As pastor, I would like to take this moment to offer my sincere best wishes and prayers to all our parishioners here at Saint Catherine of Siena for a very blessed and holy New Year--may 2018 be a year filled with all the Good News which God offers to each and everyone one of us in His love.

We end 2017 with the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph--and a narrative from Luke which calls us to “read between the lines of the gospels which recently told us of the birth of Jesus and today we are now given an unexpected Christmas gift in this gospel” according to Father Raymond Brown. We are told to look ahead, as I am sure many of us will to 2018 with hopes, expectations and dreams for the new year.

As a parish we have many things to look forward to in 2018. It is my hope that we can continue to grow as a parish and encourage even more of our members to volunteer, becoming the lifeblood of our ministries, outreach, liturgies and music programs. I hope that we not only increase in numbers but also increase in our holiness--learning and understanding more about the Truths of Christ, our Church and the faith which we all profess. And I hope we can find new ways to bring our faith to life by making it more applicable in life for our children, teenagers
and especially our young adults. This is perhaps our biggest--and most important--challenge. And it is not just a challenge for the Church-at-large but quite honestly it is a challenge for our families and our society and our culture as we now know it.

For the youth of our community, those who are under the ages of 25 or30, this challenge is foundational: the world in which we live today is not only constantly changing but does so at warp speed. Traditional values and religious mores--the glue of family life--might be replaced
with ease, sources of information are often distorted when opinions become the new “facts,” whether they are or not. The currents which we may hold dearly to--family life and a culture which breeds generosity, respect and charity--might no longer be present in which the young can easily be formed and supported.

But there are a lot of reasons to have great hope for 2018, and that’s why our role is important. Thanks to the people of this parish our youth and young adults see abundant signs of charity and love of neighbor. We see it in many Christian opportunities of service this parish offers:
from ministerial projects of feeding the hungry, Pantry Partners, St. Elizabeth House; from the support you give to the Knights of Malta Mobile House of Care and our Neighbors In Need fund, to the outreach of the Prayer Shawl Ministry’s concern for the sick and grieving of this parish, to the amazing people who readily accepted the new program to support the residents of Chelsea House nursing home in Hartford and so much more.

We also see charity and love in the teens in our Youth Ministry, who just a few weeks ago amazed me when Judy Pluta offered a night of compassion and showed photos of people with struggles, Mrs. Pluta asked our teens to look with eyes of compassion and see what was going on in their lives. Rather than judging them on appearances and externals, they looked more deeply at them and saw the person--certainly much more than I saw --and so they responded with compassion.

And so we can look forward with great hope because of a lived-faith: a hope that is born of faith--a trust in God’s goodness, and a hope that is born out of the practice of faith by the families of these youths. For as St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us, the common denominator of
a Virtue or a vice is habitus (originally an Aristotelian concept redefined in the moral sense by Aquinas and to be understood as “second nature” or some moral aspect which is “well-practiced”). That is accomplished in the family formed by faith. As we end 2017 celebrating the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, who are to be our models of hope for God’s unexpected
Christmas gifts in our lives, I guess we all can look forward to 2018 confidently with the phrase that “practice makes perfect” and indeed it does--and in an eternal way at that! Faith: Believe It. Live It. Share It.