Happy Sunday! I hope and pray everyone has had a good July 4th weekend! This weekend we are welcoming Fr. Jeff Pooley, our new parochial vicar. He'll be getting settled in over the next couple of weeks, and then I'll be away on vacation. He'll do a great job while I'm gone! I will be traveling the last two weeks of July for my 10-year reunion with my classmates from seminary and then heading to Colorado. I'll be back on August 1.

Happy Sunday! This weekend we are sad to say farewell to Fr. Michael. It has been a great joy to serve alongside him these past two years. His last Mass will be the Spanish Mass on Sunday. Please keep him in your prayers as he begins his new assignment as the parochial vicar at St. Anne parish in Gilbert. With his departure comes the arrival of the newly ordained Fr. Jeff Pooley. He will be joining us starting July 1. It is a great joy to welcome him and to have our parish be his first assignment as a priest. I certainly know how much of a gift it was to start my priestly ministry here in 2016 and I know Fr. Pooley will experience the same. Thank you for offering him such a warm welcome.

Jean Amery, a Holocaust survivor tortured by the Nazis, later wrote about the abyss of human evil. He described his reaction as an "indignant despair." Haven't we all, to some degree, felt that abyss opened beneath us? A sudden loss, a violent head- line, a moment of loneliness or panic, when the world feels fragile and meaning seems to collapse?

Happy Sunday! It's been a number of weeks since I've written a bulletin letter and so much has happened. We were blessed to have the ordination of four new priests for the diocese on June 6 and to host the first Mass for Fr. Nathan Blanchard last Sunday. Please continue to keep these new priests in prayer as they prepare to begin their priestly assignments in July.

When I was a young altar server, I once overheard two very different comments about the Eucharist. One person asked, "Is Father distributing the bread or the wine?" Later, another asked, "Can you go get Jesus from the tabernacle?" Same parish, same Mass, but two very different ways of speaking. I pondered: So, is it bread that we pretend is Jesus? Or is Jesus a tiny white thing in a box? I was utterly confused.