Pastor's Weekly Message
28th Sunday In Ordinary Time,
11-12 Oct 2025
Dear Fellow Saints-in-the-Making,
Joyful greetings in Christ Jesus the Lord!
As we celebrate the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time and continue to celebrate the month dedicated to Respect Life and the Most Holy Rosary, we also celebrate, at least nationally, Native American Heritage Month. To honor the heritage of the indigenous persons of this great land, let us look at two of the saintly Native Americans who help make the church a beautiful and varied mosaic of cultures, peoples, and languages.
The first Native American to be canonized a saint is Kateri Tekakwitha. Known as the Lily of the Mohawks, she expressed a desire from a young age to belong completely to Jesus. Seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries to northern New York catechized her and members of her tribe, though there was great hostility against them. Kateri was ostracized and ridiculed for her faith in Jesus, but she persevered, eventually moving to a Catholic enclave in Montreal. Though marked severely by smallpox as a young child, her face miraculously cleared upon her death, and she appeared then with the youthful beauty of the innocent who consecrate themselves to Christ.
Nicholas Black Elk, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, lived from the mid-19th-Century to the mid-20th Century. In the second half of his life, after deep spiritual conversations with Jesuit missionaries at the turn of the Century where they pointed to the stars and moon and sun and spoke of the Creator God Who fashioned them all, Black Elk was baptized and took the name Nicholas after the saint who had looked so tenderly after the poor. Nicholas Black Elk spent his life catechizing his fellow Lakota, teaching them to seek Jesus. He travelled thousands of miles with this message of Peace that Christ alone can bring. His cause for canonization is under way.
The following is a prayer Saint Katharine Drexel, who after becoming a religious sister, spent her vast inheritance catechizing Native Americans and African Americans throughout the United States and establishing Catholic schools for them, prayed by the great Sioux Chief Red Cloud when she met him during her visit to South Dakota:
O Great Spirit, Whose voice I hear in the winds, and Whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me! I am small and weak; I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset! Make my hands respect the things You have made and my sharp to hear Your voice. Make me wise that I may understand all things You have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons You have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brothers, but to fight my greatest enemy, myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes. So when my life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to You without shame. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.
All holy women and men of the Americas, pray us!
God love you! I do.
Fr. Lewis
PS: In last week’s homily, I mentioned the hundreds upon hundreds of tulip bulbs that the Historical Committee of Lewes in Bloom is planting for next Spring. I am humbled to share with you that I since learned that they plant 40,000 bulbs! So to all of our parishioners who are part of Lewes in Bloom, I will keep you in my prayers during this demanding endeavor to beautify the First Town in the First State.