Highlights from 2020-2021 Financial Report

10-31-2021Pastor's LetterFr. Dan Connealy

Happy Sunday!

This weekend, we are releasing our Financial Report from the 2020-21 fiscal year. We are so grateful for the financial support everyone has offered in this past year. It has been difficult and strange in many ways, but good and life-giving in so many more! I would like to share some highlights here at St. Joan of Arc. Our youth group, Verso l’Alto, has continued to grow and we are reaching more teens now than before COVID began! Our preschool stayed open with in-person instruction and actually increased enrollment. We have continued to have new parishioners register every week. Plate contributions are up 11%. With money from the Together Let Us Go Forth campaign we replaced four air conditioning units, including Weidner Hall. The parish endowment has continued to grow and in the last year alone it grew 55%. Thank you so much for helping us further the mission of St. Joan of Arc to spread the Gospel.

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Every Human Life is Beautiful

10-24-2021Pastor's LetterFr. Dan Connealy

Happy Sunday!

This week, I’d like to share an excerpt from a letter I recently came across from an 11 year old girl. It’s a very powerful reminder of the beauty of every human life. I hope you enjoy it. This next week I will be on my retreat in Montana until Friday.

Please keep me in your prayers and know of mine for you!

Christ’s peace,
Fr. Connealy

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How is God inviting us into a deeper relationship with Himself?

10-17-2021Pastor's LetterFr. Dan Connealy

Happy Sunday!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful week. I want to share a quote from Pope Benedict XVI that I recently read. He writes, “When God disappears, men and women do not become greater; indeed, they lose the divine dignity, their faces lose God’s splendor. In the end, they turn out to be merely products of a blind evolution and, as such, can be used and abused. This is precisely what the experience of our epoch has confirmed for us.” We do not need to be theologians to notice this. It seems that more and more often our society is trying to wipe away the face of God. We know as well what has happened in our culture alongside this. Men and women lose their true identity, which is only bestowed by God, in the confusing and misleading transgender culture. We see an increase in anxiety and anger throughout society. Notice that Pope Benedict speaks of “divine dignity”. He means to tell us that dignity has some transcendental meaning because it is bestowed by God.

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Consider Joining the Choir

10-10-2021Pastor's LetterFr. Dan Connealy

Happy Sunday!

This past week I was in Orlando, Florida for an educational conference hosted by the Catholic Medical Association. It’s always good to be back home and with all of you. I love seeing the parish alive with so many families and volunteers coming and going. I’m grateful especially for all those volunteers helping with Religious Education. The year is off to a great start!

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The Sacrament of Marriage

10-03-2021Pastor's LetterFr. Dan Connealy

Happy Sunday!

This weekend our readings take us to the beginning of the Bible, to Genesis 2. God recognizes that “it is not good for the man to be alone” and so he creates woman, his helpmate and spouse. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us:

“Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh." (CCC 1605)

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