Church of St. John
We are most grateful for the funds we receive at the Church of St. John the Baptist in Trenton. Because of this most generous grant, we are able to carry out some evangelization efforts that we normally couldn’t do. As the pastor of three parishes, I am convinced of the importance of getting valuable resources to our parishioners (and non-parishioners), many of which I believe change hearts and minds. Here are some things we have done lately.
In just over a month, we have Mark Armstrong coming from Bismarck to give all of my staff an in-service where he will give two separate presentations, one on Our Lady of Guadalupe and the other on the Shroud of Turin. Because of the Coronavirus we had to push Mark back to this fall. I am very excited for him to present as this will greatly assist my Catholic and non-Catholic staff in understanding Our Lady of Guadalupe image and apparition, as well as the fascinating details regarding the Shroud of Turin. I can tell you that a good number of my staff do not know much about either of these images, or the stories that surround them.
For Easter, we were to give away Matthew Kelly’s book, Rediscover the Saints. While we have ordered and received our 800 books, we have not given them out yet because of the Coronavirus outbreak. We are hoping to give them out once more people start attending Mass.
We still continue to order books and cd’s from the Augustine Institute for our kiosks. One of the books we have placed in the church is the Thomas Madden book, The Crusades Controversy. It is a great little book which addresses much of the misinformation regarding the crusades.
Finally, the last resource is a beautiful novena that is incredibly helpful to people who try to control everything. It is called the Surrender Novena. I hand out a lot of them in the confessional and this has greatly assisted many people in surrendering everything to God. It is written in the first person which is helpful for people to hear and apply God’s voice to their lives.
