My Dear Friends:
I want to thank all of you who attended the all-day prayer vigil and adoration on Election Day. Once again, the faith of our parish shined through, and I am particularly proud of the efforts of all of you in the campaign against Amendment 4. Because of your prayers and work, thankfully the amendment was defeated and life prevailed!
When you sit down in your pew, you will notice a brand-new book in the book holder. These are our new missalettes! The old ones, while practical, would get very worn over the course of sometimes six months of use, and their wear and tear would be a bit of an eye sore for visitors and faithful walking into the church. These new hard cover missalettes are more elegant and befitting our beautiful worship space. The only drawback is that they are not dated like our usual missalettes. So this is where catechesis on the lectionary comes in…
The lectionary or the readings you hear every Sunday at Mass are divided into a three-year cycle. We are currently finishing up Year B, and on
the First Sunday of Advent we begin Year C. So, essentially, we hear the same readings every three years. In Year A, we hear from the Gospel of Matthew, in Year B we read from the Gospel of Mark with some weekends dedicated to the Gospel of John, and in Year C we hear from the Gospel of Luke.
One of the nice features of this new hard-covered book is that it has a ribbon so that you can mark where the readings are that week, and your fellow parishioner that comes to Mass after you will not have to go flipping around looking for the readings. The page number of where the readings can be found for that week will always be printed in the bulletin on page 3 in the “This Week’s Readings” section and announced by our cantor. The book also has a very easy to follow Order of the Mass towards the beginning of the book, and some exquisite and uplifting prayers that you can recite before or after Mass starting on page 1216.
For the year ahead, each book rack will include one hard-cover song book, one of the seasonal soft-cover missalettes and one new, hard-cover missalette. For our Centennial/2026 liturgical year, when the new pews with the longer book racks are installed, the soft-cover missalettes will be replaced entirely with a second batch of hard-cover missalettes, so that the new pews will no longer house the soft-cover missalettes that may be worn and tattered.
Our music and liturgy staff did a lot of research and went to great pains to find this new hard-covered missalettes and were very picky in choosing which ones would best fit this beautiful worship space. One of the things that they wanted me to pass along to you was this simple message: please do not take these new hard-covered missalettes with you. As you can probably see, they were not cheap. If you want a dated missalette that you can take home with you, I highly recommend subscribing to Magnificat which many parishioners already do. Magnificat has some excellent reflection on the daily readings and it is a wonderful worship aid that you can take wherever you go. Magnificat also offers a children’s Missal, Magnifikid, which is a great resource for children as they learn how to pray the Mass. As for this new missalette, please keep them in the pews so that all our parishioners can enjoy them and pray with them for years to come.
God bless you all,
