Thursday, 19 November 2009 10:11

Stewardship is not a church program, it is a way of life and a mission for all Christians
A conversation with Bishop Michael O. Jackels
The TOGETHER vision aims to deepen our practice of stewardship as a way of life, sharing responsibility for the mission of the Church.
Stewardship is one of the goals of the TOGETHER vision partly because stewardship is a way of life and not just a church program.
It’s not something that’s optional for anybody who is a Christian. And just like the knowledge that we have of Jesus and His Church, we have to deepen our understanding and practice of stewardship. It is ongoing and will remain ongoing.
Stewardship is a part of anything and everything we do in the sense that it guides and inspires what we do, and it also puts limits on what we do.
If in achieving the fundraising goals of the TOGETHER vision we harm or hinder the sense of oneness in our diocese or our practice of stewardship, then we have failed.

Thursday, 15 October 2009 08:25

A conversation with Bishop Michael O. Jackels
One of the challenges for all Christians is to understand who we are in relation to God and others.

There is no solitary Christian. As soon as you profess faith and are baptized, you belong to the Body of Christ, the Church, the community of believers, the family of God, which transcends space and time.

We belong to the Diocese of Wichita, which is shepherded by the Bishop, who invites everyone to participate in the liturgy of thanksgiving and praise in the Cathedral.

You might be a parishioner of Baxter Springs, or Bushton or Zenda or Fort Scott, but you also are a member of the Cathedral Parish in the sense that it is the mother church of the Diocese. And ideally that’s where we would worship if we could.

So there is a spiritual connection between each member of the diocesan family and the Cathedral church.

Thursday, 17 September 2009 06:30

A conversation with Bishop Michael O. Jackels
Editor’s note: The TOGETHER vision includes a special appeal that aims to benefit seminarian education, the St. Katharine Drexel Catholic School Fund, the St. Maria De Mattias Endowment Fund and a renovation of the Cathedral campus.
The St. Maria De Mattias Endowment Fund is a grant program with the potential to benefit individuals or groups or parishes all together. The only limit is our creativity in developing innovative programs and identifying resources to help us grow in our understanding of the faith.
Why do you need to grow in your understanding of the faith?
It would be a gross error and disservice for any member of the Church to describe himself or herself as an old dog incapable of learning new tricks. That axiom does not apply to us because as long as we live, we grow – physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Our faith is an essential part of the relationship that we have with God.
Imagine if a wife said of her husband or a husband of his wife, “I don’t need to or want to learn any more about this person. I know all there is to know.” It would be foolish to make such a statement. And if they did, their relationship would stop growing. And if it stops growing, it will end.
The same applies to our relationship of faith with God. If it stops growing, it will end.
We have to look for opportunities to grow that relationship through some kind of study. It is not enough to learn to be able to site scripture. Even the devil can site scripture, and he didn’t love God.
Any kind of faith-related study should lead us to prayer, which is the purest expression of our relationship with God. Our study should also lead to some kind of lived-out action, such as humble service or forgiveness.
If we fail to grow our relationship of faith, we stand the risk of losing something of incomparable value. The St. De Mattias fund enables people to develop programs; to participate in programs and to have resources available to grow that relationship.
One of the first questions of the Baltimore catechism is “Why did God make me?” God made you to know him, love him, and serve him, so as to be happy with him in this world and in the next.
So the St. De Mattias fund provides means by which we can fulfill a divine purpose for our creation – ultimately to be happy with God in heaven for all eternity but also to be happy in this life with God. And that happiness is rooted in knowing God.

Goals of the TOGETHER vision
• Strengthen the oneness between parish and Diocese.
• Deepen our practice of stewardship as a way of life, sharing responsibility for the mission of the Church.
• Invite everyone to help fund seminarian education, Catholic formation programs and a renovation of the Cathedral campus.

Thursday, 20 August 2009 08:26

A conversation with Bishop Jackels
Just as we are continually called to a deeper faith or a greater practice of our faith, the same can be said about stewardship. It can always be deeper or greater.
A parish may need assistance because not all the parishioners are practicing stewardship as a way of life. But some parishes may need assistance – even if they are extraordinary in their practice of stewardship – because there is a lower amount to tithe from. Ten percent of 10 dollars doesn’t go as far as 10 percent of 100 dollars or 1,000 dollars.
So there are parishes that may struggle to carry out the mission of the Church in their parish – particularly a Catholic school.
The St. Katharine Drexel Catholic School Fund was set up to help those parishes. All Catholics – and even those who aren’t Catholic – throughout the Diocese are invited to contribute to this fund.
You are invited even if you belong to a parish that does not have a school, if you do not have children, or if your parish school does not rely on funds from the St. Drexel fund because we are not Catholics just unto ourselves.

Thursday, 06 August 2009 07:13

Project reflects Bishop’s TOGETHER vision
A groundbreaking ceremony for the 2009 Apostle Build will be held at 1:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 21.
Apostle Build is a project of Wichita metro Catholic parishes, institutions and organizations to pool resources to build one home every October in cooperation with Wichita Habitat for Humanity.
Tama Dutton, director of the diocesan Respect Life and Social Justice Office, said Apostle Build is not only a way for the faithful to participate in a corporal work of mercy, the project is also a reflection of the TOGETHER vision.
“Bishop Jackels wants to strengthen the oneness among the parishes of the diocese,” Dutton said, “in addition to deepening our practice of stewardship as a way of life. Apostle Build does all that and allows us to practice social justice.”

