Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: One. Let's go.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish podcast with Father Greg and jd. Each week Father Greg and I connect to discuss a variety of topics related to our faith and our parish in Winona, Ontario. We are here to help spread the good word and further unite our parish community.
This is episode number 25 and we've landed in ordinary time. We're celebrating St Thomas.
We will talk about worship and the examine prayer. Remember, you can find us on the Apple podcasts, the Spotify, the YouTube every week. So please like or subscribe and we'll find your inbox every week. Or don't like or subscribe. That's totally up to you.
Follow us. We will lead you to goodness.
Happy Canada Day, Father.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Happy Canada Day. This is Canada Day that we're recording this.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. Got some great news this morning that our podcast is number 54 in the Divine Office category.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: I don't know how to interpret that.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Neither do I. Like I thought if it's number 54 in Winona, that's big trouble. If it's 54 in Canada, that's not bad.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Where are these analytics coming from?
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Somebody who wants our analytics to be better and thinks they have the key to our analytics.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Is that some spam email you got?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: I think we're still number one in Winona, at least in the hearts and minds of Winonans. And I'm going to go with the 54 is maybe a candidate thing in Divine Office, but it's kind of fun nonetheless.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Okay. I'd love to know more about how they categorize that and have to work on that.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, check out what their algorithm is.
I do have a quick question before we begin this week.
Have you ever considered becoming a baker?
Because you're always.
You're already good at raising the bread.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: That's great.
Thank you.
I have baked before. I used to make some muffins and some banana chip cookies and bread and stuff.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Haven't done it in a while though.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Not in a while. And what would your favorite baked good be?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Chocolate cake.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Chocolate cake.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: But it has to be nut free.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Nut free chocolate cake. You heard it here first. Deliverable to the flowers.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Please don't give me tons and tons of it because I don't eat much sweets, actually, because it makes my brain fuzzy. So if you're asking me like, what tastes best, it's chocolate cake. But if you're like, don't give me too much of it.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Okay, not too much of it.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: And I'm gonna start really being like, out of it. You're gonna be like, man, you can't focus, but like it's too old as chocolate cake.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: You could get me father Greg on a sugar high.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Exactly. That's what it is, right? My brain's really sensitive to sugar.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Excellent.
Well, back to the raising the bread joke. That's a father Greg quality joke right there. And after that, you better start us off.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Sure. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. God, we thank you for this day. We thank you for our country, thank you for our parish, thank you for our listeners. Thank you for you for your love, for your care for us. We just open our hearts and our minds to you, God. Right here in this moment, we're aware of your presence. We ask you to fill us with your presence and help us to feel your peace and whatever we might be going through, give us the assurance of your blessing and protection and guide us so that we can continue to walk with you. May Mary, St. Joseph, St. Michael, all the saints pray for us. We pray this in Jesus name. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Thank you for that, father.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: You're welcome. Just had to turn up the prayer condition.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it is a little bit stiff and sticky but getting better all the time.
Let's reveal our saint of the week. Each week we feature a shame a Shane.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: I love Shanes but I love saints too.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Saints. Yeah, and we share some facts about their life. You know, as we strive to live out our mission as Catholics, we can always look to our saints and our shades.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Actually, I don't know if we can look to Shane's first. I don't know what those are yet.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Are they opposite of saints?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: I just don't know if we need to investigate that right now. I don't know.
It's a fun verbo. It's not a typo.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: But we'll bookmark that one for later research.
All right, so we will talk about St. Thomas the Apostle, also known as Doubting Thomas, one of Jesus 12 apostles. Initially skeptical of Christ's resurrection, he declared faith after seeing Jesus wounds. Known for his honesty and desire for truth, he's believed to have traveled to India to spread Christianity where he was martyred. He's very revered in Indian Christianity, particularly by the St. Thomas Christians of Corella. His feast day is celebrated this week on July 3rd.
And in looking for memorable words attributed to St. Thomas, simply my lord and my God.
