher Word and a reception in McGuire Hall afterwards.
March 8, 2026
We have a lot coming up at St. Joseph’s this Lent! Read more to find out what!
March 1, 2026
We’re now well into Lent and I hope that it’s going well for everyone. If you think your Lent needs a bit more, consider the many opportunities to go deeper at St. Joseph’s. You could attend our Friday Stations of the Cross (7pm) or go deeper with our Journey with Joseph by attending the Saturday small group discussion on St. Joseph (Saturdays at 11am in the parish hall). We also have Nightfire in a couple Fridays, so that is another option to go deeper this Lent.
February 22, 2026
I pray that everyone’s Lent is starting well! This can be a time a great spiritual growth if we cooperate with the graces God sends us. To support our spiritual growth, we have a lot going on at the parish this Season:
February 15, 2026
This Sunday begins our Journey with Joseph! Make sure to pick up the book of meditations for the next 33 days (we’ll also email the meditations and they’re available on our parish website). The friars here wrote the meditations for our parish specifically. And we did so the old-fashioned way: we didn’t use AI for any of the writing! There’s a lot of parts to the Journey with Joseph, so check out our parish webpage and emails for all the details.
February 8, 2026
It’s the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Baptism is at the root of our entire spiritual life. St. Paul puts it this way: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-4).
February 1, 2026
It’s the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Baptism is at the root of our entire spiritual life. St. Paul puts it this way: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-4).
January 25, 2026
It’s the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Baptism is at the root of our entire spiritual life. St. Paul puts it this way: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-4).