February 11, 2024
sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Fr. Boniface Endorf, OP
Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,
Our Winter Thomistic Institute series continues! This Friday Fr. Andrew Hofer will speak. He’s a specialist on the Church Fathers, the theologians of the early Church, and he was one of the best professors I had in seminary. It will be a great talk. The topic is about who the early Church believed Jesus to be. Asking who Jesus is started quite a fight—even Roman Emperors got involved! We’ll learn why the Church believes what she believes about Jesus. The talk is entitled: “Fighting over Jesus: Early Christological Debates and Why they matter today.” The talk starts at 7pm this Friday, the doors open at 6:30.
This Wednesday, 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. We’ll have Ash Wednesday masses at St. Joseph’s at 8am, 12:10pm, 5pm, and 7pm.
Mass Tidbit:
The Our Father continues “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those wo trespass against us.” Our daily bread can mean our daily sustenance. We ultimately rely upon God for everything—He created us and holds us in existence at every moment. We should go to God for even our most basic needs, and give Him thanks for what we have, materially and spiritually. However, daily bread means more—it also means the Eucharist, the Body of Christ that sustains our souls. We give thanks for Christ’s gift of Himself to us that makes our salvation possible. He has forgiven us our sins, reuniting us to God, making our spiritual transformation possible, and thus providing us the food we need for our spiritual journey to heaven.
We ask God to forgive our trespasses, our sins, so that we are not held back from union with God and the joy He calls us to. But we play a role in that journey: the Our Father tells us that we are called to forgive others’ sins too. In fact, our forgiveness is linked to our being willing to forgive others. We thus overcome sin by loving as Christ loved—loving even those who have harmed us, as Christ loved us even when we were in sin. It’s the daily bread, the graces of the Eucharist, that gives us the strength to love so boldly. As we grow in the ability to love through the Eucharist, we make our way to heaven.
God Bless,
Fr. Boniface
