My Dear Friends,

Happy 100th Birthday St. Theresa! Tomorrow, we celebrate the 100th birthday of our parochial school which opened its doors as St. Joseph Academy on September 15, 1925. It will be a day of celebration here on campus as the children will attend Mass to properly celebrate this milestone, and then they will spend the day having a big birthday bash during the school day. It is indeed a reason to celebrate.

Tomorrow also marks the official beginning of our yearlong Centennial Celebration as a parish that will culminate in October 2026 when Little Flower celebrates its 100th birthday. There will be many events throughout this year to mark this once-in-a-century occasion. But more than events, I call on all our parishioners to also spiritually celebrate this milestone.

How do we do this? Well, during this Holy Year of 2025, both Pope Francis and Pope Leo have called us to conversion and to be disciples of hope. This is what we are called to during a jubilee year: conversion.

And it is providential that on the eve of our yearlong celebration, we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. As we were reminded in last week’s gospel, our Lord tells us that if we do not pick up our cross to come after him, then we cannot be his disciples. This coming jubilee year for our parish is a call to all of us to deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ by embracing our cross, to spend more time before the Blessed Sacrament in our Perpetual Adoration Chapel, to come to confession more often, and to make the Mass on Sundays the center of our life as a parish. Everything we do must be oriented to and flow from the Eucharist.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us of this reality drawing a line from the Second Vatican Council: “The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1324)

It is indeed a time of jubilee. We begin tomorrow with the 100th birthday of our school and will continue to celebrate for 13 months! May the end of this parish jubilee find us renewed by the Holy Spirit, through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and our patroness St. Therese, to begin a new century of service centered on the Eucharist here at the Church of the Little Flower.

God bless you all,