As we conclude today the glorious 50 day Easter Season with Pentecost Sunday, let us remember that we are temples of the Holy Spirit by our Baptism. Wow! Do we pray and work to develop the amazing gifts of the Holy Spirit that we have received (wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord)? Use God’s gifts to put your faith into action in the public square! Here is part of the Sequence for Pentecost Mass: “Come, Holy Spirit, come! And from your celestial home Shed a ray of light divine! / O most blessed Light divine, Shine within these hearts of yours, And our inmost being fill! / Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”

We have had the meetings with the 8th Graders and their parents for Confirmation. If there is anyone who didn’t attend and is thinking about Confirmation, please have a parent call the office, as soon as possible, to find out more information.

Congratulations to Noah Povanda, who received the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and First Holy Communion on May 30 at Notre Dame Church!

After the papal conclave to elect Pope Leo XIV, somehow, the 6th Graders at Pope St. John Paul II Elementary School convinced me to hold a “donut conclave!” After speaking with a baker at Hermitage Bakery, the ballot included the following choic-es: round glazed, cake donuts with sprinkles, twisted donuts, apple fritters, crème sticks/Long Johns, & lemon filled / raspberry filled donuts. After all the Cardinals elected a dean (he took a donut oath), they cast their ballots for the best donut. The result: a tie between crème sticks/Long Johns and raspberry filled donuts! They enjoyed eating what they elected. We also watched a DVD that showed an actual papal conclave with some footage of when Pope John Paul II died in 2005, and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI.

After reading about Pope Leo XIV (how exciting!), here is a quick look back (this is a very fascinating and well written article) at a Pope who reigned during very tumultuous and confusing times. This is a June 1, 2025 article on The Catholic Thing. It is writ-ten by Msgr. Charles Fink- he has been a priest for 47 years in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which spans Long Island. Here is the article:

Courage Under Fire: A Tribute to Pope St. Paul VI

When I graduated from my large public high school in 1964, I don’t remember having ever heard the word marijuana. By the time I graduated from college four years later, you could discern the fragrance of pot wafting across the campus. Protests against the Vietnam War were everywhere in full swing, and the sexual revolution was sweeping away centuries-old moral norms concern-ing marriage, sex, and family.

The revolution, however, was more than sexual. It struck deep into the heart of dogmas and traditions throughout the Church and society. Everything was up for grabs. If I attended one, I attended a dozen or more lectures beginning with words to this effect: “Up until Vatican II, we believed thus and so, but now we see clearly that. . .” Pope Benedict XVI called this the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” In the seminary I attended, the attitude, often as not, seemed to be, “We owe Tradition and official teachings of the Church critical respect; now for the rest of the semester let’s look at what the latest, greatest dissenting theologians have to teach us.”

The world, Catholic and non-Catholic, was turning upside down, as a perfect storm of war, protest, dissent, and the jettisoning of all that came before seemed poised to sweep away everything in its path. Against this seemingly invincible tide of disruption and destruction stood a frail, reserved, intellectual servant of God and his Church, raised to the papacy in 1963 as Pope Paul VI, canon-ized in 2018, and now officially Pope St. Paul VI.

He knew what he was in for. He knew the state of the Church and the world, one point lamenting that the smoke of Satan had entered the sanctuaries of the Church. The wonder is not that he wasn’t always wearing a smiley-face; the wonder is that this man of chronically poor health could bear the weight of the responsibility thrust upon him.

Experts insisted that the Church should change her immemorial teaching on artificial contraception, and, by implication, all that follows from the divorce of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex. He stood fast, issuing in 1968 the most controversial en-cyclical of modern times, Humanae Vitae.

Seeing growing confusion among Catholics concerning the ancient dogmas of the faith, he promulgated his magnificent and too-little-known or appreciated “Credo of the People of God,” an extended and clarifying meditation on the Nicene Creed.

Deeply devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, he tried to promote that same salutary devotion among the faithful in two of his seven encyclicals.

Sometimes accused of leaning too far to the right morally and dogmatically, he was accused of leaning too far to the left in matters of social justice, both accusations are unjust: those making them forgetting or ignoring St. Augustine’s famous maxim: “In essential things unity; in doubtful things liberty; in all things charity.”

When it came to holding fast to the essential teachings of the Church, Paul VI was rock solid. When it came to prudential judgments concerning, e.g., how to reconcile the right to private property on the one hand with the goods of the earth being given for the good of all on the other, he warned, even before his papacy, in a little work published as The Christian in the Material World, that “Economic prosperity absorbs us more and more, as though it wanted first to attract us, then to enchant us, and final-ly to enchain us,” a warning not unlike Jesus’ oft-repeated cautions against the dangers of riches.

Critics of Paul VI even found reason to find fault with him following a tragic incident that darkened the end of his life. His friend, former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by a far-left terrorist group known as the Red Brigades. Pope Paul wrote a heartfelt letter to the kidnappers begging (on his knees, he said) for Moro’s release, earning him the accusation that he had treated the terrorists too kindly.

The Pope’s accusers should have considered that good men – facing such tragic and desperate circumstances – might employ dif-ferent approaches concerning the best path forward. In the event, Moro’s bullet-ridden body was found in a car in Rome. The pope’s own wounds, inflicted by critics and dissenters over many years, were doubtless even more numerous, if less visible.

It’s often insinuated that a different pope or a different approach to, say, liturgical observances, would have spared the Church the trauma of mass defections from the pews, empty seminaries, and dwindling numbers of religious. But it’s been my experience that in a complex world populated by equally complex human beings, there are no magic wands or silver bullets to answer what ails us. But there are dogmas and moral absolutes, setting the boundaries outside of which we stray at our own peril. Within these boundaries, there’s wide latitude in seeking approaches to solving problems and addressing issues, none perfect and none final, given the flow of history.

Pope Benedict XVI declared that Paul VI had lived a life of heroic virtue. Pope Francis canonized him. Two very different popes of one opinion about a third. I side with them against the cynics, second-guessers, and back-seat drivers maligning this holy man’s good name, and I stand in admiration and awe of a man who showed extraordinary courage and composure under fire. I know I could never have done the same for as long or as well. I doubt many of his critics could have. St. Paul VI, pray for us. [end of article]

Pope St. Paul VI (Pope from 1963-1978), pray for us. Father Miller