Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today we celebrate our parish feast day – the feast of the Precious Blood of Jesus. The month of July is dedicated to the Precious Blood and we will be honoring It by joining in a communal prayer of the Litany of the Most Precious Blood of Christ which focuses on the real presence of Jesus in the Precious Blood. Another way we hope to celebrate this feast day will be with an ice-cream social after all the Masses. If we get enough volunteers, everyone will be welcome to visit the upper parking lot under the tents after ALL the Masses for enjoyment and fellowship with physical distancing.
There are seats available at our Sunday Masses (including the Saturday Vigil Mass at 5 PM). There is no need to sign up; please just come if your health allows it. There are many places to sit in the balcony and in the Parish Hall and maintain physical distancing. To help lessen any fears please know that we sanitize the pews, the door handles/knobs, and other surfaces after every Mass, and we have extra disposable face masks if people ask for one. We are doing all that we can to minimize the transfer of germs. Of course, please use your best judgment if you have a compromised immune system as you decide when to return to Sunday Mass.
Our parish food pantry, “St. Joseph’s Table”, continues at our Old Rectory and is open from 10 AM to 12 PM on Saturdays and 4 to 6 PM on Wednesdays. If you would like to volunteer to help out, please contact the rectory. We need bilingual speakers to help our visitors. We also need to build up our inventory of donations of nonperishable food (and some perishable food – we have limited refrigeration) or gift cards. Donations can be made in the rectory office from 9 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday. St. Joseph’s Table helps all members of our parish, both English and Spanish speaking. If you need any assistance, please come by.
The dates for our First Communions are: Saturdays, July 11, 18 and (with a bilingual Mass) July 25. The rehearsals for each Mass will be the Friday night before at 7:00PM: July 10, 17 and 24. Please contact the CCD Office with your preferred date. We need to spread the children out equally among the three dates, and the number of guests might be limited to maintain physical distancing. I’d like to thank Kelly Wilton, Pat Reed, Dora Castro and all the catechists who teamed up to prepare the children and their families during the pandemic for these special days.
Vacation Bible Camp is coming July 27-30TH. Under the direction of Kelly Bennett, the children will be able to participate in a program called, Totally Catholic: Rocky Railway! Through life’s ups and downs, Jesus' Power Pulls Us! See the bulletin for more details and volunteering opportunities: we need 5 adults and 10 youth Middle School and High School age.
I’d like to remind you that there are many resources available to help you with your faith formation. Some resources are:
• Www.formed.org: there are thousands of Catholic movies, video programs, audios and e-books at your fingertips! Many of these programs are in Spanish and English; our parish code is V2XJNR; create your personal account with your email and password for future use!
• There are lots of kid videos, games, Catholic Lego sets at www.holyheroes.com.
• There are also CDs, movies about saints, and books of apologetics, fiction, and biographies available in our parish library. You can check out the key from the office and find the treasures inside to check out!
We are grateful to our parishioners who are able to continue to support the parish during this time as we still have all of our payroll expenses. Thanks to your generosity, we are up to about 40% of our usual income. If you can help us get closer to reaching our budget, it would help us very much.
Let us continue to pray for our Lord’s protection and help during this pandemic and for peace and justice and the overcoming of all forms of hatred, including racial hatred, during the social unrest we have been going through in our country.
Shalom,
Fr. Kevin