Dear parishioners and visitors:

Please be aware that there will be a temporary change in our Confession times for the week of June 5th – 9th as our friars will be attending their chapter (meetings of the friars of the province.)

For June 5 – 9:

Confessions will be from:

11:00 AM to 12:00 Noon and 
4:30 PM to 5:30 PM

There will be no 8:00 to 9:00 AM Confessions this week.

Our Mass Schedule will stay the same:

7:30 AM, 12:00 PM and 5:30 PM

Dear Community and Friends of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi,

May the Lord give you peace.

Thank you for your participation in the Pentecost celebrations last weekend. The Masses were lively, and grace filled. I was delighted with the many children who joined us for masses over the weekend. It is good to hear the little voices during the Mass.

I ask your prayers for the friars this week. We will gather in Chapter as Holy Name Province for the last time. In October we will become a new province, Our Lady of Guadalupe, along with our brothers from five other provinces across the United States. Our gathering will be a time of remembering and celebrating the history of Holy Name Province and the many friars who have gone before us. We also give thanks for the young men who are beginning their journey with us as friars. The Church of St. Francis of Assisi has been central to the life of our Province. Many of us professed our Solemn Vows here. This has been the Provincial Headquarters for many years.

Fr. Dennis, Fr. Michael, and Fr. Frank will stay home to be sure that we are able to continue Mass and Confessions with you. We will not be available for confessions this week (Monday -Friday) at 8:00 AM.

Please be assured of the prayers of the friars for you as we gather. You are a great gift to us, and you have formed and shaped us over the years. I thank you for welcoming friars into your lives over the many years. A former Minister Provincial once noted that we are at our best when we are with people. You show us the love and grace of God.

Blessings and Peace, Fr. Tom, ofm

St. Francis of Assisi began live-streaming our daily and Sunday Masses immediately after the pandemic lock-down in March 2020. This new service allowed our parishioners and visitors to remain connected to the Word of God and the celebration of the Eucharist as best we could in those difficult days. Live-streaming continues to serve people who are homebound, people who live far who want to stay connected to St. Francis of Assisi, and people who like to watch daily Mass from their offices during the week.

We are committed to continue to provide this service to everyone.

We will continue to stream all of our Masses and special events to our website at:

and at our

You can also see an archive of our past Masses at the same YouTube page.

However, staring June 1, 2023 we will no longer stream our Masses to our Facebook page.

We are doing this in an effort to reclaim our Facebook page for posts related to live, faith, spirituality and parish events.  We hope that this will reduce clutter on our page so that our posts are easier to find and see in your feeds.

We are also doing this because livestream has less technical glitches when streamed directly to our website or YouTube.

Don’t worry. We are not going away.  You are invited to watch Mass online as often as you like in these two locations.

Dear Community and Friends of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi,

May the Lord give you peace.

This year our celebration of Pentecost coincides with Memorial Day. We give thanks for the gift of the Spirit always already given. In John’s Gospel, Jesus, in his encounter with the disciples in the locked room, offers them peace and inspires them with Holy Spirit. Jesus empowers the disciples to offer forgiveness in his name. In the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples
praying in the upper room are gifted with the Spirit. They immediately proclaim the Gospel’s message to people of various nations. Each understands the message with no language barrier.
As we link our celebration of Pentecost with the memorial of all those who have died for our nation. We are called again to accept the offer of peace in the Spirit and to embrace the variety of nations with the message of God’s overwhelming love.

Memorial Day is a solemn remembering of the pain and loss that so many have experienced. We remember families and friends who grieve the deaths of Service Women and Men. We keep
memory as we gather to tell their stories and bless them for their shared gifts. We also commit to working for peace as their legacy. The power and dynamism of the Spirit enable us to engage in the work of peace. The gift of the Spirit is God’s presence within and among us. It is the energy of God gracing us to do the good. St. Paul reminds us that we do not even know how to pray as we ought but the Spirit groans within us as our prayer. We feel the groaning for peace, for freedom from fear, and for hope in a future of freedom for all. Our constant prayer is the acceptance of the variety of gifts embodied in the many women and men of our world.

As the diverse crowd that heard the proclamation of the disciples on that first Pentecost, we, a diverse community, hear the message of God’s love for all anew. We each hear in the way that we are able to hear. Often at Pentecost, we pray for the coming of the Spirit, as if God is holding back. I have always wondered why we do this. The Spirit has already been given. Perhaps it would be better to pray that we accept the gift that God offers us, the sharing in divinity that is ours through the breath of God breathed into us as Spirit.

In openness to the Spirit, we embrace and nurture our gifts. We are each uniquely gifted, and sharing our gifts forms the community known as the Body of Christ. As we see in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, each person is essential to the Body. Each gifted person has the dignity of God’s Spirit. We are likewise the Communion of Saints; our Memorial Day reminds us of the grace that links us with all who have gone before us.

May they rest in peace and may we work for peace.

Blessings,

Fr. Tom, ofm