Dear Sacred Heart Family,

I really enjoyed my first weekend with you.  Some of my family was able to join me for the 9:30 at St. Mary’s and the 11:00 at Sacred Heart.  With my big family, you will be seeing one sibling or another from time to time.  I enjoyed giving them a tour of both Churches.  Sunday evening, I went back for my day off and helped bale hay.

I need to apologize for the mess up with Mass this past Monday morning.  I had a key to give to Fr. Tomy so he could access the sacristy and celebrate the Mass.  With my family visiting and greeting, I forgot all about it and the key stayed in my pocket!  Again, I am sorry about that.

They are making great progress in the floor restoration.  When the viewing port is set up please take a peek.  Sacred Heart is already a beautiful Church and this will make it even more beautiful.  I am looking forward to celebrating Mass there when it is done.

Thank you for all those who came out for the Sacred Heart Golf outing this past weekend to support our parish and school.

I really love the fact that we are entrusted to the two hearts- that of Jesus and Mary together.  We could not ask for better caretakers!  Below are two prayers, one to Jesus and one to Mary. May we keep each other lifted up in prayer and ask for their help in living our mission.

I look forward to getting to know you as we go along.  I have always enjoyed joining families for dinner and, if it hasn’t been done yet, blessing the house while I am there.  A game of cards thrown in wouldn’t be amiss either!  Some people have been asking what I like to eat – I pretty much enjoy all food and I don’t have any allergies.  I don’t eat a lot of sweets and the only food I really don’t like is Mayonaise!

God Bless ~ Fr. Todd

Dear Families at Sacred Heart and St. Mary on the Lake ,

I am very excited to be joining you.  I know Fr. Joe has loved his time with you and I am to be following him.  He has told me many great things about both communities.  Every time we talked over the past couple of weeks all he would do is brag about you and the good things the Lord has been doing.  I look forward to continuing the good work Jesus has already begun.

I know this has been a shock for you as it was for me and St. John the Evangelist, the parish I came from. I was struck by the fact though that the announcement happened on the feast day of the birth of St. John the Baptist.  He is an incredible example of what it means to follow God’s call, even with its unexpected twists and turns.  It was a reminder to me of the Lord’s providential hand in all of this and the call to trust in His love and His plan.

I wanted to share a bit about me.

I grew up in Fowler, MI on my parent’s 260-acre organic dairy farm.  They sell their milk to Horizon organic.  I am the 4^th of ten children (seven boys, three girls).  My twin brother, Fr. Gary, is number five being born four minutes after me!  Five of my sibling are married and I am blessed to have nine nieces and nephews.  I am hopeful that there are many more to come.

I entered seminary right after high school in 2006.  My first four years were at St. John Vianney College Seminary at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN.  I then spent four years at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit for Theology.

For my first assignment I spent three years at St. Thomas the Apostle in Ann Abor, MI.  I spent this past year at St. John the Evangelist in Fenton, MI.  Both of my assignments have had schools so I am very excited to have our school at Sacred Heart.

I enjoy running, fishing, playing cards (euchre, pinochle, cribbage to name a few), board games, reading, and generally hanging out.  I love being a priest and I love farming (I usually go back to my parent’s farm on my day off) so this assignment seems particularly providential.

It is an honor to be able to serve here.  I look forward getting to know all of you.  I have been praying for you since I received the call from Bishop Boyea.

God Bless,

Fr. Todd

Greetings in Christ!

It’s with a heavy heart that I submit this bulletin, my last one for you, my beloved parish families.

July 1 of this year would’ve started my seventh year with you guys and apparently, the Bishop decided that it was penance enough for you all!

All kidding aside, I want to tell you with all sincerity that I love you. You have helped me become a better priest than I was when I walked into our parishes six years ago.

Through all of you, the Lord healed my broken heart and I am eternally grateful to all of you for that.

I’m going to type up my last homily and submit it to both parishes to put on the website or whatever means is deemed most appropriate. It is in that homily that I will offer you my thanks, as well as some challenges for the future.

I ask you to welcome Fr. Todd, to cherish him and love him like you did me.

I will hold both of my parish families in my heart for the rest of my life.

I’m heading off now to minister to two parishes closer to my family which of course is a blessing to me. In the same way that I tried to give you the entirety of myself, I will now offer that to them. This means that I will not be coming back to help with weddings or funerals or other such things. It’s not a lack of love on my part at all, but a desire to be faithful to what the Lord is calling me to now.

