Lent is a great season where we are called to fasting, almsgiving and prayer. While our motivations may vary from Read More »
Father Mark’s Pastoral Direction
News Categorized: Pastoral Direction
Father Mark’s Pastoral Direction
One of the efforts that the leadership of our parish has been concentrating on is Radical Hospitality. The objective here Read More »
Father Mark’s Pastoral Direction
In this past weekend’s Gospel reading from Luke, the scene in the synagogue marks the launch of the public ministry Read More »
Recognizing Father Mark
Whispering Winds has offered many a retreat from everyday cares with an opportunity to seek a closer moment with God. Read More »
Fill out our OMC Survey Here!
Let your voice be heard! Have a significant, positive impact on our parish! What do you think is working? What Read More »
Take the 1% Prayer Challenge!
One Percent of your day is roughly 15 minutes – talking to God in prayer is a great way to Read More »
Rummage Sale donations have been coming in! We are accepting donations of useable goods through Thursday, June 27. Proceeds support our parish youth programs. The big sale is Sat. July 28th 7AM-1PM. Volunteers who want to help sort are welcome! Contact volunteer @ omcsandiego .org for more information.
...for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
#Godisgood
#allthetime
Today’s Feast is, with last Sunday’s Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity, fundamentally central to our faith as Catholics. Belief in God being a community of three persons, yet one God is probably one of the first heavy theological mysteries we are exposed to as children. How many of us learned to make the Sign of the cross at a grandparent’s knee?
Then at the age of 7 or 8 years we all received our First Holy Communion. Another mystery. This is the great mystery we celebrate today. We will carry the Body of Christ in public procession as a re-emphasis of our belief in the real presence of the risen Lord in the Eucharist.
I heard a man who is Jewish, a Shakespearean scholar and a very fine teacher, explain this mystery and it was, without a doubt, the best explanation of the Real Presence I have ever heard. Here it is feebly explained in human terms. Aren’t all our explanations of God’s mysteries feeble, indeed?
Everything that can be experienced by our senses is one of many physical attributes that something, anything has. The bread used at Mass, which we know is changed into the Body of Christ, has attributes in this way.
It is white.
It is soft.
It is round.
It is porous.
It has a certain taste.
It even has a certain smell.
All these attributes are particular to bread. That’s how our minds know we are dealing with bread. Our senses have taught us that when we have a coming together of all these attributes we know that it is bread. Philosophers call these properties, qualities, characteristics or attributes “accidents”. We taste, smell, see, feel. We can even hear a host being broken in half. In other words, whatever our senses perceive, even with the aid of those instruments which we are forever inventing to increase the reach of the senses like microscopes, amplifiers, etc., are accidents but they are not the thing itself. Philosophers call that thing itself, the “substance’ of the thing. While our senses perceive accidents (physical attributes) our senses cannot perceive the substance of something. Only one’s mind can know the substance of something.
This is true of bread, it is true of every created thing. Left to itself, the mind assumes that the substance is that which, in all its past experience, has been found to have that particular group of accidents. But in these two instances, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the mind is not left to itself. By the revelation of Christ, and the motivation of the Holy Spirit, it knows that the substance has been changed. In the one case into the substance of his body, in the other into the substance of his blood. Our senses cannot tell a difference in the bread and wine. They are perceived, by our senses, to be the same before and after being consecrated. It is important to remember that our senses can only perceive “accidents” and not “substance”. The consecration, which happens at Mass, changes the substance. In its substance, after consecration, the bread and wine are the body and blood of Our Risen Lord.
Any and all explanations of the Mysteries of Our Faith, are human and therefore essentially feeble and hugely inadequate attempts to explain the inexplicable. This is one such attempt.
Happy Father's Day Weekend to all Dads and Granddads. Prayer cards for fathers are in the church gathering space. Fill one out and return and your father will be remembered at all Masses for the month.
May the choirs of angels come to greet you; may they speed you to paradise. May the Lord enfold you in His mercy; may you find eternal life.
Margaret Mylett was a blessing to our parish. For years she was the one who provided hospitality after funerals and comfort to the families. She shared what she had and most especially her gift of service.
Margaret's funeral will be Friday, June 21 at 10:30 AM
Some pictures from the Diocesan Multi-Cultural Mass celebrating Pentecost and our universal Church. After the procession of cultural groups, there was the dressing of the altar. Different groups brought fabric representing their culture and they became the tapestry if fabric beneath the altar cloth.
#catholic
@ Cathedral Catholic High School
Fr. Mark from this morning’s KUSI News!
Multicultural Mass and Festival at Cathedral Catholic High School -
SAN DIEGO (KUSI) – The Catholic Church is a universal one. The world’s cultures – from Africa to Vietnam – will joyfully gather at the diocese’s second annual Multicultural Mass and Festival on Saturday, June 8. So many turned out last year for the inaugural one, that people were turned aw...And so it begins.... collection of useable goods (no junk, please) for this year's OMC Rummage sale has begun! We will be accepting donations through June 27. Sale is Saturday, June 29th @ 7AM.
The Sign of the cross before Mass:
When we begin Eucharist "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," we enter explicitly into the real world: the world of relationship—of interaction—with God.
The Sign of the Cross is the oldest Christian profession of faith. In the late second century, Tertullian wrote: "In all our travels and movements, when coming in and going out, when putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever we are doing, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross"
What are we saying when we do this?
First we lift up our hand—and heart—to heaven, as many do when they pray to God. But the difference is, we put our hand on our head, on our forehead, to say we know him. He is not "the man upstairs" for us; he is our Father. He gives us his own divine life. Then we bring our hand down and place it on our heart to say God came down from heaven as Jesus the Son to be one of us, to take flesh and live in us as his body on earth. He lives and acts with us, in us, and through us to continue his mission of giving life to the world. Then we sweep our hand in an arc from one shoulder to the other to say that the Holy Spirit is within us, sending us out and empowering us to unite the whole world in one divine family of love.
All of this expresses the meaning, and is the fruit, of the cross, on which, by baptism, we died in Christ and rose again with him as a "new creation." If we understand the Sign of the Cross, we understand the mystery of Christianity.
At Mass we begin our week with the Sign of the Cross. It ex-presses the identity we have through relationship with the Three Persons of God. We can use it all week to remind us of who we are. We can "extend the Mass" by making the sign of the cross when we wake up and go to bed, when we sit down to table or get into the car, whenever we turn on a computer or pick up a cell phone.
The Mass reminds us to do everything we do "in the name" of the relationship we have with Father, Son, and Spirit. Why not carry that reminder into the world outside? By making the sign of the cross, we can express all week long our awareness of the relationship that people have with each other and with God that we receive at Mass.
