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This Wednesday, March 5, is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten Season. Lent is a campaign for holiness, both personally and communally, inviting us to turn more deeply to Christ through repentance and ongoing conversion of life. The Lenten season is built upon the three spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and the works of mercy. These disciplines are given to us as a means of making a more personal response to the Lord who Himself calls us to undertake this 40-day campaign. We have various activities and events that our parish sponsors during Lent to help nurture your relationship with Christ in the Church, community, and the service of others.  Please join us this Lent in our striving for Christ, and through Him, renewal in mission and greater holiness of life.

Although this memorial is an optional one on the liturgical calendar, I believe it is good for us as a parish under the patronage of Mary Immaculate to celebrate it since it was to St. Bernadette Soubirous, a poor French peasant girl, that Our Lady identified Herself as the Immaculate Conception. The apparitions began on this day in 1858. Bernadette was collecting firewood for her family's home at the grotto of Massabielle. Suddenly, she saw a young Lady, shining like the sun, standing in a small niche in the grotto. Bernadette would see "the Lady" 18 times altogether. During the final apparition, Bernadette asked the Lady for her name. According to Bernadette, the Lady bowed her head, lifted her hands toward heaven, and said, "I am the Immaculate Conception". Bernadette did not understand what the Lady meant by this. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception - that Mary had been preserved from original sin and its effects from the first moment of her conception - had been defined by Pope Pius IX just four years earlier. The Lady Herself ratified the proclamation of the dogma and confirmed the truth of Her Immaculate Conception.