“Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

 The Sunday before Christmas I ran a pastor’s column about the Holy Family settling into Bethlehem and the cave in which baby Jesus was born. Today I write about Our Lord’s birth in the cave and the shepherds who saw the angels and visited Our Lord.

Two thousand years ago in the first Advent, the week before Jesus’ birth, the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would have been traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem. What was it like reaching Bethlehem and settling into the cave? Fortunately, in the visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich we have an idea.  Blessed Anne was the greatest visionary on the Life of Jesus the Church has ever known. She passed away in 1823. You can find all of her visions from Angelico Press, much of them are free online as well. In this pastor’s column I share some of what she saw concerning the Holy Family’s travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

All too often we reject, out of hand, things of a supernatural nature.  To be sure, we need to discern things that are not natural. God normally operates within the laws of nature, laws he created, however he is not limited by them. God does occasionally perform miracles that nature or science cannot explain. Years ago, I heard about the Holy House of Loreto in Italy. It is supposedly the house that the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived in while they lived in Nazareth. Somehow, it was miraculously transported to Italy in the 13^th century (1200’s). In the spirit of Advent and the Holy Family’s journey to Bethlehem, I submit a fascinating article on how the little house where they lived in Nazareth made its way to Italy. Enjoy.

This Monday, December 8th, we mark The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, one of only three Marian Feast days that are so special that we observe them as holy days of obligation. To get some idea of how important the Blessed Virgin Mary is to God and thus to the Church and us, look at the list below of Marian Feast days throughout the liturgical year. 

Over the past couple of weekends all three communities in our parish family, Columbia River Catholic, have had townhall gatherings exploring the same questions of “who are we?” I wasn’t at any of them, yet the feedback I got was that those seven town hall gatherings varied in tone and answers from a love fest to court room. The compiled results of those seven gatherings and this stage of our journey will be published in a future bulletin and sent to the Archdiocese of Seattle.

More than at other time in human history, people are swamped with information. With the internet being in the palm of everyone’s hand, information is everywhere—some of it true and helpful, some of it misleading and evil. We must be discerning not only about the information we access, but the degree to which we access it. This is also true of where we get information about our Catholic faith.

This Sunday we celebrate the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, a church in Rome. As odd as that sounds, celebrating a church, you will have heard about it in my homily, and hopefully have some deeper insight into the connection between the physical and spiritual. However, it does line up nicely with this pastor’s column on campus projects. I meant to have this in the October 19 pastor’s column entitled “Share the Good News,” but I ran out of room. So here is the follow-up to that with some great things to know and share with others about our physical campuses.

This Sunday, November 2, happens to be All Souls Day, a special day of the year on which the Church has historically made a point of praying and doing penance for the dead. Although I touched on purgatory in a pastor’s column a month ago on the Four Last Things, I go into a deeper dive here hoping that it will help you in your faith, and inspire or challenge you to help those who cannot help themselves anymore.

I ran part one of this pastor’s column on May 28. In case you missed it, you can find it here https://holyredeemervan.org/pastor-columns/thefatimastory1. At the time I thought I would be able to run the whole four-part series by the end of June, then too many things got in the way, and I was not able to resume it until now. We should be able to finish it out in consecutive Sundays in a row.

I ran this pastor’s column seven years ago on the 100^th anniversary of the apparitions of Fatima (I can’t believe it’s been seven years). It’s a good series of columns that most of you didn’t read seven years ago, and for the rest, a great re-read. 

This Sunday we launch our new combined bulletin for the three communities that make up Columbia River Catholic: Holy Redeemer, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Our Lady Star of the Sea. 

            Instead of producing three different bulletins of roughly twenty-four combined pages, we are now producing one bulletin with roughly twelve pages.  This saves our staff’s time and our resources, and improves our ability to communicate across our three communities.  Now we can see in one place what is important for all of us to know as well as things that are site/community specific.