FROM OUR PASTOR.....

Dear Parishioners:

The opening words of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, summarize its underlying reasons and purpose.

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

Divided into five chapters, Magnifica humanitas has an underlying premise: technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity,” nor is it “inherently evil” . However, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.

Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human,” following a courageous mentality of shared responsibility and communion, so that the world “will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.”  (This is a great letter to read and reflect upon in our present time).

Last week Pope Leo made a pastoral visited to Fance.  There was a marvelous outpouring of the French people at all of the Papal gatherings. The scenes seen on media kindled a sense of something rare a stirring: hope. This gathering, told us something important about the resilience of the eternal church: modern France itself, the pontiff at the restored Notre-Dame de Paris, still standing 800 years on, through revolution and atheist rule and fire, or celebrating Mass at the site where Catholic kings, priests and faithful were martyred.

As Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal said: “The scale and intensity of the crowds evoked a people yearning to lift their eyes above the storms and stresses of our age. People tired of the disintegration of their societies, the loss of their identity, alarm at the soulless ascendancy of a curious sort of secularism and a relativism that preaches the equality of all faiths and none; fear that the civilization they inherited won’t be around when they are ready to pass something to their children; alienation at the accelerating technological revolution that threatens their livelihoods, their lives and even what it means to be human.”

Pope Leo urges governments and us to respect the sanctity of human life, desist from war, care for refugees, and observe the Christian gospel of charity to ensure the continued centrality and dignity of humans to life on this planet.  I pray that this Month of October, this month of the Dignity of all Life, be a special time of prayer and reflection for us all as God’s daughters and sons.

                                                                                                God Bless!

                                                                                                Msgr John Shamleffer