A Note From Father Eickhoff
January 12, 2025
Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. This feast marks the end of the Christmas Season in the Church. After today the Church returns to Ordinary Time and the color green, the Christmas decorations are taken down, and the music during the Mass switches from the familiar Christmas tunes to what I like to think of as “standard Catholic music.” This is also a good day to ponder for a moment your own baptism. Now, I don’t expect you to remember your own baptism – unless of course you were baptized as an older child or an adult – but rather to think about what baptism means for you as a child of God. Baptism is indeed the moment of being adopted forever as a son or daughter of God. Meditate on that statement for a moment and ponder what it means. You, who are otherwise a puny, short-lived creature on one little planet in the cosmos, become in the moment of the Sacrament of Baptism part of the very family of the creator of the universe. That is an extraordinary thought. A thought so outrageous that in any other context you would sweep it out of your mind. And yet, through the words of Jesus Christ, through the words of the Scriptures, through the words of the Apostles; we don’t just accept this thought to be true, we strive to live our lives by it. Every time we walk into a church and bless ourselves with holy water, we are reminding ourselves of our baptism and of our kinship with God.
In other news:
Starting with the new year we will begin announcing with the Prayers of the Faithful the names of those persons who have died and will have or have already had funeral masses said for them here at St. Anne Parish. There will also be a notice in the bulletin listing the names of these same persons who have died and the day and time of the funeral mass if applicable (if applicable, meaning if the funeral mass is still in the future when the bulletin is distributed).
There is a tradition in the Church that the dates for the moveable feasts of the Church (that is those feast days that don’t have a specific date in the calendar but rather appear on different dates each year depending on the lunar calendar) starting with Easter are announced to the congregation at the end of the Christmas Season. So with that in mind here are the dates for the important feasts of the Church for the year 2025:
Ash Wednesday – March 5th
Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week – April 13th
Easter Sunday – April 20th
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Stephen Eickhoff
Pastor