Love of the Living God

If you like someone as a friend, you enjoy spending quality time with them. If you should become infatuated, you will usually begin to think more and more of the person and long for those moments when you can be together. And finally, if you fall in love and discover your heart’s desire, you can really only be happy and know peace when you live in union with the beloved. The experience of God is something like that and even very much more. God is love itself, and our Christian faith makes no sense without the experience of knowing God’s love and being in love with God. Our faith, first and last, must be grounded in the incomparable love of the living God. Each one of us was created with an infinite capacity that God has designed and endless hunger that God alone can satisfy. Our moral law and Gospel values, the truth of our doctrine, our churches and schools, our hospitals, our missions, our structures of community, our commitment to service, our defense of life, our option for the poor lose their meaning without the continuing experience of knowing the love of the Father, in Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the essential reality that Christian prayer embodies and affirms. 

Red Mass 2013 - 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

For Homily from the Mass click here: RED MASS HOMILY

St.Francis of Assisi

St. Francis of Assisi, he is rightly famous for his profound love of evangelical poverty. But, in his own day he is almost infamous for his fierce insistence that poverty stopped at the doors of the Church. Folks often miss the sharp polemic of his witness against the heresies of his era: the anti-sacramental Waldensians, the anti-material Albigensians. Along with his enthusiastic preaching of the Kingdom, his sheer delight in the natural world, and his direct service to lepers and to the poorest of the poor, Francis continued to collect stones and rebuild churches and chapels, almost to the very last year of his life. He certainly scandalized some folks, by spending a share of the money he and his friars had begged, in order to purchase precious vessels, elaborate linens, and expensive sacred art in order to glorified and beautify the house of God. For Francis, and so many of the Catholic saints that came before and after him, what is spiritual and interior needed to be celebrated in this world by what is material and external. Consecrated sacred space signifies the beauty and glory of a new heaven and a new earth in world that is yet to come.

Mass for St. Vincent DePaul Society in Peoria Diocese

For the Homily click on this link: HOMILY ST. VINCENT DEPAUL

Pope John Paul II RELIC to visit Peoria, IL

St. Hubert Statue for Hunters

The Nazareth House in Henry, Illinois has a new statue on the property.  The bronze statue sculpted by A.T. Merhaut Company, stands 5 foot in height and depicts St. Hubert (San Humberto), a deer, Laborador retriever, and ducks.  All are encouraged to come visit and pray near this new statue.

History: The feast day of St. Hubert is November 3rd.  Hubert was a married court­ier serving Pepin of Heristal, France. He reportedly had a vision of a crucifix between the horns of a stag while hunting. Widowed, he entered Stavelot Monastery, Belgium, and was ordained by St. Lambert at Maastricht. He succeeded St. Lambert about 705 as bishop.  He was noted for his miracles and for converting hundreds. Hubert died at Tervueren, near Brussels, Belgium, on May 30, 727. He is a patron saint of hunters.

Blessing from a priest:  By the intercession of St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters, may you always honor God the Creator, who set man in dominion over all the animals.  May the Lord God make you an honorable hunter who respects fellow hunters, the animals, and all creation; May He keep safe you and all who share the field or the forest; May He make all hunters proud of their kill, generous with their meat, and thankful in all circumstances.  May God bless you: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Prayer for hunters: By the grace of God may I always honor, thank and adore the Lord God who created the animals and saw that each species was good. Let me love the God who made humans in His own image and likeness and set them over the whole world, to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth (Gen 1:26). By my honorable conduct as a hunter let me give a good example and teach new hunters principles of honor, so that each new generation can show respect for God, other hunters and the animals, and enjoy the dignity of the hunt.

Oktoberfest Mass 2013

For the homily click here: OKTOBERFEST HOMILY