The Season of Lent

Welcome to the Saint Richard and Saint Charles Borromeo Parish Podcast. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Amen. Well, it's been a long time since I did my last podcast. My apologies. Although it's been a very, very busy last few months with a lot of activity, which has been, really helpful and hopefully sanctifying for both of the parishes. And first of all, blessed Lent, we are on the first Friday of Lent.

That's when this is being recorded, but Lent is a very beautiful time of year. Lent comes from an old English word, which means springtime. What do we do at springtime? We do spring cleaning. So it's a time for us to clean house, regarding prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, to help God sanctify us and our souls by examination of our consciences, doing prayers, deepening our prayers, asking our Lord for everything we need, all the graces we need, and deepening our friendship with our Lord.

He's our best friend we could ever have. So in prayer, when we call for prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we're not supposed to take that as adding a thousand new prayers to pray. We need to deepen our prayer. By deepening our prayer is, tell our Lord everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly that's going on in our hearts, and to ask him to show us or to reveal to us the depth and the breadth of our pride that leads to our sins, and to be able to give us the grace to properly, and satisfactorily confess our sins to the best of our ability. We don't have to remember the the number of our sins.

If we have a lot of sins of a certain kind, we can just say, I did this multiple times, or I have a habit of doing this, etcetera, etcetera. So it's a beautiful time of year also to meditate upon the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Of course, right now, we're meditating upon the time in the desert of Jesus. This weekend, we speak of the temptation in the desert, how Jesus allowed himself in his fullness of his humanity as he's fully divine and fully human to undergo, tests by the evil one. And even though he was tempted by Satan, he overcame those temptations for the greater good of the heavenly father, the holy trinity, and ourselves, and gives us an example to resist temptation.

And so this gospel reading in the forthcoming Sunday, which will be the first Sunday of lent after Ash Wednesday. It's particularly beautiful, and then our lord guides us. He became one of us to show us the way to heaven. And we have a great number of devotionals during lent, one of which is the stations of the cross, which we have at Saint Charles and Saint Richard at 05:30PM on Fridays and followed by the Knights of Columbus fish fries at both parishes. We have a very vibrant set of chapters for the Knights of Columbus at both parishes, both, wonderful in terms of the direction they've taken, the revivification that they have, undergone in terms of promotion of membership for younger men to become involved in the Knights of Columbus, which is founded by, father Michael McGivney, who's hopefully on his way to sainthood.

And he started out wanting to help widows and orphans. And so the Knights are very, it's the men's Catholic kind of a premier men's Catholic organization and charitable organization for the greater glory of God and for the help of souls. And so, you know, we'll have the opportunity to go to the Stations of the Cross led by various lay members of the community and their children perhaps or their families, and then we can go to the fish fries. And, they do a great job. They put a lot of work into these fish fries, so please tell them thank you, and they're always raising money for a good cause.

And, Lent is another opportunity for us to examine our consciences by praying to our lord to help us to know ourselves. Socrates said, know thyself. Jesus perfects that in that he wants us not only to know ourselves, but to know our sins and to repent of our sins. Saint John the Baptist's, his theme or you if you have there's one word that you could equate or you could think of John the Baptist as repent. And so Jesus says the same thing, and we need to repent of our sins.

There's a word. It's the last prayer of after communion in Ash Wednesday, and it we need to pray for a spirit of compunction. What is compunction? It essentially means we need to pray that our Lord or that we will, with the Lord's grace, puncture our egos, our pride, our self inflated ideas of ourselves, and our selfishness. And so that can take many forms.

But we also have to take a step back and realize that we need to observe the principle of the mustard seed. We have to take care of our own little corner of the vineyard, first of all, in our hearts. That's where the principle battle between god and the devil takes place. And there is the presence of the demonic outside of us as well as, more hopefully, the angelic. Each one of us has a guardian angel who watches over us every day of our life since the day we were conceived.

So thank your guardian angel. Speak to your guardian angel. Pray for your guardian angel's protection. Apologize to your guardian angel. I do for the times I've offended God or let my guardian angel down.

So that's a good opportunity to renew or to even, start to, love our guardian angel and appreciation because God is another one of God's gifts that he didn't need to give to us, but this is a being, an immaterial being that holds the very face of God. And that is that beautiful prayer, angel, god, my guardian to your tomb is love. Commence me. Here, ever this beautiful prayer, angel of God, my guardian to your tomb whose love commits me. Here, ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and guide.