I mean, just there it is right there. When he, when he finally believed and, and you know, there was probably a necessary path of, through his unbelief to take him to that point.
I think right after that he said, jesus, I trust in you.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Quite possible.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Now, I know we're into season four of the Chosen here at the church now.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: I think that three or four.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: Three or four. And I thought Thomas is very well cast and they, they've done a really good job of, of creating his background as to how he became who he was and, and the factors that may have influenced his role in Doubt. So for those of you haven't tuned in yet to the Chosen, very well worthwhile your time.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: And getting to know the background stories, you know, some fictional but very, very plausible as historical context.
All right, it is time for Ask Father Greg. Each week we respond to a question submitted by one of our loyal listeners or one that we make up ourselves.
This week, I'm wondering, a unique feature of Catholicism is that we pray to Mary and the saints.
Some people mistake this for worshiping them and kind of say that it's wrong. But there's a difference, isn't there?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. As Catholics, we would never worship anyone but God. God alone deserves worship. To worship something other than God is called idolatry. That's a serious sin.
So why do we pray to Mary and the saints? First off, when we say pray to Mary and the saints, that can confuse people. So we have to be careful. We just mean by prayer, talking to anyone in heaven. Right.
So God is in heaven. He's the number one person we pray to.
But we can also speak with Mary and speak to the saints because if they're in heaven, they can see what's happening. And they pray for us, they watch us. They're like our divine. Well, they're participating in God's divinity. They're in heaven. They're like our spiritual cheerleaders. Right? So they're praying for us, they're supporting us.
And we believe in the communion of saints. That means we believe that we're connected in the body of Christ not just with those who are on earth, but those who are in heaven and those who are on the way to heaven in purgatory. So we're all connected in the body of Christ in those three levels of the church. The church militant, the church suffering, the church triumphant. So we can speak to Mary and the saints. And if they're closest to God, then their prayers are most powerful because the scripture says, the letter of James says the prayers of a righteous person are powerful. Indeed. So Mary and the saints, they're very holy. They're very righteous. Righteous just means you're doing what's right. They're right with God.
So their prayers are powerful. We don't worship them. That would be sinful. But we honor them.
We honor all humans. That's what we're supposed to do by means of their human dignity. But we honor especially those who have done great things, and we honor them. And God likes to give them a special role.
He doesn't have to do this, but one of the ways that God honors those who are in heaven is giving them the chance to continue helping on earth. And God likes that we do this because it brings us together as a family. For one family.
This is one of the ways that that gets expressed. So we never worship anyone but God, but Mary is the queen of saints. I mean, no one has ever honored Jesus. Sorry. Honored Mary more than Jesus, so. Well, no one honored Jesus more than Mary too.
And so we will never hurt Jesus by honoring his mother. I mean, who would be hurt by us honoring their mother? Nobody. They would be very happy. So hopefully that answers a bit of that.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Perfect.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
One expression that you included was the communion of saints, and it's a word I think we've spoken hundreds of times.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: And it's one. It's.
It's a little bit out there. Like, it's. What is the communion of saints. Because we know what communion is, but not thinking of it in terms of a. Of a collection of beings or saintly people.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: That's right. Wow. Yeah. By the way, did some research on Shanes, which are not saints. However, apparently the name Shaint is a Irish last name that means son of John, so. And there's a lot of St. John, so. So maybe the saints are pretty good too.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: So we weren't wrong.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: There we go. We love saints and we love saints and we love John and we love Sons of John.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: All the St. John's oh, we talked about a saint a couple of weeks ago who's one of the saints that we use the full name Church is named after. Our school's named after him.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Aloysius Gonzaga.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Aloysius Gonzaga, yes. And in researching this, we thought, well, there's another one. St. Thomas Aquinas.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Just again, as more of a distinguish between the Saint Thomases.
Is there another Saint Aloysius?
[00:09:40] Speaker B: I'm not sure. There might be, but I have to be honest, I'm not sure.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: All right, maybe something.
Maybe somebody can write in and let Us know that they already have that knowledge.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Well, we're going to talk about a resource of the week now.
