SCCR Parish Blog

This is just a reminder that this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, is one of only two days a year  that Catholics are required to fast.  (Good Friday is the other one).  This discipline is required of all Catholics who are between the ages of 18 and 59.  (That is, on or after your 18th birthday and before your 59th birthday).   Catholics younger and older than that are certainly welcome to engage in this fasting as well. Fasting is one of the precepts of the Church -- that is, the bare minimum for all disciples of Christ.  Among those precepts, Catechism paragraph #2043 reminds us of the purpose of fasting: This ancient practice commended by Christ Himself "prepare[s] us for the liturgical feasts and help us acquire mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart." The U.S. Bishops have a concise summary of what is required on the two fasting days.  Those who have medical reasons not to fast are of course exempt from doing so.  If you are i...

  Priest assignment announcement for the South Clermont Catholic Region, February 13, 2022   Archbishop Schnurr has nearly completed the process of assigning priests to the Families of Parishes (FOPs) which take effect on July 1st.  Our four-parish FOP, including St. Thomas More, St. Bernadette, St. Mary and St. Peter, will be served by three priests: pastor Fr. Tim Ralston, assisted by two parochial vicars, Fr. Thomas Dorn and Fr. Bill Wagner.   Fr. Ralston is the current pastor of St. Bernadette and Fr. Wagner is the current pastor of St. Thomas.   However, all three priests will be assigned to serve all four parishes.   Additionally, a seminary professor will likely be serving as a visiting celebrant at some of the Sunday Masses. We are blessed to have so many priests assigned to the region. Fr. Reutter will be given a new assignment, serving as one of three parochial vicars in a northwest rural area of the Archdiocese consisting of seven p...

  There are a lot of great saints in February.  More on them later. But here a few short bio's of two saints who overcame great adversity because of their faith. St. Jerome Emiliani and St. Josephine Bakhita (both February 8th).

  I'm just a bit late with this: Yesterday, we celebrated the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th century friar, scholar and doctor of the church.  He is without question one of the greatest theologians in Church history.  Fortunately, he wrote prodigiously and we still have his writings, hymns, Scripture commentaries and more. Below is a brief snippet from the breviary (the Church's daily prayer book) with his reflections on how the Cross encompasses all the virtues (habits of holiness) which we strive for.  This is also available online at universalis.com From a conference by Saint Thomas Aquinas, priest The Cross exemplifies every virtue Why did the Son of God have to suffer for us? There was a great need, and it can be considered in a twofold way: in the first place, as a remedy for sin, and secondly, as an example of how to act.   It is a remedy, for, in the face of all the evils which we incur on account of our sins, we have found relief t...

  With so many young Catholics drifting away from the Church and her holy sacraments, many family members are faced with a knotty problem: what to do when they marry outside the Church or enter into a marriage in a way that breaks the commandments of Christ.  On the one hand, family members want to be supportive of their relatives, but on the other they don't want to condone something that is wrong. Dr. Janet Smith, a well-know moral theologian and popular author, has some thoughts well worth reading.  They are in the form of an open letter she wrote to her goddaughter when she decided to marry outside the Church.  The letter links to her comments on what to do if the marriage itself is sinful.

  In some of our Bible study groups, there have been questions about purgatory.  I often speak of this in November, when the Church traditionally intensifies her attention to the "Four Last Things": Death, Judgment, Heaven (and the purgatory needed for many to get there) & Hell. However, since there has been a lot of false or misleading teaching about purgatory in recent years, I want to address it again.  One of the worst false teachings which crept in especially in the 1970s and 1980s is that "the Church doesn't teach purgatory is real any more."   That is flat out wrong.  Here are some good brief articles on the topic. A good Q&A regarding common questions about purgatory from Britain's Catholic Truth Society. The question of purgatory and time from Catholic blog Aleteia. At the bottom of this post, I've included some brief excerpts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on purgatory. Finally, just a note on the artistic depictions of pur...

  I am reprinting my parish bulletin column from this weekend  below (with several of my typos fixed!)  Please continue to pray fervently not only that the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade but that we Christians will be prepared to bring the Gospel of Life to the nation when they do.  =================== Preparing for a post-Roe world 49 years is a long time.  As of yesterday, that is how long the country has lived under the Roe v. Wade regime – that is, the coercive mandate from the U.S. Supreme Court to make it legal in all 50 states to kill a child in the womb for almost any reason at any time, due to the twin judgments decided in 1973 of Roe and Doe v. Bolton .  There is an old saying that “the law is a teacher,” so to put that in perspective, our government has been attempting to teach over two generations of our citizens that is is perfectly acceptable to kill a fellow human being.  Or, to put in another way, a significant percentage of our p...