A LETTER FROM FR. PAUL - OCTOBER 21, 2018

Archbishop Listecki has written a letter on the abuse scandal. It can be found on the archdiocesan website.

Wednesday evening, October 24th, from 6 to 7 pm in the gym at Wauwatosa Catholic, the annual State of the Saints report will be given. Please attend this presentation about our school to be updated on what is happening. I hope to see you there!

This weekend is the kickoff for the pledge drive for 2019. Next weekend we will have the witness talks from parishioners and soon after that you will receive the stewardship mailing. I ask each family to take this pledge process seriously. While we have rented part of our school to Kingdom Prep, we have lost considerable gym rental so that the gym can be available to Kingdom Prep and we have had costs to prepare the space for use (Kingdom Prep has covered cosmetic updates, but we needed to fix some things up to make the space usable.) There are a lot of deferred maintenance projects waiting for more income. In the September Invitation you received the annual report and with the pledge material you will receive more financial information, as well as a comprehensive parish report. We need your support to continue to do all the wonderful things that are happening. Pledging helps us to build a realistic budget. Please be as generous as possible and keep this process in your prayers.

Reminder: we now have a parish calendar on our website where you can find information about all that is happening at Pius. Thanks to our webmaster, parishioner Chris Graham, for his ministry to us through social media.

In our Gospel this weekend we have the third reaction of the disciples to Jesus’ declaration that He would suffer and die: James and John ask to sit on His left and right in the Kingdom. We can just imagine the indignation in the voices of the other disciples: just who in the heck do they think THEY are?????

The problem was that the disciples were focused on themselves instead of on Jesus: they needed to be asking “Who does Jesus think HE is?” and listening to what He was telling them. But their preconceived ideas about a warrior king messiah and their concern with themselves and their status blinded them to what Jesus was saying and who he really was.

My friends, the same can happen to us. We can be so sure we know “the truth,” we can be so sure we know who Christ is and what He wants of us, that we can be blinded to who He really is for US, TODAY.

That is why it is so important that we walk with Jesus, that we give Him the chance to explain to us who He is and what he wants of us at this moment in our lives. We do that through quiet prayer time with the Lord, through participation in community worship and events, through the sacraments, and through reflection on the Gospels.

I invite us this week to reflect on how much we are listening to what Jesus might be saying to us versus how much we might be telling Him how things should be. And let us support each other in prayer.

-- Paul James Portland, SDS