Dear Friends,

A very happy Divine Mercy Sunday to you! What a beautiful gift of the Church that we can devote this Second Sunday of Easter to celebrating God’s mercy. Whether we realize it or not his mercy has been present from the moment of our baptism, when God first invited us into His family and gave us the grace of truly calling Him “Father”. This has been his invitation from baptism, that we would recognize that God is not distant, but desires to be in relationship with us as a father is to his children.

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Dear Friends,

Jesus Christ is Risen! Our journey through Lent has reached its endpoint, this glorious Easter Sunday. This is the day that Jesus continually speaks of in the gospels as He referenced the need for the Son of Man to die, but on the third day rise. When He told the disciples this after the Transfiguration, St. Mark tells us that they asked each other what "rising from the dead" could mean (Mk 9:9-10). This is the day that brings clarity to the confusion the disciples felt and in a very real sense to our own confusion.

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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

On this Palm Sunday we have begun the Holy Week in which we celebrate the sacred mysteries of our salvation by Christ's final days on earth. Today we start with his triumphant entrance into the Jerusalem. The solemn procession at the beginning of Mass is re-enacted by us through the sacramental of blessed palms carried by us, the beloved children of God.

The Lenten season concludes this Thursday and the Easter Triduum begins. The Mass of the Lord's Supper is celebrated on the evening of Thursday at 7:00 PM (Bilingual) followed by Eucharistic Adoration at an altar of repose until midnight. In this liturgy, Christ takes his disciples into the upper room for the Passover. Then we accompany him to the garden of Gethsemane and then we follow him to his bitter passion.

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Dear Friends in Christ,

It is a great joy for me to introduce myself to all of you. My name is Father Dan Connealy and for the past three years I have served as a priest in Flagstaff, Arizona at San Francisco de Asis parish and Holy Trinity Catholic Newman Center on the campus of NAU. I am very grateful and humbled that Bishop Olmsted has appointed me Parochial Administrator of this wonderful parish.

I was born and raised in Phoenix. I am the 6th of 8 children, three of my brothers and sisters still live here in the Valley. Growing up at Most Holy Trinity parish, I attended elementary school there through 8th grade. I then attended Shadow Mountain for high school where I played baseball, basketball, and swimming. After graduating I went to the University of Pittsburgh on a swimming scholarship. It was in Pittsburgh that I first began to seriously discern a call to the priesthood. The Newman Center there had a perpetual adoration chapel which I was able to stop in at before going to swim practice. In the silence there I felt the Lord's continued invitation to consider the priesthood. After two years in Pittsburgh I left to enter the seminary.

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