Amen. And so, please, it's a good opportunity for us during Lent to pray to our guardian angels because there's a lot of darkness There's a lot of darkness outside the in the world. You have rioting. You have a lot of violence. You have a lot of anti Christ woke sentiment, very hostile, secular aggression against the church, but in the end, the Lord triumphs.

He is a king of the universe, and he is our Lord, which means dominum. He has dominion over everything. So this is a testing ground. We're on a pilgrimage to heaven, and we need to keep our eyes focused on praying for the pope, praying for unity in the church. Most of all, within ourselves, praying for a spirit of humility as we continue to serve our lord.

Pray to our blessed mother and to Saint Joseph. Blessed mother is very powerful. Ask her to cover her with your mantles, to pour her tears over and into the wounds that cause you to sin. Pray for Saint Joseph's protection. He's the terror of demons.

Pray that our lord will pour his precious blood into our wounds and cover us with his precious blood to protect us and deliver us from evil. If we do that, God will never be outdone in our in his generosity. And so, also, just wanted to thank the Saint Charles folks. We just completed it was three over three years in the planning, renovating. Actually, it was repair, renovation, and beautification, and upgrading, the nave and the sanctuary of the center of our activity in the center of our worship, the Holy Church at Saint Charles.

And so we need to pray in gratitude for, first of all, bishops, support through this entire process as well as the vicar general, Monsignor Kevin O'Neil, his help and his guidance as he was the kind of chair of the repair, renovation, and beautification committee. And Sean Pauley, who's an architect who really helped us out, Sean Frampton, who was our attorney, Colonel George Bristol, who was a good, and worthy, guide to for me to bounce things off of and to help be kind of an interlocutor between myself and the parishioners. And also, all the all the folks at MontanaBuild, Paul McElroy's business. So they did a great, job there. And it was a hard job.

We had probably we asked probably upwards to 15 general contractors who didn't wanna do it because of the slope of the roof, which is more acute than a 45 degree angle, and it's 40 feet at its tallest. So they had to get scaffolding actually, buy scaffolding and get a couple of scissor lifts in there. It was it was high risk work, so I consecrated it to Saint Joseph to ask him to help the workers and to protect the workers and our lord to send his holy angels into Saint Charles, and they came through, of course. And so please pray to Saint Joseph in gratitude, the one to whom I consecrated this and any work at any one of our churches. And if you have work at home, consecrate that work to Saint Joseph.

Ask him to protect your house like he protected Jesus, Christ Jesus, the son of God and the son of Mary. And so we were closed at Saint Charles from late September until later part of January, and it looks beautiful. Bishop gifted us, with the crucifix from Saint Joseph's in Butte. And also, two years ago, I procured I didn't know, it was a tabernacle from Saint Joseph's in Butte because it had to close and the, diocese, needed to sell it. And so he removed Bishop removed all the precious, items, the holy items from both there and Saint John in Butte that had to be closed.

So we were the happy recipients and, of our beneficiaries. So please pray in gratitude for Bishop's great gift of this crucifix. The corpus is one of less than 10 in the world made by the De Prado Company of New York and Chicago. The De Prado brothers came over to The United States in 1888 from Tuscany, and they started this statuary company. And most a lot of the old churches or even new churches, have De Prado statues.

And this was probably made in the early nineteen hundreds of this corpus in the cross. It's white oak. Jesus is still alive. He's giving over his spirit to the heavenly father. And, also, I had two very talented, artists, who restored the cross and the corpus to its great, its great beauty and its original glory.

And, so I'd like to thank Kathy Reiner. She did a great job of Kalispell. She prayed every day when she'd come over for over two and a half months to take repair parts of the corpus that were, a little bit damaged. And John Hayden, the altar guy, who, the white oak, he stripped it, sanded it, refinished it, and then we reattached the corpus to the cross and put it up in early Jan late January. So you can come visit, and take a look at it, close look at it, pray before it.

Just know that our lord's in solidarity with us. So over at Saint Richard, we continue to, try to serve you as well as we can. There's lots of things going on at Saint Richard. The last two days two nights of the month, we do, free dinner for anybody who needs it. A lot of people rely on their SSI checks or Social Security, and it's an easy time at or it's a hard time sometimes.

It's easy for people to run out of money at the end of the month, and it can be hard. So, every every last two days of the month, you can come grab a bite to eat if you're running short on food at Saint, Richard. And also at both parishes, we collect for the food bank, and there's a lot of snow on the ground right now, and it's cold outside. And we have a wood lot over at Saint Richard with the Knights of Columbus. That's their special charism, over at Saint Richard, and that they collect wood throughout the year and, where they have wood chopping parties on Saturdays throughout the summer.

