My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I hope everyone’s power has since been restored and that everyone was safe during the storm.  We had to cancel our Masses and our Feast Day celebrations at St John Vianney last weekend as a result of the power outage.  St John Vianney finally got its power restored late Monday evening.  Mary Our Queen was a little fortunate to have its power restored last Friday afternoon.  I was at Methodist Hospital visiting a parishioner when the storms came in and was there for a while before it was deemed safe to return.

We are slowly assessing the damages at our Family of Parishes and have initiated an insurance claim as a result of the storm.  When the Human Needs Garage Sale was going on at Mary Our Queen, I looked through both our Parishes to see if there were any items that could be donated to supporting its cause and I found quite a few flashlights at Mary Our Queen.  Thinking we really did not need all these flashlights; I gave them to the Garage Sale only to regret it after the power outage.

With the power outage, we moved St John Vianney’s Feast Day celebrations to this weekend.  We celebrated our 50 year anniversary in June and we continue our celebrations with honoring  our Patron Saint.  We managed to post pictures of Fr Reiser who was in Ars, France celebrating the Feast Day of St John Vianney with a group from our Parish at the Shrine of St John Vianney on our Facebook page. What a blessing it was to be able to be present on such a memorable occasion.  We will have a Parish wide celebration after the 10:30am Mass at St John Vianney this weekend.

The teachers at Mary Our Queen will be returning this week to prepare for the new school year.  We welcome everyone back and pray for a great school year ahead.

Please see my column from last week’s bulletin for the results of the survey that was done to have a better understanding of the needs and interests of our Family of Parishes.

With the survey in mind, one of the things we will be introducing will be “Encounter Days” which began last Sunday August 4th at Mary Our Queen which will add an additional time of Eucharistic Exposition and Adoration on the first Sunday of each month, from the end of the last Mass until 6pm.  Spending time in the presence of the Lord is a tremendous form of prayer.  By making this available on Sundays (in addition to Mondays at MOQ and First Fridays at SJV), we hope that more people will be able to experience “the peace which passes understanding,” which only the Lord can give us.  If Adoration is new to you, a simple next step in your prayer life could be to come and spend 15 minutes just sitting in the church on Sunday afternoon.  The Lord is waiting to meet you there! Next month’s Encounter Sunday will be at St John Vianney.

More details will be coming soon about other new opportunities, including a men’s group, a women’s prayer group, and a weekly Bible study for everyone.  And we do have an app for that (multiple apps, actually) to provide options for every schedule.

Have a Blessed Week.

Fr Marc