Thank you for loving me as I am and helping me become more.

Your brother,

FJK

Greetings in Christ!

I want to start this off with a reminder for us all.  Next week is a big one for our Sacred Heart family.  We begin our massive project of repairing the floors all through the Church, re-carpeting and all sorts of yummy goodness, including work on the entrances and exits.  Because of that, the only masses we will celebrate from July 2-6 is on July 4th at St. Mary on the Lake at 9:00am.   We will pray mass together that day and ask God to bless our country and help us to grow closer to Him.

The Catholic Church also offers us a pretty big celebration this week: On Friday, we celebrate the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul.  This is the day when we remember the martyrdom of both of these extraordinary men.  It’s unclear why this date is picked: its either because one of them died on that date or because it is the day their relics were moved to Rome…we are not sure which.

Either way, its a time to remember their deaths and honor the faith, hope, love and courage that gave them the strength to lay down their lives for Our Faith.

St. Peter was crucified upside down on Vatican Hill in Rome in the year 64 AD, during the reign of Nero.

In 1950 human bones were discovered beneath the alter of St. Peter’s Basilica and many claimed they belonged to Peter. In 1953 an excavation found St. Peter’s tomb in Jerusalem bearing his previous name Simon, as well as the tombs of the other apostles, Mary, and Jesus.

In the 1960s, discarded debris from the excavation beneath St. Peter’s Basilica were re-examined and were identified as the bones of a male human. This discovery caused Pope Paul VI in 1968 to announce they were likely to belong to the Apostle Peter. On November 24, 2013, Pope Francis revealed the relics of nine bone fragments for the first time in public during a Mass celebrated at St. Peter’s Square.

As for St. Paul, he was beheaded in 67AD, also by Nero. As an interesting sidenote, St. John Chrysostom wrote that Nero actually knew St. Paul personally.  St. Paul’s body rests at St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.

In 2006 National Geographic confirmed the remains were his.  You can read about that discovery here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/5685157/Bone-fragments-confirmed-to-be-Saint-Paul.html

Let’s pray to stay faithful to that which was handed on to us by the wonderful Sts. Peter and Paul!

fjk

Greetings in Christ!

I pray that these warm days in Michigan bring you great joy, productive work and wonderful time with you family. Speaking of family, it is Father’ Day. I want to take this opportunity to thank the Lord for my dad. The older I get the more I realize I will probably never finish learning all the beautiful things he has to teach me. Let’s all pray for our dad weather living on earth or in heaven.

This is going to be an unusual week at our parish families……

The bad news is that Tammy, Fr. Tomy and Deacon John are all going to be away and you guys are stuck with me!

The good news is that Bishop Sean will be here throughout the week and we will carry the mass schedule as best we can, as well as any emergencies that may pop up.

Bishop Sean is going to offer Bible Study this week at Sacred Heart on Wednesday night at 6pm.   I haven’t asked him what topic he would like to cover, but I’m sure that he will knock it out of the park as he usual does!

On Thursday of this week, we celebrate St. Aloysius Gonzaga, a Jesuit priest.  Here’s a little bit on him from Catholic.org:

¨ St. Aloysius was born in Castiglione, Italy. The first words St. Aloysius spoke were the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. He was destined for the military by his father (who was in service to Philip II), but by the age of 9 Aloysius had decided on a religious life, and made a vow of perpetual virginity.

¨ A kidney disease prevented St. Aloysius from a full social life for a while, so he spent his time in prayer and reading the lives of the saints. Although he was appointed a page in Spain, St. Aloysius kept up his many devotions and austerities, and was quite resolved to become a Jesuit. His family eventually moved back to Italy, where he taught catechism to the poor. When he was 18, he joined the Jesuits, after finally breaking down his father, who had refused his entrance into the order.

¨ He served in a hospital during the plague of 1587 in Milan, and died from it at the age of 23 after speaking the Holy name of Jesus for his last words.

¨ He received his First Holy Communion from St. Charles Borromeo and his Last Rites from St. Robert Bellarmine.  St. Robert went on to write a book about the life of St. Aloysius.

May God bless us to hunger for Him like St. Aloysius did and pour ourselves out in loving service to those in need!

God bless you all

FJK

Greetings in Christ!

