Dear Parish Family & Friends,
We have been hitting the Solemnities quite hard this month! Just on Friday we celebrated one of our Diocesan feasts, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. A few days earlier, the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Now, today, we celebrate the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul. What's interesting is that the Church has found it important enough to celebrate this feast day (always falling on June 29), that it replaces the celebration of the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
These two men are the pillars of the Church of Rome, having both gone there in response to the Lord's call, and both being martyred there out of love for Christ. Their burial places now underlie two of the four main basilicas in Rome – the universally known St. Peter in Vatican City, and St. Paul Outside the Walls.
As an older priest mentor would say sometimes: We have the bones! Perhaps this seems a bit macabre, but the reality is that the bones of these men give deep witness to our faith as handed down to us over the last 2,000 years. The stories of the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth – God and Man – and the ramifications of his life, death, and resurrection, are concretely manifest in the remains of these two great Saints. It's fact, not fiction.
Sts. Peter and Paul, pray for us!
-Fr. Kennell