Sacred Heart Parish
MASS INTENTIONS FOR THE WEEK
Saturday, November 14
4:00 PM Deceased Members of Crozier Council, Knights of Columbus
Sunday, November 15
9:00 AM Kathleen Johnson
10:30 AM Irene R. (Henley) Delrossi
11:45 AM Parishioners of Sacred Heart
Sunday, November 22
9:00 AM Parishioners of Sacred Heart
10:30 AM Intentions of Dorothy Possell, Lucy Iacino, and Rose Michalek
11:45 AM Edward Boisseau, Henry and Isabelle Boisseau
CELEBRANTS FOR NEXT WEEKEND’S MASSES
Saturday, November 21
4:00 PM Fr. Collins
Sunday, November 22
9:00 AM Fr. Imbelli
10:30 AM Fr. Connelly
11:45 AM Fr. Connelly
CONFESSIONS
Saturday, November 21 – 2:00 to 3:30 PM – Fr. Connelly
READINGS FOR FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING
First Reading: Daniel 7:13-14
Second Reading: Revelation 1:5-8
Gospel Reading: John 18:33b-37
HOLLY HARVEST FAIR
5 Days to Go – Are you ready?
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If you have any donations for the Raffle or Silent Auction, please let us know by November 16.
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We are still accepting donations for Grandma’s Attic. They can be brought directly to the gym on Friday, November 20, if more convenient.
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Have you selected your recipes for the Bake Table? (Please label – name of item and whether nuts, chocolate, etc. included.) Pies – food without nuts or chocolate – cookies, cupcakes, cakes – breads, fudge and jellies are popular.
We will be transferring items from the school to the gym on Thursday, November 19 at 2 p.m. We will really need help on Friday, November 20, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. setting up tables and decorating. All help will be greatly appreciated.
If you can help during the Fair on Saturday and/or Sunday, please call us. We hope to see you all Nov. 21 and 22 – bring a friend and enjoy shopping and meeting friends at the Fair.
Barbara Hatem Gloria Rausa-Thompson
617-969-2567, 617-969-2054
ARE YOU HAVING PROBLEMS TAKING LEAVE OF YOUR LEAVES?
If you are elderly and/or unable to rake the many beautiful maple leaves in your yard, I have two post-graduate students to do it. Just call the rectory and like taking the bus – you can leave the leaves to us!
Father Connelly
ADVENT SEASON
A new Church year begins on November 28/29, the FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT. Advent is a period of devout and joyful expectation as we prepare for Christmas which celebrates Christ’s first coming, and we await Christ’s second coming at the end of time. We enter Cycle C in our Scripture readings featuring the Gospel of Luke. For Luke, the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus fulfill the longing of generations.
Here at Sacred Heart Parish, we offer our Advent Giving Program as an opportunity to respond to the needs of our neighbors – near and far.
Gift card selections for St. Ambrose Family Inn in Boston, Julie’s Family Learning Program, Dorchester, New England Home for the Deaf in Danvers, Walden School at the Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham
Giving Tree located in the gathering space accepts donations to help support youth activities for deaf and hearing in the parish
Food Collection for the Missionaries of Charity in Dorchester for distribution to needy individuals and families. This is coordinated through the religious education program.
We encourage all parishioners to support at least one of these outreach opportunities.
2009 CHRISTMAS GIFT DRIVE
Once again we will be conducting our annual Christmas Gift Drive. As we have in the past several years, we are working with St. Ambrose Family Inn, which provides shelter and support to homeless families and Julie’s Family Learning, an educational program serving low income young women and their children. We are also supporting the needs of the New England Home for the Deaf and the Walden School at the Learning Center for the Deaf. Cards listing the specific needs will be available at the Masses beginning the weekend of November 21/22.
Gifts should not be wrapped and should be dropped off with their cards at the Parish Advent celebration on Sunday December 13th. If you can help with check in or transfer of gifts to the Convent chapel on the day of the event, Sunday December 13, please contact me.
Beverly Spencer 617-965-6365; bevfrog@aol.com
FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York
Archbishop Dolan posted this reflection on his blog at www.archny.org October 29 after the New York Times declined to publish a slightly shorter version as an op-ed piece.
October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!
Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism.
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”
If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:
On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”
Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.
On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.
Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.
Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.
True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.
(To be continued)
SIGNINGS
Good People,
The future is not something that is hidden in Christ's peace. He does not lie. He is the only one who tells us the truth about what he is selling. We see many ads for things in our world. Things are sold to us, promising different kinds of health, satisfaction, pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, peace, etc. – all things that Jesus promises us. Each thing has a price. We are always told we are getting some kind of deal and that the cost is nothing compared to the benefit. Jesus tells us of a cost too. It is everything we have and are. His product costs us everything - our love, and our life. Ads for things in this world do not emphasize the limits of their products. A car, for example, isn't advertised with the details of which parts will break first even though built-in obsolescence is a reality. Jesus tells us however the opposite. He does a kind of anti sell. The good of heaven he comes to share with us is something that, while it will never grow old, dim, and tired, will only come through suffering, trial, and death. In other words, He not only tells us the bad side of His product, He tells us the bad will come first and be severe. In fact it will be utterly awful. When we buy a car it is shiny; when we need a new one it is old and busted. When we buy into Christ's heaven it starts out with negatives that increase and then comes the good part and it is really good.
The world is not getting better. We are not verging on a utopia. Hope for a perfect world is like hope for lasting perfect health. This does not happen. It is a false hope. The only real hope is the hope Jesus gives us, heaven.
In the world which is dying, our hope increases. As the world goes down, our hope goes up. As our bodies get old and go down, our souls go up.
We know the future; it is heaven. We know that like our bodies, like our universe, our world will decay and die. This is the sign that the true good of heaven is dawning and that is the only real best.
In Christ,
Fr. St. Martin
COLLECTION FOR RETIRED RELIGIOUS
Over 3,000 Religious Sisters rely on your generosity for their retirement. Next week’s special collection provides financial support to 52 religious communities whose members have served the Archdiocese of Boston. Please give generously in recognition of the important role religious sisters have had in developing the ministries of education, health care and social service in the Archdiocese of Boston. Your contributions make a difference. For more information, please visit www.retiredreligious.org.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION NEWS
Your Confirmation I and II students will be receiving a packet this week to explain the service expectations for Confirmation preparation. Confirmation II students will receive a calendar to show parents the agenda for the upcoming semester. Please ask them for this packet. Our regular Confirmation II curriculum will be replaced with a speaker series beginning in January 2010, to cover topics primary to Confirmation Preparation. We will announce the topics, speakers and the dates to the parents of our Confirmation students as well as our Parish Community. We invite all parents and parishioners to attend these Confirmation classes on Tuesday evenings as well, to learn along with our students about the beautiful teachings of our Catholic faith. Details will be posted in the bulletin in advance.
All Confirmation II students should make up any classes missed this term. Make up’s will be held prior to the next CCD class at 6:30-7 pm in the lower church. Please contact the Religious Education Office to report that your son/daughter will be attending the make up session.
We are seeking aides in the classroom during the Sunday and Tuesday programs. Due to large class size, additional help is needed to keep order and provide effective instruction. Please contact the Religious Education Office if you would like to offer your services.
Michelle Solomon, Director of Religious Education
OFFERTORY INCOME
Weekend of November 7/8 $6,083
CALENDAR NOTES
EXTENDED COFFEE HOUR:
Sunday, November 15 – 10 AM to 1 PM – Parish Center
WOMEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP:
Sunday, November 15 – 10:30 AM – Convent (DR)
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION – GRADES 1-5:
Sunday, November 15 – 10:30 to 11:45 AM – Lower Church
BOY SCOUTS:
Monday, November 16 – 7:30 PM – Parish Center
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION – Tuesday, November 17
GRADES 1-5: – 4:00 to 5:15 PM – Lower Church
GRADES 6-10: – 7:00 to 8:30 PM – Lower Church
GUILD OF ST FRANCIS “HOLLY HARVEST W/S”:
Tuesday, November 17 – 7:00 PM – Guild Room
LITURGY COMMITTEE MEETING:
Tuesday, November 17 – 7:30 PM – Convent (DR)
COFFEE HOUR:
Friday, November 20 – Follows 9 AM Mass – Parish Center
LITURGY, ADORATION AND THE ROSARY:
Saturday, Nov. 21 – 9 AM to 12:30 PM – Lower Church