And it's amazing, and it's grown into quite the ministry. So anybody who has a wood burning stove, which a lot of people in the flathead rely on to warm their entire house. If you know anybody who's running low on on, the fuel for their stove, the wood, please give the Saint Richard Parish a call or walk in, and, the the Grand Knight, Martin Jordan will help you, get some wood out to your place or to your friends. And, so both parishes are, thriving. Thanks be to God.

We have new parishioners coming in all the time. I just, there's a young lady, who came in, today who just registered and a young family earlier in the week who registered over at Saint Charles. So we've had at Saint Charles and Saint Richard. The parish continues to grow, and I've consecrated both parishes to the holy family and to the holy trinity. And so, we need to continue to pray, and I need to be grateful for you and for all your prayers.

So I just wanna thank Shannon at the Parish Podcast Project for his patience. I haven't given a podcast in a long time. So thank you for listening, and may God bless you this entire, Lenten season, and may your Lenten resolutions be, grow throughout the year. So do something beautiful for God. And, also, you might wanna read your favorite scripture or reread a favorite book of yours that has helped you throughout difficult times to help you in this beautiful time of Lent.

When we pray, we fast, and we give alms, especially the poor, poor in spirit and the materially poor as well. So may almighty god bless you, the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen. And hopefully, we'll see you soon for the next parish podcast. So have a great lent, and we will as my friend, father Tony Laymon, used to say, he was a great Jesuit at Gonzaga University, an alumni chaplain, to be continued.

Speaker 2: During Lent, we join Jesus in the desert for forty days, praying more deeply, fasting from what holds us back, and giving generously to those in need. It's a time to turn back to God with all of our hearts. During this season, let's resolve to pray more for each other and all of the Catholic clergy. And may God grant you a blessed Lenten season.

Speaker 3: Our journey through Lent has begun. And I don't know if you've had a chance to read Pope Leo the fourteenth's Lenten message to the faithful yet, but it's really good. The first part of his message is about the maternal care of the church and how the church calls us to recenter our lives on the mystery of God during this season. We live in a world full of anxieties and endless distractions, and Lent is a good time to get ourselves refocused on what matters. It's a pause in a world moving at breakneck speed.

Only through silence and focusing on our faith can we move into deeper conversion. Lent is a good time to begin reading scripture if it's not part of our daily lives and get to confession if it's been a while. Pope Leo really puts a focus on the importance of listening. We all know good relationships require everyone to listen. He pointed out that in the account of Moses meeting God in the burning bush, God declared, I have observed the misery of my people.

I have heard their cry. Pope Leo is pointing out that God listens to us when we pray. Listening is fundamental to his nature. And he invites us to listen. To scripture, yes.

But also to the cries of those in anguish around us. In a world full of division and arguments, the word of God allows us to discern the voices that truly matter. The poor, the suffering, the forgotten. He really wants us to listen to the cry of the poor. And we remember Lent has three pillars.

Prayer, which is both talking and listening to God, fasting, and almsgiving. That last one is about loving and serving the poor. Pope Leo also talks about fasting and how it's concrete preparation for receiving God's word. Fasting literally has a physical and spiritual effect on us. It reveals our deepest hungers.

When we abstain from food, we become aware of what we really crave, what we consider essential, and what we can live without. It's a way of ordering our appetites, engaging the cardinal virtue of temperance in a greater way. But the most interesting part of his message is this idea of fasting from words that hurt other people. I don't have to tell you that we live in a day and age when words can be weaponized and then magnified immensely on social media. But it doesn't have to be that overt.

Even quiet gossip in social circles, or work, or even the parish can hurt others and damage our relationship with God. Pope Leo urges us this Lent to disarm our language. Avoid harsh words, rash judgments, slander, and speaking ill of those absent. Instead, let us measure our speech and choose kindness and respect in our homes, workplaces, friendships, social media, and in debates. When we fast from hurtful words, hatred recedes and space opens for peace.

The last part of the Pope's message this Lent is to remind us that our Lenten journey is not an individual journey. There's a communal dimension to Lent. We gather together as Catholics every week at Mass, and maybe in some other ways like prayer groups and Bible studies. We listen together, encourage one another, and conversion comes not just to individuals, but to the whole church. So, as we go through Lent, let's take these words to heart.

If you haven't read the 2026 Lenten message from Pope Leo the fourteenth, please look it up on the Vatican website. It's definitely worth the time and will be a great inspiration.

Speaker 0: Well, thanks for listening to the podcast for Saint Charles Borromeo and Whitefish and Saint Richard in Columbia Falls. Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This has been a production of the Parish Podcast Project.