This is very exciting.
This came about through, through a chat I was having with my spiritual director yesterday. And she said something I said was very Ignatian, I thought.
She didn't say ingenious.
Okay, so it's not that you didn't say igneous, which is a rock, but ignatian. So I thought, oh, I'm going to think about that a little bit. And so we, we chatted about that a bit more and got talking about some of the principles of Saint Ignatius. And then that led me to thinking about the Examine Prayer.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Examine prayer.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Examine prayer. Examine prayer. Examine Prayer.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: And this beautiful little resource is a book by Father Timothy Gallagher, who you've met a number.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I met several times. He came to do a retreat, maybe even two of them, at least one at St. Augustine Seminary while I was there. And then also when I was at the Institute of Priestly formation, both for a summer program and then a 30 day silent retreat. He was there both times giving talks. I had various conversations with a very, very good, holy, bright man. Like, excellent books, very, very worth your time.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: 30 day silent retreat.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: And they gave talks before to prep you.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: All right.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: And actually, according to St. Ignatius, there's two rest days where you are allowed to go and talk to people and stuff.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Very, very important for extroverts.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: That's right. But also like, yeah, there's, it's interesting, like in the wisdom of St. Ignatius, he would see that there's something healthy about just kind of loosening up a little bit on two occasions.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Okay, well, the examined prayer is so important and so beautiful as a prayer, as a process to carry out daily. And what I'm going to propose is in some coming weeks that we kind of delve into this in a little bit more detail.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Sounds great.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: We do a couple minutes on a quick resource saying, hey, everybody, this is a great resource. Go check it out. But I think for this one it would be really cool for us to dive into it so of part by part, over the course of a number of weeks.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: It's a great idea. The examined prayer is such a profound daily practice where we can first off put ourselves in the presence of God, thank God for what he's given us, review the day through his eyes, see where we responded well to God where we didn't, where has he been active that day, and thereby get an ever more refined sense of God's Presence in a continual way that brings us greater joy and peace.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Okay. And what a great way to go through it than with Timothy Gallagher's book. So we'll look for that in a coming season if we're gonna go into seasons or in a future time.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Okay. We'll go with that.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: And we are fully into Ordinary Time now. It feels like it just started, but this Sunday, get this 14th Sunday of ordinary Time. It's like we were cruising along with Easter and all these feasts, and then, boom, 14th Sunday.
Did I miss a few weeks? How did that happen?
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Well, I was wondering where you were those last 13 weeks, but. No, I'm just joking. That's a joke. No. So the way the church's liturgical calendar goes is, first off, Advent is the start of the year. So it's Advent. Then you have Christmas. Then you have Ordinary Time for however many weeks until Lent starts. And obviously, the start of Lent is calculated on wherever Easter is gonna fall.
So Lent starts. So Ordinary Time pauses at Lent. So it already happened for, like, eight or whatever weeks. Right. And then Lent started, then Easter.
Easter's 50 days, too. Right. Ending with Pentecost.
So then we had a few big feasts on Sundays, like Corpus Christi, Trinity Sunday.
And so then you do all that math, and you end up, hey, we're about to get onto the 14th Sunday of ordinary Time. But you weren't sleeping. You were here for all of it.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: They just. They went under covert names.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: The other weeks.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: And what. What's our focus in Ordinary Time like? It sounds regular, normal, but it's nothing but.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: That's Right. Ordinary in this sense comes from the word ordinal, which means a numerical sequence. Right. So if you studied math, you'd learn about ordinal sequences.
Indeed. So therefore, we're going through the Scripture in a sequential manner, reading it and taking it in. And the green color, we can say, represents growth. We're growing just like a healthy plant. We're developing our spiritual life.
We're going like a green light forward with Christ.