I gotta tell you, I simply can’t believe how fun and successful our Food Fair was.  We are going to set next years date ASAP so we can get the word out to get more cooks in to lose to me and my World Famous Coney Sauce.  🙂

We have closed out the Easter Season and celebrated the Trinity and Corpus Christi…one of the my favorite seasons has come to a close.   Now, we enter into a rather longish stretch of Ordinary Time.  Every year, I remind us that the Church does not use the word “Ordinary” the way we Americans do.  We are using the Latin word for a progression of numbers.  Thus, this is the 10th week of Ordinary Time and next week is the 11th, all the way through to the end of the year.

I’ve got a couple things to run by us…

First of all, we will be starting the restoration of our Church floor in the first week of July. Because of all the moving around and adjusting, we won’t be celebrating mass together that week, except for July 4th, when I’ll offer mass at St. Mary at 9:00am.

Our town hall meetings broke down what we will be attempting and how far we hope to stretch our dollars, so I won’t go into that too much. The basic idea is this: we will get new carpet in the area where you all sit and pray during mass (that area is called the Nave), we will be ripping out the platform in front of the communion rail and the elevated area where the altar is.  Depending on what we find underneath the altar area, our plan is to restore the original terrazzo/marble flooring.  We are also replacing the carpet in the front entryway, and removing the carpet in the sacristy to restore the original wood floor.  This is made possible because of your generous response to the Witness to Hope Campaign and I am so excited about it.  Because the money is pledged over 3-5 years, we may have to secure a bridge loan from the diocese to take care of the payments that will be due right away.  We thought we had qualified for a no interest loan should such a thing pop up, but as it turns out, we didn’t.  It’s not that big of a deal, thank God, as the interest on such a diocesan bridge loan is very low.

Please pray that God bless our efforts and help everything to go well.  While these restorations are going on, we will pray mass in the Parish Hall.

The second thing I need to run by you concerns our Altar Rosary Society.  These marvelous ladies do more for our Parish Family than you can imagine…they take care of our altar linens, pay for various mass needs that pop up, they clean our Church and give their all for us.  Usually, they host a large rummage sale to fund their activities throughout the year, but this year our renovation work makes that sale an impossibility.  As a result, we are going to take up a second collection for them this summer, on  August 4-5.  Please be generous to them, they’ve been crazy generous with us.

So that’s what I’ve got for you, beyond a plea for patience and understanding.  This summer will be a very challenging stretch for us all and, when we get impatient or irritated with the process and all the accommodations, its a good time to reflect in gratitude for the gift of being able to worship in such a holy, beautiful space.

Over the next couple weeks, I need to submit the bulletins very early and, as a result, they probably won’t be too personal in terms of our schedule, what’s going on, etc.  I’ll use those times to let us know what Saints are coming up in the weekly celebrations.  It’s always nice to remember our Saints great examples and wonderful prayers.

I pray that God bless our efforts to be His People.

fjk

Greetings in Christ!

This weekend is the Feast of the Sacred Body and Precious Blood of Christ, or as its more commonly called “Corpus Christi”.

As Catholics, we recognize the gift of the Eucharist as one that is so amazing, its the only Sacrament we call “The Blessed Sacrament”.

I thought this might be a good time to tighten up our reverence for the Eucharist a bit, so I’m going to offer some things I’ve seen that we can work on.

Genuflection: a priest challenged me on this in seminary and it absolutely changed my life.  When we walk into the Church, we genuflect toward the Tabernacle.  If someone was new to a Catholic Church, it might not be clear to them what we are doing because we can easily fall into the trap of “half genuflecting”.  When you go to genuflect, pause and do it slowly.  Its using our bodies to remind our brains that we are in a Sacred Place: let’s take our time and do it right!

Language: its not the “bread and wine” once the consecration happens: its the Body and Blood of Christ.  That’s important for us to remember: its using our language to remind ourselves that this is a great and sacred moment.

Our Body Posture, make sure we try our best to show reverence and intentionality when we are ministering the Eucharist or receiving it.

It’s good to think about the fact that we receive the Eucharist.  We do not initiate, Christ initiates and we respond.  There are numerous ways we show that mystery and wonder within the mass and the way we receive communion is one of those ways.  We submit to the teaching that “God initiates, we respond” by making sure that we receive communion, we don’t take communion.

