Happy Monday Parish Family!
Today is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Throughout the day, I challenge you to pray to her, thanking her for her life altering "yes". May we all accept the challenges given to us with the same zeal and love for God as Mary.
We hope everyone has been able to peruse the displays that our ministries have put up for our Harvesting Helper event this month. There are many ways to share your gifts and talents with your parish family. Don't bury them!
This coming weekend, we will be having a second collection for our Saint Vincent de Paul Conference. Especially in today's economy, more people than ever are having a hard time making ends meet, making it difficult for families in our own community. Please consider giving whatever you can to help others in a difficult situation.
We would like thank Tony Befi for his over twenty years of service as Finance Council Chair. His leadership and dedication to the parish family is greatly appreciated and he will be missed. We wish him the best in his retirement from this position! In case you missed the Annual Financial Report this weekend at Mass, you can find it on the Finance Council page of our website inked below.
For our Saint of the Week Series, I'd like to introduce you to Blessed Leonella Sgorbati (1940-2006). Born Rosa Maria Sgorbati in a small northern town in Italy she was the youngest of three children. As a young girl, she desired to be a missionary. In 1960 at the age of twenty, she joined the Consolata Missionary Sisters and took the name Sister Leonella.
Led by her love and compassion for all God's people, she went into nursing where she spent a large portion of her life caring for the sick, founding hospitals and training nurses. In 2001, she went to Somalia and established a teaching hospital in Mogadishu. It was the only hospital in the nation that served all people, regardless of their tribal or religious affiliation. There she taught the Somalian people to care for others, giving them an opportunity to escape the clutches of the terrorists by giving them a way to support themselves.
Religious extremism was on the rise in Somalia, and even though she knew the risks, Sr. Leonella would not leave the people she had come to know and love. On September 17, 2006, on her way to meet her fellow nuns for lunch after a shift at the hospital, Sr. Leonella and her driver were shot. She was rushed to the emergency room and her last known words before she passed was, "I forgive. I forgive. I forgive."
Often we have needed to forgive someone, and perhaps even more often we have needed that forgiveness. I pray that when it's our turn to do the forgiving, no matter the transgression, we can have the humility of God's love and the confident peace of Blessed Sr. Leonella to freely give our mercy to all those who need it.