Dear Parish Family,

I would like to wish all the Moms a very happy Mother’s Day! You are a great blessing for your families and for the Church as well. Pope St. John Paul II said the following:

   “Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the mother’s womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and ‘understands’ with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the ‘beginning’, the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb. This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings – not only towards her own child, but every human being – which profoundly marks the woman’s personality.”

  “Motherhood implies from the beginning a special openness to the new person: and this is precisely the woman’s ‘part’. In this openness, in conceiving and giving birth to a child, the woman ‘discovers herself through a sincere gift of self’.” “Human parenthood is something shared by both the man and the woman. Even if the woman, out of love for her husband, says: ‘I have given you a child’, her words also mean: ‘This is our child’. Although both of them together are parents of their child, the woman’s motherhood constitutes a special ‘part’ in this shared parenthood, and the most demanding part. Parenthood – even though it belongs to both – is realized much more fully in the woman, especially in the prenatal period. It is the woman who ‘pays’ directly for this shared generation, which literally absorbs the energies of her body and soul. It is the therefore necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared program of parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman.” -Pope St. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter “Mulieris Dignitatem” (1988)

  May God bless all of our Mothers who are with us now. May He receive into His loving, eternal embrace all of our Mothers who have departed from this life into the next.

God bless you.
 Fr. Dan Redmond