From Father Carlos...
Dear Friends,
A Blessed New Year of the Lord 2022!
With gratitude and great rejoicing, we have celebrated the end of a whole calendar year, thanking God for the many blessings received during 2021. Now, as we begin this new year of 2022, we entrust to the Lord the joys, hopes and even the challenges that this year will bring for us. It is Blessed Solanus Casey’s invitation that we “Thank God ahead of time,” and indeed today we already thank God for the many graces and blessings we will receive throughout this new year.
On the first day of 2022, January 1, the Church universal celebrates the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. The celebration of Mary’s divine motherhood is linked to the celebration of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because we profess that Christ is perfect God and perfect man, the necessary consequence of such profession of faith is to acknowledge and celebrate that Mary, as the Mother of Christ, is indeed the Mother of God.
Already, the first day of the year, the Church invites us to set our priorities straight. To profess that Jesus Christ is God is to say that he is the only one to whom we will listen and the only one we will follow. The Gospel, where we find the teachings of God, the Son of Mary, becomes thus the foundation of the new year we begin to live.
What at times lies underneath the lack of fervor for the practice of the faith is an actual lack of faith in the divinity of the Lord. If someone professes Christ to be the second person of the Almighty Trinity, then that person will heed his words that say “Come to me all you who labor and are burdened” because these words are coming from God himself and not from a mere human being. And if that same person professes that God is good and that God loves us, then we would heed Christ’s words with confidence for we would know that they are ultimately ordered for our good, coming from the one that loves us and perfectly wills our good.
As we begin this new year of the Lord, I invite us to consider the following: do I profess that Christ is God with my whole being? If we answer “yes” then the practice of the Faith makes sense and indeed we recognize that it is truly “our duty and our salvation.”
Another consequence of believing that Christ is God is the belief in his real presence in the Eucharist. Jesus who is God once took bread and said, “This IS my body” and then took a cup filled with wine and said, “This IS my blood.” Because he is God, we believe Christ meant what he said and accomplished what he intended. That bread that is Christ is in our churches, in the tabernacle, awaiting for us to visit him and to adore him.
This year our parishes will be blessed with a Perpetual Eucharist Adoration chapel at Saint Frances Cabrini. There, the bread that is Christ, the bread that is God will be permanently exposed for adorers to come and worship the Lord whom in his infinite mercy and love for us wished to remain in our midst in the Eucharist.
As we celebrate Mary, the Mother of God, may we also celebrate our Faith in Jesus Christ, the Father’s only begotten son, “who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirt and born of the Virgin Mary” who is also “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” Jesus Christ is Lord, and He lives and reigns world without end.
*Please keep Father Carlos in your prayers this week while he is away from the parishes.