Last month, I took some time for my annual retreat. While many times I like to do group retreats with other priests, for this particular retreat, I packed up my car & headed down to southern Ohio & a cabin in the woods in Hocking Hills for a solo retreat.

As we continue along our Advent journey, I’d like to begin a new tradition on the 3rd Sunday of Advent (next weekend), an annual Bambinelli Blessing.The Bambinelli Blessing isn’t a tradition that I came up with, but rather a tradition at the Vatican that began with Pope St. John Paul II & has continued through Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

As we enter into the season of Advent & begin a new Church year we are invited & encouraged to pay attention for the new ways that God comes among us. As we draw closer to our celebration of Christmas when we celebrate the historical coming of Jesus into our world, we start the Advent season by focusing on Jesus’ coming at the end of time.

In one of my columns last month, I talked about some of  the insights that I had gleaned at our Priests’ Convocation that we had at the beginning of the month.  Over time I hope to share with you some of those insights with you.  This week I want to share some insights that I gained about splitting my time each week between both parish offices.

With the overwhelming generosity from this parish, we have always been able to create so much joy over the holiday season. So please check out our Giving Tree this year. As of now we have 26 families with 31 children to provide for. Simply take a card from the tree, enjoy a day of shopping, and return the gift with the card from the tree...

In just a few weeks we will begin the season of Advent, entering into a new liturgical year. The season of Advent invites us to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus into our lives. One of the ways that we can do that, one of the ways that we can prepare ourselves to recognize the ways that Christ comes among us is by taking time in silence & prayer.

Hi there, everyone! It’s “the boss,” Angel, here again. My dad asked me to write a column again as this week on Monday (Halloween) marks 3 years since I hopped up on my dad’s lap at the rescue agency & told him to pick me. And boy am I glad he did. I am so, so happy to be here with all of you! I hope you are doing well! Here we are, right at the cusp of November. I know that my dad loves November because his birthday is in it, but I dread those months where my bathroom gets covered in snow!

The beginning of October found me gathering with 200+ brother Priests of the Diocese out in Huron at Sawmill Creek Resort for our biannual Priests’ Convocation. I remember when I was in the seminary that the week of the Priests’ Convocation was somewhat a week of vacation with all of our Priest professors being away.

One of the great forms of prayer in our Church is intercessory prayer. So many of us have people & causes that we pray for on a regular, sometimes even daily basis. We pray for people who are sick, people who have died, we pray for peace, we pray for the unemployed, just to name a few. There are many ways and forms that we could ask our Lord’s intercession, one of those ways that we are very familiar with is through the offering of Masses.

As we enter into the month of October, I wanted to look at some upcoming events you might be interested in marking on your calendar.

Hi everyone, it’s Angel again! As we come to the close of this month I asked my dad if I could write to you about something serious. This month of September is National Suicide Prevention Month. I did some reading and I found out that suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States, claiming, in 2020, the lives of roughly 45,000 people. Those are some high numbers!

Over the next few weeks we will be rolling out a new opportunity for you to be able to do everything from share your thoughts & suggestions, to getting information about various ministries & ways to be involved around the parish, (for when someone new visits us) to begin the process of joining our parish family. These boxes will be found, starting with the first weekend of October, October 1st & 2nd, at the doors of the Church.

This weekend, I’d like to extend an invitation to each and every member of our parish family. That invitation is this, to consider how we might be able to help us continue the mission of the Kingdom of God here at St. Vincent de Paul.

St. Theresa of Calcutta once said, “There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.”

Hi, everyone! It’s Angel again. My dad asked me to thank you for reading our bulletin series on prayer. He says that he wants to thank you & that he hopes & prays that you’ve gotten something out of it that has helped you on your spiritual journey. He also wants to thank you because our last form of the 5 forms of Catholic prayer is prayers of thanksgiving.

When we engage in prayers of praise we are praising God for who & what He is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph #2639 says that praise, "lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in glory.”

Prayers of petition are very similar to the prayers of intercession that we looked at last week, with one difference, their focus. While in prayers of intercession we are interceding for the needs of others, when we pray prayers of petition, we are bringing, not the needs of others, but our own needs before God. We intercede for others, we petition for ourselves, I guess that you could say. 

This weekend, we continue our look at the different forms of prayer by looking at prayers of intercession. My guess that this is one of the most familiar prayers that many of us pray. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that, “Intercession is a prayer of petition which leads us to pray as Jesus did,” (2634). Praying for the living and the dead is also a spiritual work of mercy. We offer prayers of intercession every day and every week at Mass.

This week I wanted to start with adoration, simply because it comes first in alphabetical order. In prayers of adoration, we adore the greatness of God and our dependence upon Him for everything. Prayers of adoration also remind us of our own hu- mility. When we take time to focus on how great our God is and all that He is and all that He’s done for us we come to realize just how great our need for God is..

HI everyone, it’s Angel again! My dad says that this weekend’s gospel talks about something called prayer. I wonder if prayer is like when I’m begging dad for treats? Maybe, maybe not? Dad says that we should all be engaging in on a daily basis as a part of our faith journey, prayer. He says that prayer isn’t just a part of our relationship with God, prayer IS our relationship with God. But, why do we pray? What is the point of prayer? I asked my dad to explain it all to me, here’s what he told me.