Thursday, 16 July 2009 10:03

A conversation with Bishop Jackels
We teach others to know, love, serve God.
Catholic formation programs are included in the TOGETHER vision because teaching is one of the three tasks or offices of the church: worship, teaching and service.
Catholic formation is also a part of TOGETHER because of the primacy that teaching and learning has.
We want people to serve God.
We want young men to hear God’s call to the priesthood and young women to religious life. We want other people to recognize their marriage as a vocation from God, and we want everyone – all the baptized – to recognize their share in the responsibility for the mission of the church to serve in that capacity.
But that service, whether you are talking about vocation or mission, can’t be forced. It is inspired by love.

Thursday, 18 June 2009 07:55

A conversation with Bishop Jackels
One hundred years ago the people of this Diocese sacrificed greatly to build this world-class Cathedral, and it is an expression of our living as good stewards to honor that and to preserve it.
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception is in need of attention. If we don’t give that attention, it will deteriorate. And so that would be reason enough for a renovation of the Cathedral to be included in the TOGETHER vision.
But our mother church is also a part of TOGETHER because it is an expression of who we are. The Cathedral reflects the community of the faithful in the Catholic Diocese of Wichita.
We practice our faith in and with a parish community, but also as part of a diocesan family and a Church that is universal.

Thursday, 14 May 2009 08:51

In coming issues of the Catholic Advance each of TOGETHER’s vision goals will be examined.
God has blessed us with a large number of seminarians, which results in a large bill to educate our seminarians.
So seminarian education is part of the TOGETHER vision beginning with that very practical reason, but it’s also part of the TOGETHER vision because we can’t fully practice our Catholic faith without the life and ministry of priests.
The Catholic Church is what is called a hierarchical church, which means that priests play an essential role of sanctifying, teaching and leading or governing.
Fr. Ned Blick, who is currently serving as an Army chaplain in Baghdad, recently wrote that he was “traveling to Basra, an Army base that has 2,000 Catholics who had not seen a priest in more than two months.” Now if you go and ask those soldiers, who are perhaps in life and death situations, if it matters whether or not you have a priest, they will tell you it matters a great deal.

Thursday, 30 April 2009 08:26

TOGETHER: We gather. We learn. We serve. These words have a very specific meaning in the Catholic Diocese of Wichita.
We gather. We learn. We serve.
“We gather” refers to the assembly gathered in church for worship especially on Sunday because that is an assembly that is Church. That is the Church in a church.
The fathers of the second Vatican council said that if you want to see the real picture of the true Church, then you look at that gathering of the faithful in a Sunday assembly for worship. That’s who we are. And that’s the most important thing we do. That assembly is the source and summit of our Christian lives or the indispensable source of the true Christian spirit.
First of all, we aren’t true to ourselves if we don’t gather there. So missing Mass on Sunday is not just breaking a church law. It is being false. It is pretending to be something that you are not.
Secondly, that’s where we derive the true Christian spirit. That’s going to influence how we live outside of church.
We go from that assembly to learn and to teach. You have to first learn in order to teach. And the object or the end of teaching is to learn. And our principle mission is to form disciples of Christ.
We go from that assembly to serve the needs of others, whether they are the needs of those within our parish community or our diocese or the needs of those outside of the church community like those who come to the Lord’s Diner for a hot meal and hospitality.
So that gathering is absolutely significant for all things. Without it, whatever our endeavor might be, will fail.

Thursday, 16 April 2009 10:00

TOGETHER: We gather. We learn. We serve. During the next few years you are going to hear this phrase a lot. These words have a very specific meaning in the Catholic Diocese of Wichita.
TOGETHER
It is meaningful because on one level it reflects the reality of who we are, but it also represents the potential of what we can and should become.
There is no solitary Christian.
As soon as we profess our faith in Jesus and receive baptism, we become part of what St. Paul calls the body of Christ. We are members of the body of Christ. We are children in the family of God. We are part of the assembly of believers. And assembly is just another word, another translation of the original word for church. So whether it’s for worship, certainly for service, and even for teaching, it requires us to come together as a body, a family, a community.
One of the things that I have been trying to highlight is that most people will identify with their parish. They might say, “Yeah, I go to St. Francis of Assisi parish.” And I would say that the majority don’t think beyond that. But it’s important to view that we’re also together in a diocese. And you are members of a body, a family, a community that includes people you have never seen, may never meet who are in places that you have never traveled to like Bushton or Baxter Springs or Neodesha or Zenda or Fort Scott, but nevertheless, they are as much members of your body/family/community as the people of St. Francis of Assisi. And likewise it goes further again to include the universal Church and further again to include those who have been elect as the saints in heaven and the souls in purgatory and awaiting their entrance into glory.
So we cannot be but together.
In the next issue of the Catholic Advance learn more about the meaning of TOGETHER: We gather. We learn. We serve.