That’s why when we receive, we do it one of two ways:

¨ If we receive on the hands, we make a throne with our hands: right hand under and left hand on top (if we are right handed).

¨ If we receive on the tongue, we make sure that we do so in a way that makes it easy to receive: chin up, tongue extended.

We do not take the host out of the priests hands, we receive.  This is why we don’t do what is called “Intinction”: taking the host and carrying it to the Precious Blood in order to dip it in: we receive.    Whatever way we receive, we want to be sure that we give a loud and clear “Amen” to the statement “The Body (or Blood) of Christ”.

We love each other…that’s part of being a family.  However, we want to be sure we show proper reverence and reflection when we process forward to receive Him.  The communion line is not a good time to socialize with those we walk by: we focus on Jesus in the Eucharist.

We avoid chewing gum during mass and make sure that, if we are distributing The Eucharist, we act with great love and reverence.

We help those who come to Church but are not Catholic.  We do so by explaining beforehand what the Eucharist is and why we ask those who are not Catholic to not receive it.  At every Church I’ve been assigned to, I (or others) have found the Sacred Host left laying on the floor or even enclosed in hymnals.  No one does something so disrespectful intentionally; they simply don’t know what to do.  We can help those we bring to Mass, or if we see someone who doesn’t seem to know what to do after receiving communion, we simply offer to take the Sacred Host and consume it.

It may be that we look this over and it sounds picky, but I promise you its not.  St. Paul tells us that “Whoever eats the flesh without considering it eats and drinks their condemnation”…wow.  It’s that important! So, I’m using this Feast as a time to remind us as a family to pause and make sure our familiarity with the Eucharist doesn’t unintentionally move into disrespect for this incredibly sacred and special gift from God.

May our love and reverence for the Eucharist translate into a deep love and reverence for each other!

God bless you!

Greetings in Christ!

May God bless our Memorial Day with a great gratitude for all those who died in service and defense of our country.  As Jesus said “No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

We’ve got a big one this weekend: Trinity Sunday.  This is the day when we Catholics celebrate a special mass to honor the unity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  The catechism defines the Trinity as “The Central Mystery of our Faith”…the trinity permeates so much of our worship and our theology that, honestly, we often miss it!  But, right there at the beginning of our mass we say “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, which is also the words we use to end our mass.  We believe that the three persons of the Trinity are so perfect in their love for each other and self giving that they are one.  Catholic marriage is an attempt by two humans to imitate that mystery and such a wonderful thing is only possible through the power and working of the Trinity: this is why we recognize marriage as a Sacrament.  I could go on and on and if you are at any of the masses I celebrate this weekend, I very well may!

We thank God that He is a community of persons who created us and recognize that this fact has placed within us a hunger for community.  May God bless and strengthen our efforts to love Him and each other by imitating the beauty of the Trinity.

Monday is Memorial Day and this is a big day for our country.  As Catholics we recognize the value of honoring the dead and we pray for them as well.  Let’s use this great day as a reminder to be grateful for those who have died in service to our country and also as a time to remember how important it is to pray for the dead.

I think it important that we pray together that day and, weather permitting, I am going to pray mass at the Sacred Heart Cemetery on Memorial day at 8am.  If you would like to come pray with me, bring a lawn chair or something to sit on and we will pray mass together back by the crucifix in the back of the cemetery.  If it is raining at 7am, then count on us NOT praying mass at 8 and I invite you to pray a Rosary for our dead.

Even though Fr. Dan is not leaving until July 1st, we have had our farewell parties for him.  Please be sure and thank him for his generous heart and wonderful presence among us these last few years.  As I typed a couple weeks ago, I would have been lost without him…what a great man.  Starting in August, it will be Fr. Tomy and I covering St. Mary on the Lake and Sacred Heart.  Fr. Tomy will also be helping at St. Anthony on Sunday nights.

Finally, I was genuinely touched and blown away by the response from both parish families in regard to DSA.  I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.  I actually had a few of you ask if there was a way to set up a monthly automatic donation for DSA and it turns out the diocese is working on that.  For my part, I am pledging $20.00 as month in perpetuity to the DSA as soon as it become available to us.  If we all do $10, $15 or $20 a month, we won’t even need to do a DSA pitch anymore and we’ll actually get money back from the diocese each year.  Please pray about this and, if you feel called, look for further updates here in the bulletin.

