Dear friends,

As we come to the end of the year, I look back with profound gratitude to God for the many blessings we have received as individuals and as a parish. I look forward to yet another wonderful year ahead. However, aware that it is often very easy to overlook the many good things we were gifted with and focus only on the negatives, I invite you to take a moment to honestly audit the year and be grateful to God for all the gifts you too have received. While I leave it to you to individually count your own blessings and thank God for them, I invite you to look forward with greater optimism and gratitude to God for the many more gifts and blessings yet to come this new year.

Dear Friends,

It is another great year and a special opportunity for me to wish you my dear beloved family of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year 2024, as your Pastor. As we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior today and throughout this season, I want to thank God for the many blessings He has bestowed upon us individually and as a community since our last Christmas celebration. As a community, I am sure, these blessings are numerous to count.

Dear Friends,

As we have heard several times already, Advent is a time of preparation for the coming of the Lord: His coming to us sacramentally at Christmas, His coming to us individually at the end of our lives and His coming to us collectively at the end of time. But He comes to us all the time. He is among us. That is why in the First Sunday of Advent, we talked about preparation by being watchful, being alert, because we do not know when Christ will come again; in other words, the key word in this First Sunday of Advent called us to Watch.

Dear Friends,

In my last article, I emphasized the reality and certainty of Jesus’ coming and the need for us to be always watchful and alert. In this article, I want to emphasize the need to be prepared for His coming especially by being found doing good when He comes. Allow me to share part of an article I read sometime back that highlights the same theme of being always prepared and being found doing the right thing.

Dear Friends,

The term Advent comes from two Latin words Ad-ventus or ad-venire, which simply means “to arrive” or “to come” respectively. It marks the beginning of the Church’s liturgical calendar. It is a four-week period leading up to Christmas.

For us Christians, and Catholics in particular, it means a time of expectation and preparation for the Lord’s birth. So, the prophecy of John the Baptist: “a voice of one calling in the desert, prepare a way for the Lord …” (Mk 1, 3), echoes loudly to us this season.

Dear Friends,

This weekend, we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King which also officially marks the end of the liturgical year A. Next weekend, we begin the season of Advent to prepare for the birth of this great King. Yes, don’t we all admire a great leader? Particularly here in the United States I often hear people insisting on having strong leaders; leaders who can lead us to the common good, to prosperity, to peace and stability, to achieving our “American Dream”.

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago I was blessed to go on a pilgrimage of sorts with the teens of our parish through our Life Teen program. It wasn’t a pilgrimage to the tomb of an obscure saint or the site of a Marian apparition. Instead we journeyed to California, to the thrilling amusement park known as Six Flags where we joined over two thousand teens in celebrating our faith. The experience proved to be a unique combination of theme park thrills and profound encounters with Jesus Christ. In a way the event inspired a realization that the Lord is always present to us, sometimes in the most unlikely of places, and that we are always invited into a profound and personal relationship with Him through the Eucharist.

Dear Friends,

Recently, I had an interesting experience, which happens to me quite often. It is that experience which inspired the title and content of this article. Please, read on.

On that day, I had an appointment at a certain huge parish in our Diocese with the Pastor. At the time of making the appointment, I had introduced myself and proceeded to have a great conversation on the phone with the sweetest sounding receptionist. So, on the day of the appointment, being my day off, I went dressed casually and arrived two minutes earlier at the office.

Dear Friends,

As I was away the other week “wasting time in the presence of God”, as Bishop Dolan described retreat to be, I had a lot of time to reflect in that serene environment. Suddenly while there, what seemed to be ordinary encounters and normal interactions began to take on new meanings as I meditated upon them. The retreat center offered just a perfect opportunity for me to do that. For instance, one morning as I took a walk in the quiet desert surrounding of the Center, before my morning prayer, I came across what looked like a wolf which scared the hell out of me.

Dear Friends,

Last week, I joined a section of the priests of the Diocese of Phoenix for a five-day retreat at Picture Rocks Retreat Center in Tucson. When I told my nephew, Saviour, that I was leaving for this retreat, he promptly sent me a sympathy note from Uganda wishing me a quick recovery. He thought I was seriously I’ll. Another one thought I was on a vacation. This is what inspired me to explain briefly what a retreat is.

Dear Friends,

For a little over a week now, you have seen our crosses hanging on the pergola on the east side of our Church as they did for the first time last year. For those who are wondering what those crosses mean, well, here at our parish, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, which is a pro-life parish, each year, we join the entire Church in dedicating the month of October to celebrating the sanctity of life as I mentioned in my article two weeks ago. During this month, we are asked to pray each single day for an end to abortion through saying special prayers, prayer intentions, posters and through symbols such as those crosses, I have mentioned.

Dear Friends,

Through the many eras of our Church we have encountered great evils and sufferings in and of the world. We have seen this in the various instances of war, hatred, violence, division, and the disregard for the inherent human dignity that every life possesses. As our Pastor, Fr. Robert touched on last week, we commemorate October as the month of the Rosary and as Respect Life month in the Church. These two go hand in hand as our Lady, Mary the Mother of the Church works tirelessly to guide not only those who profess the faith, but all peoples to her Son, the Prince of Peace, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Dear Friends,

By tradition, the Catholic Church dedicates each month of the year to certain devotions. In the month of October for instance, we focus on two significant commemorations: Respect Life and the Holy Rosary. October also includes the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary which we celebrate on October 07 and the best way to celebrate the month is, of course, to pray the Rosary throughout the month. Here in our Diocese, we have the Arizona Rosary Celebration during which all the Catholics from around the Diocese gather to say the Rosary and honor Mother Mary in downtown Phoenix at the Convention Center. This year this celebration falls on Sunday, October 15.

Dear Friends,

Two weeks ago, more than 160 of our Priests from the Diocese of Phoenix joined Bishops Dolan, Nevares and Olmsted for a four-day Priests’ Convocation in Flagstaff. The weather there was gorgeous, the camaraderie among the priests was very uplifting and the surrounding pine trees were just beautiful, complete with trails for a leisurely walk. During one of our longest breaks one afternoon, two of my friends and I, decided to take a walk and enjoy the beauty of the pine forest. The walk was so enjoyable and conversation so interesting that soon we did not realize how far we had gone till we began to feel thirsty. Unfortunately, we realized that none of us had gone with a bottle of water. The thirst I felt that moment in my case, reminded me of an incident I experienced many years ago except it was worse.