This weekend is commitment weekend for the Cardinal’s Appeal. If you haven’t given already please consider making a gift to support the Archdiocese of New York. Even if you can only give small gift, every bit of participation helps. You can give at https://cardinalsappeal.org and make sure to put St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village as your parish.

I pray that Lent is going well for everyone and that you’re starting to experience the graces of this season. By this point our penances start to feel less fun and new and the real work of striving to follow God more closely begins. Hang in there: God truly is at work in this season. 

We’re now starting our Lenten preparation for the glories of Easter! Make sure to use the graces of this Lenten season to grow closer to Christ and to seek out the holiness He calls us to. With that holiness comes the joy we all long for. Our Lenten penances are especially useful in opening us to hear Christ more deeply in this spiritual season and to follow His lead.

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. It’s a day of fasting and abstinence. The point of these penances is to open our souls to God so that we can hear His voice in our lives. It’s a form of repentance, meaning sorrow for our sin and turning from sin back towards God. Penance and repentance are thus hopeful acts: that we can be united with God and turning towards His mercy and grace.

Good news! This year our annual St. Joseph Parish Dinner returns! It will mark the official opening of McGuire Hall, our new parish hall. We’ll bless the hall just before dinner and we’ll show before and after photos of the project. We’ll also continue the trivia contest during dinner. Monte’s Trattoria is catering the event again, and the operators of Monte’s are parishioners, so the food will be great! Tickets will be sold at our Sunday Masses, starting next week, until the dinner or until we run out. So mark March 19th in your calendar, buy a ticket, come to the 5:30pm Saturday Mass, and come to the dinner afterwards. I look forward to seeing everyone there!

This Monday is St. Valentine’s Day and many people ask who he was. We don’t know a lot about the historical St. Valentine. We know that he was a priest or bishop and was martyred on February 14th, 269 AD, during a persecution of Christians by the Emperor Claudius. There are many legends concerning St. Valentine, but they are attested to only centuries after he lived.

We’ve been starting a lot of new ministries at St. Joseph’s in the past couple months—that’s why our Sunday announcements have gotten so long! You can always check our parish website (www.stjosephgv.nyc) for information about all the ministries to see which one you’d like to join. They are more in the works so make sure to listen to those announcements: you may find the one you’ve been looking for. Also, if you’re interested in volunteering to help with any of the ministries just let us know, we’d be happy for the help.

It seems that we’re on the downslope of the newest omicron variant and my prayer is that things will start to return to normal soon. I’m hoping that people who have been reluctant to return to Mass in person will start to pray about when the best time to return to Mass. In order to help parishioners concerned about returning to Mass feel comfortable returning, this weekend we’re introducing a special communion line where the person giving communion will more frequently sanitize his hands (the other people distributing communion also sanitize their hands before giving communion), where there will be communion in the hand only, and where every precaution will be taken to ensure maximal safety. This communion station will be by the St. Joseph statue.

The 2022 Cardinal’s Appeal is beginning and this year our parish goal is $73,500. It funds the charitable works of the Archdiocese, supports financially fragile parishes, supports the training of Diocesan priests and the retirement of Diocesan priests (but not the training or retirement of Dominican friars), funds various offices, such as the Young Adult Outreach office, and the many other activities of the Archdiocese of New York.

We’re now back in Ordinary Time. For me this time is always the most dreary—we’re fully in the grip of winter but without the cheer of Christmas decorations and celebrations. We await the coming of Spring which seems so far off. However, in what afterwards will feel but a short time we’ll be in Lent and then Easter with Spring just before us. 

I hope that everyone had a wonderful and grace-filled Christmas Season! Today, the Baptism of Our Lord, is the end of the Christmas Season. Yes, that means you can now get rid of any dried-out trees. Today we celebrate Christ’s baptism of repentance by John the Baptist in the Jordan river, when Christ joined Himself to us even in penance and from which His public ministry would begin. 

While most of us know that there are 12 days of Christmas from having been made to sing about them, living in a Protestant country as we do, it is easy to be confused about when those days are. Saturday marks the 8th day of Christmas and therefore the end of the Octave of Christmas.