My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Congratulations to Archbishop Michael McGovern on his installation as the 6th Archbishop of Omaha. Archbishop Michael was installed on Wednesday the 7th of May. We look forward to his leadership in our Archdiocese.
Congratulations to all our second graders at St John Vianney and Mary Our Queen for receiving their First Communion the last two weekends. Please keep our First Communicants and their families in your prayers.
I was presented with a check from our MOQ MARQUEE Committee with $324,000 on Sunday. I would like to thank all our MARQUEE Chairs, Paul and Betsy Austin, Kevin and Gina Rau and Dan and Mary Ann Tietjen for chairing this amazing event and for all who assisted in making this event possible. We could not have done this without you. The funds for this year’s MARQUEE will be used for classroom upgrades this summer. We have also used some of the funds to update the restrooms in the Parish Center and rectory as well as upgrading the counter tops and sinks in the Kenny Center.
Thank you to all our volunteers who helped with our campus cleanup and mulching last Sunday afternoon at Mary Our Queen. Over 60 volunteers were present to help. As aways, many hands make light work. Thank you for all that you do. We also planted new plants in our flowerpots and around the campus. We are hoping to arrange a date for us to do a cleanup and mulching of St John Vianney campus in the near future.
We concluded our Religious Education Program at St John Vianney this week. Mary Our Queen’s Religious Education will conclude next week. We also recognized on Wednesday all our High School Seniors at St John Vianney at our youth group event. Congratulations to all our High School students. We wish you the very best in your future endeavors.
Now that the weather is getting warmer, we will begin the next phase of our mechanical upgrades for our HVAC system at St John Vianney. With the boilers shut down, we will be reconfiguring the hot water piping so that the current boilers that heats up both the narthex and the social hall will also be used to heat up our Church and basement classrooms. The boiler in the basement mechanical room will then be converted to be used as a backup boiler or as long as we can maintain it as it is the original boiler (40 something years old). We also should expect to upgrade our lighting controls for the church, narthex and the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the near future. The flooring for the basement handicap restrooms that were damaged due to vandalism will be redone the next few weeks.
For our Religious Education Program at St John Vianney, we will be offering the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our first and second graders of our program in the fall. Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is a Montessori-based religious formation program for children. It seeks to create and facilitate a sacred, hands-on space called an atrium, in which both the children and their catechists can hear, ponder, and celebrate the most essential mysteries of the Christian faith as revealed in the Scriptures and the Liturgy. The atrium is a space where the child develops his/her relationship with God, a relationship which already exists.
Mary Our Queen will be hosting a Level 1 catechist formation beginning in June. If you would like to serve as a catechist for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd at either St John Vianney or Mary Our Queen or you would like more information, kindly contact Hannah Casey at Mary Our Queen Office – hcasey@moqchurch.org.
Blessings,
Fr Marc
