FROM THE DESK OF THE PASTOR

March 26, 2026

LET US ENTER INTO THE HOLY WEEK WITH JOY AND HOPE! THIS SUNDAY IS PALM SUNDAY!

This weekend we begin Holy Week with Palm Sunday and the blessing of Palms at all the Masses. I urge you all to take part in all the major Liturgies of Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and the Easter Vigil. We, as Catholics, need to live this week differently, to orient our lives around these sacred mysteries this week, so that the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection might transform our lives throughout the rest of the year. Fast, pray, celebrate! Please set aside time in these days for family prayer, for spiritual reading, for acts of charity, and, with the resurrection, feasting and celebration. Most of all, plan to participate fully in these beautiful liturgies. They catch us up into the mysteries of the Lord’s saving love. Please be assured of my special prayers for you and your families this Holy Week.  May we turn to the Lord and be more deeply converted by his love!

Please note that this year at St. Jude we will be having two liturgies going on at the same time on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday. At 7pm both evenings, upstairs in the church will be the usual St Jude (Latin Rite) liturgies. Downstairs, our wonderful Syro Malabar Community will be having its own Holy Thursday and Good Friday liturgies.  We urge you to park in the upper lots and enter through the main doors for the St Jude liturgies.  We are asking the Syro Malabar community to use the lower lots and Parish Hall doors.  

I look forward to celebrating with you all in these Holy Days.

Blessings on your week!

Fr. Johnson

A few years ago, Pope Francis offered a marvelous reflection on St. Matthew’s account of the Passion which we will hear on Palm Sunday this year. I offer it to you below as a great way to reflect and prepare for Holy Week:

 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). This is the cry that today’s liturgy has us repeat in the responsorial psalm (cf. Ps 22:2), the only cry that Jesus makes from the cross in the Gospel we have heard. Those words bring us to the very heart of Christ’s passion, the culmination of the sufferings he endured for our salvation. “Why have you forsaken me?”. The sufferings of Jesus were many, and whenever we listen to the account of the Passion, they pierce our hearts. There were sufferings of the body: let us think of the slaps and beatings, the flogging and the crowning with thorns, and in the end, the cruelty of the crucifixion. There were also sufferings of the soul: the betrayal of Judas, the denials of Peter, the condemnation of the religious and civil authorities, the mockery of the guards, the jeering at the foot of the cross, the rejection of the crowd, utter failure and the flight of the disciples. Yet, amid all these sorrows, Jesus remained certain of one thing: the closeness of the Father. Now, however, the unthinkable has taken place. Before dying, he cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The forsakenness of Jesus.

 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the Bible, the word “forsake” is powerful. We hear it at moments of extreme pain: love that fails, or is rejected or betrayed; children who are rejected and aborted; situations of repudiation, the lot of widows and orphans; broken marriages, forms of social exclusion, injustice and oppression; the solitude of sickness. In a word, in the drastic severing of the bonds that unite us to others. There, this word is spoken: “abandonment”. Christ brought all of this to the cross; upon his shoulders, he bore the sins of the world. And at the supreme moment, Jesus, the only-begotten, beloved Son of the Father, experienced a situation utterly alien to his very being: abandonment, the distance of God.

Why did it have to come to this?  He did it for us. There is no other answer. For us. Brothers and sisters, today this is not merely a show. Every one of us, hearing of Jesus’ abandonment, can say: for me. This abandonment is the price he paid for me. He became one with each of us in order to be completely and definitively one with us to the very end. He experienced abandonment in order not to leave us prey to despair, in order to stay at our side forever. He did this for me, for you, because whenever you or I or anyone else seems pinned to the wall, lost in a blind alley, plunged into the abyss of abandonment, sucked into a whirlwind of so many “whys” without an answer, there can still be a hope: Jesus himself, for you, for me. It is not the end, because Jesus was there and even now, he is at your side. He endured the distance of abandonment in order to take up into his love every possible distance that we can feel. So that each of us might say: in my failings, and each of us has failed many times, in my desolation, whenever I feel betrayed or betrayed others, whenever I feel cast aside or have cast aside others, whenever I feel forsaken or have abandoned others, let us think of Jesus, who was abandoned, betrayed and cast aside. There, we find him. When I feel lost and confused, when I feel that I can’t go on, he is beside me. Amid all my unanswered questions “why...?”, he is there. POPE FRANCIS