Pastor's Weekly Message
33rd Sunday in ordinary time, 15-16 Nov 2025
My Dear Beloved Fellow Saints-in-the-Making,
Greetings in Christ Jesus in Whose Name We are saved!
We celebrate the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time this Sunday, which means, after today, that we have only one more Sunday liturgy in the liturgical year: The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The following Sunday, Advent begins.
At this time of the liturgical year, Holy Mother Church has selected what we might feel are troublesome and challenging readings, very doom and gloom. They are, however, a wake up call for us, for the time will come, unknown to us, when the Jesus Our Sovereign Lord will come.
And we must be ready. « Before all this happens, however, they will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over…, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name. …You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will out some of you to death. »
My Dear Friends in Christ, I write these words from Rome after having just visited the Colosseum with our parish pilgrimage group. It is here inside this massive amphitheater that, for sport and as legal punishment, Christians were martyred in the cruelest of ways, usually by the jaws and claws of ferocious and famished beasts. I cannot sufficiently write how viscerally I feel in standing before the very site where Jesus’ prophecy from today’s Gospel comes true for many of our earliest Christian sisters and brothers.
And that not much has changed in 2000 years, for our fellow Christians are martyred throughout the world, the lost persecuted group of people on the planet. All because they « gave testimony » to their faith in Jesus Christ.
Let us be most grateful for the freedom of religion we have, but let it not dull our hearts to forget that so very many are persecuted in make-shift Colosseums today.
Let us ask our parish patron, St Jude (pictured here in the Basilica of St John in the Lateran, the seat of the Bishop of Rome, Pope Leo, which Feast the Church celebrated last weekend) to intercede for us and for all Christians that, through God’s grace, we might have fulfilled in us the final words of Jesus from today’s Gospel: « By your perseverance you will secure your lives. »
St Jude the Apostle, pray for us.
God love you! I do. (And I missed you all very much)
Fr. Lewis
PS: Please say a prayer of thanksgiving for Fr. Cornelius who willingly and uncomplainingly provided pastoral care through Masses and Confessions single-handedly so that I might lead our parish family pilgrims for the Jubilee of Hope. And know, once again, how much I have been praying for you while we are here.