HAPPY EASTER

It is with great pleasure as the Youth Minister that I write this week’s bulletin letter. It was a great honor to see so many our teens Confirmed yesterday. Some of our candidates have been preparing by attending classes twice a month for two years. I am very proud of all our candidates and challenge them to follow the example set by their older peers in accepting the responsibilities that come with being Confirmed. These responsibilities are things such as becoming a Lector, Eucharistic Minister, or joining the choir. Confirmation is not graduation and we as a parish still want to see you around and involved!

Today I also challenge our parish as a whole. In the Gospel we hear the account of the journey on the road to Emmaus. Are we blinded and unable to find Jesus in everyday encounters? Do we worship a homeless person Sunday and neglect one the rest of the week? Finding Jesus in everyone we meet is NOT easy, but that is our challenge. Jesus tells us that it’s easy to love our friends, the challenge is to love our enemies. We are called to love our neighbors. But we may ask, who is our neighbor? As Fr. Healy recently said, “ our neighbor is not just the person at our BBQ, but rather everyone.”

This task may seem daunting and it is in no means easy. I know I fail at this. But it’s okay to fail and fall, we’re human. The question is do we use failures as a learning experience to grow from or as a setback? Our Heavenly Father knows we’re not perfect, nor do we have to be. There is only one perfect being, God. Jesus will always love and forgive, as we saw by Him forgiving those who nailed Him to the cross.

This Easter Season, may this be our prayer. That we may forgive wholeheartedly, meet Jesus in all that we encounter, and make strangers a friend waiting to be discovered.

We Are All The Same: a story of a Boy’s Courage and a Mother’s Love, by Jim Wooten, is the next book for discussion. This is the book Msgr. Dreier mentioned in his homily last month.

Join St. Robert’s TIPPS on
Saturday, April 23rd
Happy Hollow Park and Zoo!!
(located just off Hwy 280 in San Jose)
www.hhpz.org

Happy Hollow has lots of activities for young children and toddlers. The Pirate's Cove picnic area is reserved from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Bring a picnic lunch or enjoy the snack bar. Our group rate is $5 per adult and child over 2. Free for children under 2. Parking is $6. For those wishing to leave together, we will meet in St. Robert's small parking lot at 9:30 a.m.

Please contact Andrew or Ana Kimoto or email ajkimoto@sanbrunocable.com for reservations and directions. Feel free to invite new TIPPSters

§pecial Note:

SOCIABLES

Let’s try something different.

Dinner

April 24th
At 5 p.m.
El Torita Resaurant
1590 Bayshore Blvd.
Burlingame

We are scheduled for the 2nd Wednesday of each month. If you can prepare a favorite cookie, snack or lunch item for 10 to 12 people, please drop it off at the Children's Chapel, in the back of Church, by 9 a.m. on April 13th. Please pack the items in a non-returnable container. Frozen items can be donated.

Many religious groups are concerned that the federal budget which reflects the values and priorities of the nation is anything but moral. The proposed federal budget includes a 1.6 TRILLION dollar tax cut for the wealthiest Americans while 12 million households are judged “food insecure” in the past year by a study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. WIC (Women, Infants and Children), food stamps and child nutrition programs are subject to .83% budget cuts. (WIC, for example, one of the most effective and well-administered programs ever provides healthy, protein-rich food vouchers and stands to be cut by $44 million.) Medicaid, child care and foster care are also to be cut. Discretionary programs such as education, medical care for veterans, and low-income housing are also slated for deep cuts. The deficit reduction needs to be fairly shared and not borne by the poor who can least afford it and didn’t cause the deficit in the first place. According to the Center for budget and Policy Priorities, military spending, Homeland Security and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented 29% of the FY 2004 deficit, while 58% can be attributed to the tax cuts for upper-income citizens. Only 12% represents increases in domestic spending.

So very much has been said and written about the amazing life and faith-filled death of our Holy Father that it almost seems presumptuous to write anything about him. No doubt, there will be books written by those who knew him well. He will be remembered for his stress on a “culture of life,” a term unfortunately co-opted by some politicians to gain votes, but by him to mean the profound respect we have for the human person from the moment of conception to natural death. I want to simply focus on three other aspects of his life. He put a high priority on evangelization – spreading the good news, the gospel of Jesus - and he called the whole Church to look again at revitalizing our own faith, inviting back those who have left, and reaching out to persons who don’t belong to any Church community. His travels, even when sickness caused him to tire more easily, were not for his own glory, but so that people in poor countries would know of his concern for their suffering and that people in rich countries would be reminded of the seductive dangers of materialism. How pleased he must be that in his death the values of the Church are being broadcast worldwide to those who otherwise might not have heard the message of Jesus! In death, he is reaching more people than the millions he reached in life.

Like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, John Paul II left us an example of how to die. And like Cardinal Bernardin who forgave the young man who slandered him, he publicly forgave Ali Agca, the young man who tried to kill him. Many of the values we hold as a Church come from our Jewish roots and are common to Buddhism, Hinduism and other world religions. Scholars have suggested that forgiveness is the unique Christian virtue, lived out so evidently by Jesus on the cross. John Paul II was humble enough to ask forgiveness, in the name of the whole Church, from the Jewish people of today who are still unfairly blamed by some Christians for the death of Jesus. He also asked forgiveness from the leaders of the Orthodox Church whose separation from us is an historical embarrassment, begging to be healed.