All windows have been sponsored! Thank you to the following window sponsors!

Modern Day Saints
Blessed Boleslawa Maria Lament ~
    George & Patricia Ferfecki
St. Damien of Molokai~ Joseph & Mary Kinsey
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton ~ Jane Hill Hiers
St. Faustina Kowalska ~
     Bernas, Bunn-Thomas & Hedberg Family
St. Frances Cabrini~ Mike and Lillian Scarborough
Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko ~ The Blaszkowski Family
St. John XXIII ~ William & Shelley Marchese
St. John Neumann ~ St. Luke Biblical School
St. John Paul II ~ Donald McColl
St. Kateri Tekakwitha ~ Bill & Pat Noll
St. Katharine Drexel~St. Luke Music Ministry
St. Maximilian Kolbe ~ The Montalbano Family
St. Padre Pio ~ Jose & Maria Rodriguez
St. Paul VI ~ The Wiggins Family
St. Teresa of Calcutta ~ Parish Outreach
St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) ~
     Jeanne Heppner

Witnesses to the Resurrection
Peter ~ Dan & Kathleen Foster
Paul ~ Marie Berning
Mark ~ Anna Zirbel
Luke ~ Robert Rumble
John ~ Ronnie Gladden
Matthew ~ Don Biroschik, CPA PA & Family
Angel ~ Matthew & Kristen Barreto
Angel ~ St. Luke Child Care Center
Mary Magdalene~Paticia Poljak
2 Women (Joanna and Mary, mother of James)~ Theresa Tocco

**Updated 6/20/18

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Dear Parishioners and friends,
It is with great joy, that after collaboration with the Pastor’s Advisory Team, I introduce to our parish community the new Stained Glass Window Project:

 Modern Day Saints and Witnesses to the Resurrection
 
This exciting fundraiser includes two aspects:

• Individual/group donations for the 26 stained glass windows through a bidding process.
• A parish-wide fundraiser for two community windows through envelope contributions.

Modern Day Saints Windows
The 16 upper windows inside the main nave of the church will capture the Modern Day Saints Theme. The reason behind this is for the saints to intercede, assist, inspire and support us on our way to evangelize. At the end of every Mass, we are commissioned to “go and to proclaim the Gospel of the Lord.” As we process out at the end of every Mass to fulfill that call, it is the Modern Day Saints who lived their lives most faithfully and courageously to proclaim the Good News, that today and now can inspire us to do the same.

Witnesses to the Resurrection Windows
The 10 upper windows in the gathering area of the church will focus on the witness of the Risen Lord. The beautiful Stained Glass Window of the Resurrection that is located on the front wall of the church will draw attention to these men and women in a very significant way as they witnessed the Glory of the Resurrection personally and as it is written in the Gospel according to St. Luke.

Community Windows: Sacred Heart of Jesus & Immaculate Heart of Mary
We invite everyone to participate in this exciting fundraiser! To extend the opportunity for each parishioner to be a part of this memorable and once in a lifetime project, in addition to the individual windows, we have created 4 community windows that will depict the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary. A special plaque in the gathering area of the church will identify the donors.

As I pray for the success of this project that will continue to enhance the beauty of the worship space of our church and lead us to experience the good, true, and beautiful in very meaningful ways, all profits from this project will go to directly to support the future Bell Tower at our church.

May the Modern Day Saints and Witnesses to the Resurrection pray and inspire each one of us with generosity to support the future growth of our parish.
With prayers,
Fr. Andy Blaszkowski
Pastor 

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Modern Day Saints

Blessed Bolesława Maria Lament ~ 1862 -1946    
FEAST  January  29   

A Polish Roman Catholic professed religious and the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family. Lament worked as a seamstress and soon joined a religious order though left just prior to her profession upon experiencing vocational doubts; she returned to her life as a seamstress and worked with two of her sisters to support their siblings and widowed mother. The death of her seminarian brother prompted her to return to the religious life - the Blessed Honorat Koźmiński encouraged this return - and she later founded an order that soon spread and took her to Russia, though its revolution forced her departure during World War I. Lament's beatification opened under Pope Paul VI on 5 April 1975 (she was titled as a Servant of God) and Pope John Paul II later confirmed her heroic virtue and named her as Venerable in 1991; the same pope beatified Lament while in Poland in 1991.
 
