Dear Parishioners and Friends,
As we get closer to Christmas, we are probably all
thinking about who I can bring to Mass on Christmas. There are so many
fallen-away Catholics that simply need a loving invitation to come home.
Christmas is a good time to extend a welcome to our Church.
Faith is never something private. It always involves
the Church. Pope Francis writes in his encyclical “The Light of Faith” that Christ
gathers all who believe in Him into His Body. The Christian then “comes to see
himself as a member of his body, in an essential relationship with all other
believers” (22).
This is why faith in Christ outside the Church is not
true Christian faith. “Faith is not a private matter,” the Pope writes, “a
completely individualistic notion or a pesonal opinion” (22). “Faith is
necessarily ecclesial; it is professed from within the body of Christ as a
concrete communion of believers” (22). It opens the individual toward others.
Now is the time for us to extend an invitation to that
“wandering” Catholic who, like all of us, needs greater faith. Christmas could
be the beginning of their journey home.
In Christ,
Msgr. Baker
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