My Dear Friends:
When history calls, how do we rise to meet it? When it is God who is calling, how do we respond?
A century ago, a small group of Catholics banded together with a young, Irish missionary priest to celebrate Mass in a sparsely inhabited new city on the outskirts of Miami. They settled on a parcel of land just next to the newly opened St. Joseph Academy where they celebrated the parish’s first Mass. This new parish would be named after a freshly canonized saint who went by the nickname of the Little Flower. Yet there was nothing little about the dreams of our founders and their first pastor.
Where many saw swamplands stretching out far into the western horizon, they saw a magnificent church rising above what would be become a sprawling neighborhood where the cross of Jesus Christ would be planted and the Eucharist would be celebrated daily. Even though the forces of nature and the forces of man would put that dream on hold for the first quarter of our history, the stones they laid down on this holy ground would impact generations of people who would one day call the Church of the Little Flower home.
Home is where you feel welcomed. It is where you go to feel the warmth of family. Here we have come to be baptized, to be confirmed, to be married, to receive the consolation of God’s mercy, and to receive the gift of His very presence at Holy Mass. When you think of all the moments of divine grace that have happened within these sacred walls, one cannot help but offer a prayer of gratitude to those founders who made their dreams reality so that we may reap the fruits of the seeds they planted.
Now we gather to celebrate one hundred years of the Catholic faith being celebrated and shared in our parish. What will our legacy be? Over the last three years, we built on the legacy of our founding parishioners by ensuring that this church, built for the glory of God, would endure. We have risen to meet the challenges of a new century by meticulously restoring this sacred space and finally adding a pipe organ that befits the grandeur of this worship space.
Much work has gone into these projects and there is still much to be done, but we pause this weekend to thank not only those who came before us, but also those within our midst who sacrificed and labored to ensure that the dreams of our founders would endure. With this work completed, we give proper thanksgiving to our Lord and then return to the essential task of a Catholic parish: evangelization. Those first parishioners in the 1920’s were missionaries who rallied others to their cause of building up a nascent parish. We now ask the Holy Spirit to give us that same missionary spirit to draw our neighbors, caught and entangled in a secularized world, to come home to this place of refuge we call a church. Our centennial celebrations may be concluding this month, but as we turn the page to the second century of our history, we must begin with the simple task of bringing the lost sheep home to our Lord.
Like our founders, God has brought us to this pivotal moment in the history of our parish. How will we respond? We have restored our physical church, but the next act begins now as we start restoring the spiritual church through our pastoral endeavors. We call upon the missionary zeal of our patroness, St. Thérèse, to make the gospel known to all. The work of Holy Mother Church is never over, and for us, it is just beginning. What will our dreams be? What deep waters is the Lord calling us to? We commend our parish to his providence and mercy as we reach this milestone and ask our Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, to guide us as we write the next chapter in the glorious history of the Church of the Little Flower.
God Bless You All,