And we continue just to let the Lord grow us, develop us in this beautiful season. And we also can learn that ordinary things are good, too. Just having ordinary, ordinary time, you know, ordinary things are holy, too. The littlest things of every day, when we do them with and for God, we do them well. For God, that's holy, too.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Well, yeah. It is really a blessing to see all things through the eyes of God. And just the beauty of everything in everyday life. Amen love this little line. Ordinary time is when faith is lived out in the everyday, where holiness takes root in the routines of life.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: So perfect.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: Well, there is so much happening in our community. Our parishioners. Parishioners, that's another. I pulled that pronunciation out last week too.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: This is fun. This is fun for me.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Oh, golly. So our parishioners can check out the bulletin every week, but for everyone else out there, what are some of the highlights of the coming weeks here?
Well, in ordinary time.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. I mean, definitely check the bulletin for things you can come to which are great.
Next week we have our Youth Night and our Young Adults nights, which we're excited about as always.
Fun fact, for those who don't know, we just got a foosball table and an air hockey table in the hall. We're hoping to get a ping pong table. So it's good for young people, it's good for all people, so, so, including myself. It's fun to have a little fun like that. Anyways, tomorrow I'm meeting with the principals of our schools to look at next year. So we're getting ready for that in advance for the next school year. Got our exciting finance council coming up on Thursday. Pray for us, as always, that we will continue to, as we always do, do a great job at being good stewards of the resources of our parish.
And yeah, lots of other cool stuff, but that's probably enough for me for now.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: And I kind of heard a little bit of a foosball challenge issued there, so maybe after recording we'll try to settle up the score from, from Italy.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Father 1 JD 0 Foosball is so much fun. Just saying. But I mean, it's fun as a gift from God. We, we just don't even think I have a foosball problem. Right? Or a cheese or a chocolate cake problem.
Like, what the heck? This guy's not even working. He's just eating chocolate cake and play foosball all day. Is this guy even here at the church? What's he doing?
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Oh, good golly. Well, those activities do happen within the church, so you're always here and ready to receive.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: But I don't do them very much. I don't want you to think I'm. Yeah, just like living some kind of secretly luxurious life here and failing to give myself away to the people.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, no. We see how much you do and how active you are at our parish in our community. So we, we, we know for sure that foosball is only a small daily component of that.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: It's not even daily, but it is small. But it is fun, too.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: None of those things that happen without the support of all the people doing great work here at the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Who would you like to recognize in the parish this week?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Hmm.
Should have thought about this before.
You know what, it might sound humorous, but I want to just. Giuseppe just left for. For Cameroon.
He safely arrived. Giuseppe has been a lot of fun to have around and he's coming back again, of course, for August. But I want to give a shout out to Giuseppe. He's worked so hard and he's such a fun guy. So, Giuseppe, if you watch this, just know of our prayers for you and we look forward to your return.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Excellent. Yes, very well done, Giuseppe. Great to get to know you and to continue to work with you over the next while.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: And it was some fun foosball games I had with him, and so I played them two on one.
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah.
And the result?
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Well, you can.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Father's Father remains undefeated, everybody.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Well, that is just about all the time we have for today. Thank you for your insights, Father. Shall we close with a prayer?
[00:18:01] Speaker B: Sure. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, we thank you for your love, your blessings, your care for us on this Canada Day as we record this, we just thank you for our country. We ask you to bless our country.
We always say in our national anthem, God keep our land glorious and free. And please, Lord, continue to help each of us to walk in your path so that indeed Canada may be in your eyes, glorious and free. Free in the fullest sense. In the freedom that your son has brought us. May we continue to receive that freedom and in freedom, share that love he gives us with others. We pray this in Jesus name in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Thank you for that prayer, Father.
And thank you for reminding us that we should be giving to God what is right, not what is left.
Thanks also to our fans and friends and odds and ends for joining us this week through the Immaculate Heart of Mary social media channels, the Apple podcasts, the Spotify or the YouTube. And if you like our show, subscribe and tell your friends. And if you don't like our show, tell your friends anyway and let them discern for themselves.
We are Father Greg and JD Leaving you smarter, happier and more blessed than you were yesterday with all the angels and Shanes.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: So funny.
