Happy New Year!
Our January Gathering
We will hold our monthly gathering on Sunday, January 12th at 12:30 pm in Conway Hall. We will participate in ongoing formation, recite the Franciscan Crown Rosary and, after our regular meeting and prayers, we will proceed to St. Francis Church for Benediction.
Fair Share
There will be an extra small envelope in your January and February newsletter for our Fair Share Contribution to allow you to pay in two installments. The Fair Share will remain the same at $30. The Fair Shareis not meant to be a hardship on anyone. If your financial circumstances makes it hard to pay please let a council member know.
St. Francis Inn Needs:
- Men & Women Winter Hats & Scarves
- Blankets & Quilts
- Winter Coats
- Adult & Children Gloves
- Men & Womens Thermal Underwear
- Small Size Toiletries
- Furniture for Thea Bowman Center
- Prayers
We will miss you Loretta
As you most likely already know, Loretta Ferraro is leaving the area and moving to Harrisburg. Loretta has been a faithful, active member of the fraternity for 25 years. She has served on council and was our activity director for many years. She has also been a great friend to us all. Loretta, we will all miss you very much. Our prayers will be with you.
Mothers’ Home Mornings Apostolate
We’re are pleased to announce a new fraternity apostolate starting in January. The plan is for us to meet at the Mothers’ Home in Darby every month on the Saturday that follows our monthly fraternity gathering. Since our January gathering is on the 12th, we will be at the Mother’s Home on the 18th. Please plan on meeting there at 9:00 am sharp. The idea is for us to wrap up by Noon. We will have a signup sheet at the January gathering so we can call ahead to let them know how many people to expect. Please let Lee know if you have any questions.
Founded in 1991, Mothers’ Home has provided shelter and care to more than 475 mothers and their babies. Their mission is to provide a safe haven for vulnerable, pregnant women in a crisis who choose life as a sacred gift.
Formation Information
As outlined in the formation materials for January, we will begin the New Year with a discussion of SFO Rule 11. If you didn’t receive the materials at the Christmas party, and have not been able to download them from the website, please let Lee know and he’ll try to get them in the mail to you in time for the gathering.
In February, we will begin reviewing the SFO Rules in detail, focusing on one rule each month. Details will follow.
• • •
“If humility of this sort is the first step in the journey, the journey does not end there. For humility opens one to an ever deeper and fuller life of grace that will find expression in an active love and a life of virtue. If spiritual poverty is genuine, it will express itself in our relations to all things. It can eventually express itself in the form of radical voluntary poverty, and such poverty is a furnace that purifies and leads ever more deeply into conformity with the poor and naked Christ.”
~ Zachary Hayes OFM, Bonaventure: Mystical Writings
• • •
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”
~ Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium
Leave a Reply