Please welcome our visiting priests this weekend as I am away and Fr. Spisak continues to recover after his hip replacement surgery. We are grateful for the blessing of celebrating Mass with them. We also remember this weekend the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion in our nation and has led to the destruction of over 62 million lives of the unborn, as well as grave harm to mothers, fathers, and families. Please pray for the conversion of hearts and lives so that those affected by abortion in any way may find the healing they need and deserve, for an increase of support and love for those in difficult pregnancy situations, and for a complete end to abortion, that the destruction of life in the womb may never be seen as a viable option for any individual or family to pursue. You may pick up a prayer card in the gathering space this weekend to 'spiritually adopt' an unborn baby and pray for him or her for nine months. What an awesome way to witness to life and develop a spiritual relationship with a child you will one day know and who will one day know you in heaven!

Keeping the Faith Listening Sessions I want to encourage you to participate in one of the upcoming Keeping the Faith Listening Sessions for parishioners, parents, and teachers. There is a virtual option coming up on January 26, and two in-person options for February 2 and 9. Keeping the Faith is a strategic planning initiative of our diocese to prioritize the future life and vibrancy of our Catholic elementary schools as centers of evangelization for our young people. Your participation matters as we learn about the key themes from this strategic plan and how we can all support our Catholic schools. For more information and registration details, please visit https://www.dioceseofcleveland.org/offices/formationeducation/catholic-schools/keeping-the-faith

Synodal Attitudes of Jesus
Catholics reacted to a USCCB infographic tweet on January 10 about "seven attitudes" we can adopt for the synodal journey. These seven attitudes are taken from the Vademecum for the Synod on Synodality ( https:// www.synod.va/en/news/vademecum-for-the-synodon-synodality.html) and were tweeted as "innovative outlook, inclusivity, open-mindedness, listening, accompaniment, co-responsibility, dialogue." If I may sum up the best and most insightful critiques these attitudes received from the Catholic online community, it would be this: "These are corporate HR buzzwords that belong in a Fortune 500 company, but not in the Church." In essence, this critique views these attitudes as secular and corporate, and therefore unfit for adoption by the Church. While I can appreciate the desire to keep secular attitudes out of the Church, I do not think it is healthy for us as a Church to reject these attitudes outright.

In fact, whenever we as a Church refuse to infuse the human values and attitudes of our culture with the life of Christ, we hand them over for misinterpretation by our secular world. I believe we as a Church need to reclaim these as attitudes that belong to Christ and the saints in order for them to truly take on the purpose for which they are meant. In order to reclaim these synodal attitudes for Christ, it might be helpful to provide some etymological context. The word secular comes from Latin saeculum, meaning 'age' or 'generation.' It is closely connected with the verb secare, meaning "cut off from." The word sex comes from the same Latin root, denoting that man and woman are incomplete, or cut off from their full identity as man and woman apart from each other. In a similar way, secular values and attitudes are cut off from their complete meaning when they are separated from Christ. The Church fulfills her mission to draw all creation back into communion with God not by rejecting what has become secular, but by reconnecting the secular back to its sacred origins. We need to see the secular not as something 'bad', but as something which is missing its sacred meaning and purpose.

So, the USCCB has given us seven attitudes to adopt not as the secular world or a corporate HR department would, but as attitudes that belong to their very core to Christ and as lived out by Him and the very best of us in the saints. How could we ever picture St. Francis of Assisi fulfilling his mission to rebuild the Church without an 'innovative outlook', or what St. Theresa of Calcutta's ministry to the poor would have looked like without the spirit of 'inclusivity'? Can you imagine the great minds of St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, or St. Thomas Aquinas contemplating and writing about the mysteries of our faith without Christ's attitude of 'open-mindedness' to the truth? How could the priest St. Maximilian Kolbe have given up his life at Auschwitz for another man and father without embracing 'co-responsibility' for his neighbor's life, or St. Paul brought the Gospel to the Gentiles without welcoming ‘dialogue’ with people who thought very differently from him? When would Jesus ever be able to help sinners find their way back to God if He did not walk the way of 'accompaniment' with them? I hope we can get the point from these examples that we cannot abandon or bypass these attitudes just because we see the secular world trying to live them out in a diminished, distorted, or 'woke' way. Rather, Christ invites us to reclaim and redeem these attitudes as part of His own identity so that we can become the saints He has called us to be, and to fulfill the mission He has entrusted to us as His Church in this time. I pray that we will not become a reactionary Church to the fallen world around us, but become the very Person of Jesus Christ with all His attitudes so that we may respond to our fallen world courageously, generously, and faithfully. That is the true meaning of this synod.