All volunteers are required by the Archdiocese to complete VIRTUS “Protecting God’s Children” (PCG) training. This is a one-time obligation, unlike the annual CORI process. La Arquidiócesis requiere que todos los voluntarios completen el entrenamiento VIRTUS "Protegiendo a los Niños de Dios" (PCG). Esta es una obligación de una sola vez, a diferencia del proceso anual de CORI.

As I return from a month away from the parish for various reasons, (vacation, conference, and retreat) I am reflecting on the various ways I have encountered the church.

MQOA is committed to the well-being of its community, including the emotional and psychological care of its members. Please join MQOA for the 3rd Annual “The World Needs You Here” 3 Mile Walk to be held on the Salem Common in Salem, MA sponsored by Mental Makeover!

With summer upon us, our main church can get quite hot, and you might be looking for a way to escape the heat during Mass.

It is official! Ten Commandments and Beatitudes Tablets are getting a NEW STANDING STRUCTURE! The “tablets” were picked up today and will be stored at “J.R.Welding & Fabrication” while a new steel stand is being fabricated to hold them. The goal is to get it completed, returned, and erected in its new location (between the large pine and fence along the sidewalk) by the 2nd-3rd week in July. They plan on starting on our project today! We are so excited to see the end result.

This I am writing from the hotel in Harrogate, England where I have been attending a wonderful worldwide conference about Divine Renovation, the parish renewal process we are using in our parish. Some members of the parish also attended, and it was great to be with them and many people I only know from Zoom meetings and emails. The vision of this movement is to inspire renewal in 16% of parishes around the world. That number is 33,000. I had previously written that this big number was 10%, so I want to correct the record and clarify. From statistics, 16% is a tipping point for change in organizational systems like parishes, large groups, and business organizations.

Calling All Alpha Guests (and anyone interested in ALpha)!!

This week’s second collection Promoting the Gospel supports Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) and the Catholic Communication Campaign (CCC).

This Sunday I am returning from England after attending a conference sponsored by the worldwide organization of which we are a part. The Divine Renovation Ministry, started by a priest in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has grown to be a worldwide organization that has the vision to begin a renewal process in the church beginning with thirty-three thousand parishes across the world. Why 33,000? That is roughly ten percent of the number of parishes that exist around the world. The vision of the founder, Father James Mallon, and his team is that by affecting ten percent, the whole world will be affected by the change. What is changing?

We invite you to read through the 4th edition of the Salem Council newsletter. Many thanks to their editor, Richard Olivier, for putting this together!

Wondrous Stories will not happen on Sunday, June 16th

Due to the success of the Open Church at IC last fall, we decided to test out having St. James church open for prayer too this summer.  The church will be open Tuesday evenings 4pm to 7pm. The idea is to welcome commuters and walkers into a peaceful place at the end of their day. 

We now settle into Ordinary time. In my parish as a transitional deacon (way back when), there was a priest who said all the time, “In the light of Jesus Christ, there is no ordinary time.” I agree with this statement. However, we call it that, not because of a lack of extraordinariness, but rather because it is a period that is neither Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter times. The church invites us to use this time to grow and develop in our faith and understanding of what we believe. She also invites us to continue to reflect upon the great truths of our faith and particularly this great truth, the power of the Holy Spirit and its effects in our lives.

Thank you Maeve for providing a great bulletin

Renewal is at the heart of the Christian journey. We are, as the documents of Vatican II say, “a church that is always holy and always in need of renewal” (Lumen Gentium nr8). We are holy because we are the body of Christ, and we need renewal because the Holy Spirit has called sinners to repent and be renewed in body and mind. St. Paul has this as a major theme throughout his writings and we see a huge shift in the way that Jesus would be remembered in this Gospel scene. As we gather to celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ, we remember that Jesus was starting a whole new way of encountering God in Faith. He was renewing the way that people encountered God. We need to remember that the original covenant with the Jewish people was being changed by Jesus and that, as God, he has the authority to do this and to signify what is the method of remembering the new covenant. The genius of this renewal is its simplicity and availability. It is a taking in of God so that we might become new people too. We are to remember that God loves us, that the new covenant is open to all, and that it is the work of God’s presence in us that changes us. Of course, we are urged to cooperate freely by the way we live our lives and that also is part of the new covenant. Now we are called to not only receive God’s love, but also share it with others.

The Pentecost Challenge: We invited those to come to the front of the Altar if they’ve experienced the Holy Spirit actively this past year. We will also want to be able to see, in a concrete way, the spiritual growth in our parish. 

Immediately following 9:00 AM mass on 5.26.2024, we will be doing a Memorial Day blessing on the Greenway. Everyone is welcome to join us directly after the mass.

This week we begin Ordinary time, after finishing the Easter season on Sunday with the feast of Pentecost. It was amazing to see how many people came forward to give witness to their faith that Jesus had touched them or that they had encountered the Holy Spirit in some way.

This week’s second collection supports the formation and training of seminarians in the Archdiocese of Boston for service, we pray, as future priests.

Let us come together and join the Salem Prayer Project, which aims to uplift every street, business, and home in Salem through your prayers.