February 4, 2024

fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

by Fr. Boniface Endorf, OP

Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,

This Friday our Winter Thomistic Institute series begins! We’ll have three speakers three Fridays in a row. This Friday will be Professor Brad Gregory, an historian at Notre Dame. He wrote an influential book on the Reformation and he’ll share his insights with us. It’s entitled “The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Led to a Secular Modernity.” We’re excited to have such an important thinker here, and so we’re also hosting a Saturday morning seminar with him. The talk will be at this Friday evening at 7pm in McGuire Hall and the seminar will be Saturday morning at 9:30am, also in McGuire Hall.

Lent is coming! Next week, on February 14th, is Ash Wednesday. Now’s the time to start praying about how to live out this year’s Lenten Season—how to grow through penance, fasting, and almsgiving. There is a lot of grace during Lent, so prepare now to reap all the graces of the Lenten Season.

Mass Tidbit:

The Our Father continues “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Here we will the coming of the Kingdom of God—the reign of God’s beneficent will in all creation and our union with God. The Kingdom of God brings to fulfillment all creation, as everything becomes the perfected fulness of itself and thus reflects God’s Goodness, Truth, and Beauty in accordance with its own nature. The more we become who we truly are, who we were created to be in God’s creation, the more we reflect God’s goodness, as a still lake perfectly reflects the moon above. This perfection of creation is God’s will, which we will to be done in the Our Father, that the earth may reflect the glory of heaven. We desire the coming of God’s kingdom because it is salvation—that which our hearts long for. Our hearts long for a world beyond the pain of suffering, sin, evil, and death, a world fully resonant with God’s transcendent Goodness and Beauty. 

God Bless,
Fr. Boniface