St. Damien of Molokai ~ 1840 - 1889   
FEAST  May 10      

Born in Tremelo, Belgium, Joseph de Veuster left school at 13 to work on the family farm. Six years later he joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, taking the name Damien. He volunteered for a mission to the Hawaiian Islands and was ordained in Honolulu in 1864. He served on the island of Hawaii for eight years, then volunteered in 1873 to work at the leprosy colony on Molokai (leprosy is now called Hansen’s disease). Father Damien was priest, doctor and counselor to 800 patients before he contracted the disease in 1884. He stayed on Molokai, ministering until a month before his death. Considered a model and martyr of charity, he was canonized in 2009.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton ~ 1774 - 1821   
FEAST  January 4   

Raised Episcopalian in colonial New York City, Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, a merchant. The couple had five children. William died in 1803 in Italy, where Elizabeth learned about Catholicism from the family who gave her hospitality. Wars had bankrupted the family’s shipping business. After becoming a Catholic in New York in 1805, the now-poor Elizabeth was abandoned by old friends, but accepted the offer of a Baltimore priest to open a school for girls there. In 1809 she founded the U.S. Sisters of Charity, whose schools and orphanages grew in number. She became the first native-born U.S. saint in 1975 and is the patron of converts.

St. Faustina Kowalska ~ 1905 - 1938     
FEAST  October 5    
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The visionary called the apostle of divine mercy deferred a religious calling to help her poor Polish family with her earnings as a housekeeper. She entered the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in 1925, serving in Krakow, Plock and Vilnius as a cook, gardener and porter until her early death from tuberculosis. After reporting her visions of Jesus as the divine mercy, she was ordered to have a psychiatric evaluation and the church posthumously condemned her 700-page diary. Her fellow Pole, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, championed her cause and had the ban removed after a retranslation; later, as Pope John Paul II, he canonized her and designated the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday churchwide. 

St. Frances Cabrini ~ 1850-1917   
FEAST  November 13    

In 1946, Mother Cabrini was the first U.S. citizen to be canonized; she is the universal patron of immigrants. She was born in Italy, the youngest of 13 children, and became a schoolteacher. Denied admission to two religious orders because of frail health, she was given charge of an orphanage in Codogno. In 1880 she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart with seven of her former orphans. The order spread rapidly from northern Italy to Rome, and then in 1889 to New York City, where Mother Cabrini became famous for her work among Italian immigrants. Before dying of malaria in Chicago, she had opened schools, orphanages and hospitals around the United States, South America and Europe.

Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko ~ 1947-1984
FEAST  October 19

Polish Roman Catholic priest who became associated with the opposition Solidarity trade union in communist Poland. He was murdered in 1984 by three agents of Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), who were shortly thereafter tried and convicted of the murder. He has been recognized as a martyr by the Roman Catholic Church, and was beatified on 6 June 2010 by Archbishop Angelo Amato on behalf of Pope Benedict XVI. A miracle attributed to his intercession and required for his canonization is now under investigation.

St. John XXIII ~ 1881-1963
FEAST  June 3 
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Ordained a priest in Italy in 1904, Angelo Roncalli was a medic and chaplain in World War I. He served as a Vatican diplomat in Bulgaria, Turkey and France before being named a cardinal and patriarch of Venice in 1953. Elected pope in 1958, he convened the Second Vatican Council and issued the famous encyclical “Pacem in Terris” just months before his death from stomach cancer. In the book “Last Words,” Pope John is quoted as saying to family members by his deathbed, “Do you remember how I never thought of anything else in life but being a priest?”

St. John Neumann ~ 1811-1860
FEAST  January 5 

A native of Bohemia, John entered the seminary and was nearing ordination when he departed for the United States. He joined the Redemptorists and served as a priest in New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In 1852 he was named the fourth bishop of Philadelphia. He founded more than 50 churches and greatly expanded Catholic education. John had a fondness for immigrants and knew six languages. His pastoral zeal was evident up to his last moments of life. He collapsed and died in the street at age 48.

St. John Paul II ~ 1920 - 2005 
FEAST  October 22 
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When this popular pope died, crowds in St. Peter’s Square chanted “santo subito” (“sainthood now”). The Vatican heard, and the sainthood cause for the jet-setting pontiff who helped bring down European communism was put on the fast track; he was beatified in 2011. A Pole and former actor shaped by World War II and the Cold War, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. In his 26-year pontificate, he evangelized on trips to 129 countries, upheld traditional church doctrine against dissent, connected with the world’s youth, and named more than 450 new saints. He also modeled Christian values by forgiving his would-be assassin and living an increasingly frail old age in public.
 