Whew!  it feels like I typed a lot this morning!  We are so blessed to be alive at such interesting times.

I am so very grateful to God for the gift he gave me in serving you.  Let’s be Saints.

Greetings in Christ, all!

What a wonderful Easter Season this has been.  Now, here we are at the Feast of Pentecost: the birthday of our Church.

What we celebrate this weekend is nothing less than the joy of the God giving us the gift of His Holy Spirit.

For many Catholics, we are not quite sure what to do with this gift.  We are not sure what the Holy Spirit is and how He can help us.  To that, we have been blessed to offer the Life in the Spirit seminars and, while we are wrapping up our first run of these sessions, we are offering more.  I simply cannot encourage all of us enough to check this out.  Keep your eyes and ears open for the next set of sessions: you will NOT be disappointed.

I wanted to take some space here and run through the summer with you.

Our schedule this summer is quite…interesting. There are a lot of different things going on that make our calendar quite challenging and what I ask is for your patience and understanding with the inevitable errors or changes that will come about as a result.

The biggest thing that is challenging us continues to be the lack of priests.  Fr. Tomy is stretched over Mt. Zion, St. Anthony’s and us and I continue to cover Sacred Heart, St. Mary on the Lake and St. Joseph in Adrian.  While the original plan was for that time at St. Joe’s to have ended in June, it remains unclear to me whether or not that will actually happen, as their new priest will not be arriving until August.

Beyond that, we are blessed to have a lot of marriages, baptisms and other such wonders and it is going to make our calendar interesting.

If you see something and wonder why we are doing it on such and such date when we should be doing it on another, know that we met for hours trying to figure this all out and have offered everyone our absolute best.

So…there it is.  We are beginning a wonderful and challenging run that we will give to God and ask Him to strengthen us for.

May God bless our efforts to worship Him, love Him and love each other more every day!

Greetings in Christ, all!

This blessed and holy Easter Season is drawing to a close: can you believe it?

I wanted to take this time to run the DSA by you for this year.  I had received some questions about why we are doing a DSA since we just did the big Witness to Hope Campaign and I thought this would be a good format to tackle it.  I understand people feeling frustrated or confused…especially at Sacred Heart, where we literally just finished the campaign.  I’ll ask us to think of two things when we think of DSA and then, at the end of this article, I’m going to ask everyone to consider a radical approach to our yearly DSA efforts.

The first thing is this: DSA is Diocesan Service Appeal and it is the way the diocese funds herself for the year.  They don’t have a parishes per se, they don’t have weekly collections, they are totally dependent on the yearly DSA collection to operate; they have no other means of funding.

The second thing is this: as you may remember from the handouts, the Witness to Hope campaign was done to accomplish two things: help parishes meet any extra needs they have and help the diocese shore up its numerous trusts and efforts to help people. At both parishes, we benefitted greatly from the Campaign, as the diocese basically footed the bill for our fundraisers.

So, here we are, as we are every year (except last year!) asking God’s People to chip in and help the diocese with its numerous offices and ministries.  At our Parish, we recognize that we are part of a bigger reality: we are a part of the diocese of Lansing and we need to do our part.

I want to pitch an idea that I hope will make it easy to hit our DSA goal every year and I am asking you with all my heart to consider this.  Every year, we meet our DSA because a couple people step up and write big checks.  For the most part, we do not have a large number of people participating and I’d love to change that.

Here is what I am getting to: if every family within our parish would commit to pledging $20.00 a month to the DSA, we would go over our goal and help our diocese.

In order for this to work, we would need everyone to participate…we would need everyone to commit to this and, if we did, we would easily make our goal.  To be clear, I hate asking for money.  I really do.  This time of year is one where my hunger to help us do our part clashes with the realization that money is tight and many people don’t like it when I ask.  But here is the thing: the diocese is not separate from us, it is a family we are part of and the diocese is counting on us to help them help us and all the other parishes in our diocese.

I am asking you to please challenge yourself and consider doing your part, especially if it is not your custom to participate in the DSA campaign.  Let’s not put all the burden on 5% of our parish family, but take it all on together.

I will be preaching on the DSA next weekend, May 19-20 and I will share some very specific examples of what your DSA dollars do…I think it will blow you away.

Please help me spread the word and this challenge…I would be so grateful.

God bless you…thank you for who you are and all you do.

I’m blessed.