July 16, 2023 - Pastor Message
04/30/2024THE YEAR OF MISSION
OUR VALUES
“Christ Jesus, bless us as you blessed our patron, St. Boniface, so that, by carrying out the mission entrusted to us, our parish will yield a bountiful harvest of passionate disciples, united to you by the sacraments and sent by you to further your mission.
Christ Jesus, enable us to reap this bountiful harvest by staying rooted in the good soil of the basic principles in which we as a parish believe” (Our parish’s Vision and Values statements).
We have been reflecting this year on our parish’s mission, what Jesus calls us as a parish to do in order to achieve what he has called us to achieve, our parish’s vision. In order to carry out our mission and so achieve our vision, we need some basic principles to guide and direct our efforts, some boundaries within which to operate to ensure we stay on target. While the most basic of those principles come from God in his Word and the teachings of the Church, we need to translate and apply those God-given principles to our parish’s specific situation. This is what we find in our parish’s Values statement, which you can read on the front cover of the bulletin every week.
Like our Mission and Vision statements, our Values statement is the product of much prayerful discernment which we did together as a parish in 2016-17. The statement professes six basic principles which we believe must guide our efforts to serve our mission if we would achieve our vision. Each principle reflects core actions and attitudes to which we as a parish are committed. These actions and attitudes form the foundation of all our actions in the service of our mission, and every action we take, whether in parish ministries, organizations, and activities or in our daily lives, should stand solidly on all of them.
Over the next several weeks, I will reflect in this column on the principles expressed in our Values statement. We begin this week with the first principle: “We are a parish who prays, studies, and acts in accord with the Scriptures and the traditions of the Catholic Church and the Diocese of Erie.” This statement expresses our commitment to carry out our mission within a larger community of faith that stretches far beyond our own limited time and place.
St. Boniface Parish does not exist all by itself to serve its own purposes. We are a living expression of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, revealed in Scripture, expounded upon by the teachings of the Church, and now incarnate in our time and place in and through us. As members of Christ’s Body, the Church, we are united to him and, by him, to all other members of his Body throughout the world. Like all bodies, to accomplish its purpose the Body of Christ is not disjointed but bound together in one harmonious whole, each part in its divinely ordained place and organized to act together to accomplish our one, common purpose.
Christ established his Church in a hierarchical order, placing at its head his chosen shepherds, the Apostles, under the leadership of Peter, the rock on whom he would build his Church. Christ breathed his Spirit over them, entrusting them with his own authority to sanctify, teach, and govern his people. Exercising that authority as servant leaders, they gave form to the Church and appointed successors to faithfully build it up when they were gone. The successors of the Apostles, the bishops, continue that work today under the leadership of the successor of Peter, the pope. Together, they sanctify, teach, and govern their respective regional expressions of the Church, dioceses, and the local expression of the dioceses, parishes, all in the same Spirit in which Christ established his Church through the Apostles 2000 years ago. We at St. Boniface are part of that same Body and are committed to do all that we do as faithful members of it. That is the meaning of the first principle of our Values statement.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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