St. Kateri Tekakwitha ~ 1656-1680 
FEAST  July 14 

At her canonization in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI prayed, “St. Kateri, protectress of Canada and the first Native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the First Nations and in all of North America!” The daughter of a Mohawk chief and Algonquin woman, Kateri was orphaned in a smallpox epidemic that left her partially blind and disfigured. She was baptized by a French missionary visiting her village in New York state. But, her faith and refusal to marry caused trouble, and she fled to an Indian community near Montreal, where she was revered by French and Indians alike for her mystical gifts and kindness. The “Lily of the Mohawk” is the patron of Native Americans, refugees and the disabled.

St. Katharine Drexel ~ 1858 - 1955 
FEAST  March 3   

The daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia banker, Katharine received marriage proposals but wanted to become a contemplative nun. After inheriting a fortune, she visited the Dakotas and witnessed American Indians’ poverty, subsequently pleading with Pope Leo XIII to send them more missionaries. But he and others encouraged her to found a congregation to work among people of color. In 1891, she and 13 companions became the first Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. For more than 40 years, she led the order, using her fortune to establish numerous missions and schools for Indians and African Americans. Following a major heart attack in 1935, she retired to a life of prayer. Canonized in 2000, she is the patron of home missions.
 
St. Maximilian Kolbe ~ 1894 - 1941       
FEAST  August 14 
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Raimund Kolbe, born in Russian Poland, was ordained a Franciscan, Maximilian Mary, in Rome. In the 1920s, he reopened a ruined Polish friary, started a Marian press and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Despite his illness, he had successful Marian missions to Japan and India before returning to Poland in 1936. After the 1939 invasion of Poland, the Franciscans’ criticism of the occupiers prompted the arrest of Maximilian and four others, who ended up in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. Maximilian volunteered for martyrdom, taking the place of a married man being executed by starvation. This man was present at the saint’s 1982 canonization. Maximilian is the patron of prisoners, journalists and others.

St. Padre Pio (Pio of Pietrelcina) ~ 1887-1968   
FEAST  September 23 
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Born in an Italian farming village, Francesco Forgione gained worldwide fame as Capuchin friar Padre Pio, who bore the stigmata, or wounds of Christ, invisibly from the time of his ordination in 1910 and visibly from 1918. As his renown as a confessor grew, the Vatican investigated the genuineness of his stigmata and ministry of prayer and healing. At San Giovanni Rotondo, he built a hospital to treat patients using prayer and science, as well as a pilgrimage and study complex. Shortly before his death, the stigmata disappeared. He was canonized in 2002.
 
St. Paul VI ~ 1987-1978                   
FEAST  September 26

Born Giovanni Battista Montini, near Brescia, Italy—beatified October 19, 2014; Italian pope of the Roman Catholic church (reigned 1963–78) during a period including most of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the immediate postconciliar era, in which he issued directives and guidance to a changing Roman Catholic church. His pontificate was confronted with the problems and uncertainties of a church facing a new role in the contemporary world.

St. Teresa of Calcutta ~ 1910-1997
FEAST  September 5

Born in Macedonia, Mother Teresa helped India’s destitute for more than 50 years and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. In answering a call to serve “the poorest of the poor,” she became known as “the saint of the gutters.” The former Loreto sister founded the Missionaries of Charity, which now has more than 4,500 nuns worldwide, and co-founded the Missionary Brothers of Charity. Since 1952 her Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for the Dying has cared for thousands of people abandoned on Calcutta’s streets. She was beatified in 2003
 
 
St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) ~ 1891-1942  
FEAST  August 9 
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The youngest of 11 children of a devout Jewish mother in Wroclaw, Poland, Edith was an atheist by her teens. After studying philosophy in Germany, she was deeply affected by reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Baptized a Catholic in 1922, she joined the Discalced Carmelites in Cologne in 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Fleeing the Nazis, she moved to a convent in Echt, Netherlands, but was arrested with non-Aryan Christians after the Dutch bishops protested Nazi deportations. She was martyred at Auschwitz.​​​​​​​
 

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Witnesses to the Resurrection