From Father George's Desk 10/5/2025

For the last half-century, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has designated the month of October as Respect Life Month and the first Sunday in October as Respect Life Sunday.  As Catholics we must work constantly to grow in our awareness and understanding of the whole spectrum of the Church’s pro-life teachings so that we may give witness to their truth.  In our current climate of overheated political rhetoric, politicians, television pundits, and everyone on social media are quick to latch onto the Church’s teachings when it suits their politics and just as quick to abandon them when they don’t.  The following excerpt from the USCCB’s 2004 statement on political            responsibility is a clear, concise reflection today for this Respect Life Sunday: 

“As Catholics, we are not free to abandon unborn children because they are seen as unwanted or inconvenient; to turn our back on immigrants because they lack the proper documents; to create and then destroy human lives in a quest for medical advances or profit; to turn away from poor women and children because they lack economic or political power; or to ignore sick people because they have no insurance.  Nor can we neglect international responsibilities in the aftermath of war because resources are scarce.  Catholic teaching requires us to speak up for the voiceless and to act in accord with universal moral values.

“The Catholic community is large and diverse….But all Catholics are called to a common commitment to protect human life and stand with those who are poor and vulnerable.  We are called to provide a moral leaven for our democracy, to be the salt of the earth.”

You may have seen a piece in the Trib recently about a parish in Beaver County where parishioners are    receiving scam emails, purported to be from their pastor asking the parishioner/victim to buy gift cards or furnish personal information for some reason or another.  Unfortunately, this really isn’t news.  Over the past 15 years or so, I occasionally hear from parishioners that have received such fraudulent communications, allegedly coming from me.  These phishing scams have become more frequent and have expanded to include text messages or even phone calls.  These scams, often originating in lawless countries far away, are intended to gain access to your personal identification.  Please know that neither I nor any member of the parish staff nor anyone representing the Diocese of Greensburg will ever contact you by email or text     making any request of this kind.  If you receive such an email, text, or phone call, please call the parish     office or speak directly to me or a member of the parish staff before you ever give out any personal info.  Never open any attachments or links included in such a communication and delete it immediately.

On Saturday the Church honors Pope St. John XXIII.  Angelo Roncalli was born—one of 13 children of sharecropper parents—in the village of Sotto il Monte in Northern Italy in 1881.  He was ordained in 1904 and, like most young Italian men of the time, was drafted into the army during World War I, where young Father Angelo served as a stretcher-bearer and chaplain.  After the war, Pope Benedict XV appointed him to head the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Italy.  In the 1930s, entering the Vatican diplomatic corps, as Nazi and fascist persecutions began, Roncalli was posted in Bulgaria and Turkey where he helped thousands of Jewish refugees in Europe.  In 1953 he was named Patriarch of Venice.  The Papal Conclave of October 1958 thought they were electing “caretaker pope” when they selected Cardinal Roncalli—at age 76—to succeed Pope Pius XII but Good Pope John, as he would be frequently called, surprised the world by calling for the Second Vatican Council just two months after his election.  Vatican II is, undoubtedly, the most influential event in the life of the Church in the 20th century; more than a half century later we are still trying to understand the true theological import of the council.  But Pope John’s influence extended beyond the “New Pentecost” of the council.  He took major steps to advance the Church’s relationship with Judaism (John Paul II would build on these steps a few decades later) and worked tirelessly for peace in the world; he offered to personally mediate between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to    peacefully end the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and authored the papal encyclical, Pacem in Terris, in the last months of his life.  He died on June 3, 1963, and was canonized, along with Pope John Paul II, by Pope Francis in 2014.  His feast day of October 11 is the anniversary of the convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.