Bulletins
June 12, 2016
Download the Bulletin as a PDF“Summer School”
Are there two words in succession more depressing?
Actually I could think of several combinations of words far more dispiriting. Many of them begin with ‘President’. Even though “summer school” can sound like a punishment, for many an enterprising student it can translate into “early graduation”. For others it is the way forward to a better job or new career.
Much worse than summer school is not learning. Even worse than not learning is getting dumber. Most of what we find in print, on TV and online makes us dumber. We need to be as selective with what we read as we are with what we eat. The first week of July I will be out of town attending my annual week-long summer conference with a few dozen brother priests who have been reconnecting every year since 1998. For each five-day session a lecturer is secured, be he a professor or a bishop, and a reading list sent out in advance. Two conferences and a Holy Hour each day makes for time well spent.
At the end of July I will return from vacation early so as to spend the first week of August in a Latin-immersion course at Catholic University. That would be “Latin” as in “Dominus vobiscum”, a little different from the two-month Spanish immersion experience my brother is doing right now in Guatemala.
Even though Religious Ed is on summer hiatus and St. John Academy winds down in a few days, the parish is still feeding the mind.
June 12 at 4 p.m. is the final Sunday Lecture of what has been a blockbuster of a series. Come hear Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth discuss the Sacred Liturgy in light of the 50tth Anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. Monsignor is Executive Director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), which is the mixed commission of the Catholic Bishops' Conferences in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Scotland, Southern African, the USA and fifteen affiliate conferences entrusted with preparing English translations of all liturgical book and texts for the Roman Rite.
On three successive Sundays (June 26, July 3, July 10) our seminarian Nicholas Blank will teach a Sunday afternoon Inquiry Class with Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed. Our annual Bible Study will take up St. Paul during the last week of June. Next summer we will treat St. John in the New Testament. And then in 2019 we will start over with the Old Testament.
And don’t forget about FORMED.org and our parish passcode X8DEVW. It is always on and always free so we can always be smarter.
God bless you!
Fr. Christopher J. Pollard
