My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I hope you had a Blessed Labor Day Weekend last weekend.  Labor Day is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of American Workers and we are grateful for all that work that was done to lay the foundation of our community and country.

I would like to take this moment in my column to re member the victims of the tragedy at Annunciation School in Minneapolis. As a Catholic school community, we unite in prayer and stand in hope for all those affected—the students, families, teachers, and parish. May our prayers bring them comfort and strength.

Mary Our Queen Catholic School celebrated its 60th Anniversary on Aug 30th.  We will continue our celebrations over the course of our School year in recognition of all the sacrifices Msgr. Kenny and our founding members made that allows us to continue to grow as a community.  We had an Alumni gathering on Friday September 5th.

If you are able to read this column before Saturday, Mary Our Queen will be having our Fall Festival on September 6th beginning with Outdoor Mass at 4pm.  We hope that you are able to join us for an evening of fun and fellowship with our Family of Parishes.

We will be beginning a new season of OCIA (formally known as RCIA ) The OCIA is the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults for those wanting to learn more about our Catholic faith.  It is a time of reflection, prayer, instruction, discernment and formation.  If you are interested in learning more about our Catholic faith, please see our bulletin for more details.

We will soon be beginning our Religious Education Program for both St John Vianney and Mary Our Queen.  While there have been changes that were needed to be made in part due to the availability of religious education teachers and the number of students signing up for our Religious Education programs, we are still able to offer two different sessions of Religious Education in our Family of Parishes. 4:30pm at St John Vianney and 5:30pm at Mary Our Queen.  We continue make changes to our Programs that allows us to grow the faith life of our families that we hope will continue to shape the faith life of our communities for our future.

For our Religious Education Program at St John Vianney, we will be offering the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our first and second graders of our program this year.  Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is a Montessori-based religious formation program for children.  It seeks to create and facilitate a sacred, hands-on space called an atrium, in which both the children and their catechists can hear, ponder, and celebrate the most essential mysteries of the Christian faith as revealed in the Scriptures and the Liturgy.  The atrium is a space where the child develops his/her relationship with God, a relationship which already exists.  Mary Our Queen has been offering the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd since the opening of our Early Childhood Education and Youth Center.

Please keep September 28 free for a Tailgate Cookout at St John Vianney.  This event will begin after the 10:30am Mass.  It will be an afternoon of fun and of course Football (The Chiefs plays their game at 3:25pm).  There will be a bouncy house, and a party game of cake walk for families to have fun together.  Please join us if you can.

Blessed week ahead,

Fr Marc

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