by Bishop James Conley
As we come to the close this beautiful season of Eastertide and prepare to celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, our hearts are filled with wonder, joy and praise at the beauty of God’s gifts, both in nature and in our communities.
This month of May, a month dedicated in a particular way to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is filled with events that celebrate the accomplishments of so many people. The long season of Confirmations has now come to a close and I wish to thank all of our parents, as well as our parish teachers and catechists, priests, consecrated sisters and, most of all, our newly confirmed young people, for their dedication and hard work in preparation to receive the Holy Spirit in this beautiful sacrament. As a bishop, it is a joy for me to travel across our vast and beautiful diocese to celebrate Confirmation in our parishes, where the entire Church comes together to support our children as they become fully initiated in their Catholic faith.
We are also in the season of graduation, where we honor our students, at all the various levels of education, for the accomplishments they have made in their journey of lifelong learning. At the beginning of the month, we celebrated the 25th graduating class of Saint Gregory the Great Seminary in Seward. For the past 25 years, we have been educating and forming young men for the priesthood to serve the Church here in the Lincoln Diocese and in dioceses around the country. These nine recent graduates will now advance on to various graduate schools of theology, where they will continue their seminary education and formation for the holy priesthood.
As I hand out diplomas to our high school graduates at our six Catholic high schools, I am always reminded of the importance of our apostolate of Catholic education. Our Catholic schools strive to assist parents, the first and primary educators of their children, in handing on the Catholic faith to the next generation. During this Easter season we have been listening to the Acts of the Apostles at Mass, and how the early Church spread to all the corners of the world, through the faith and joyful witness of the early Christians. We are attempting to do the same thing through our Catholic schools.
As I mentioned during Catholic Schools Week this year, each of us must see the whole world through the lens of our Catholic faith. This is the only way we can truly understand and make sense of the often confusing and chaotic world in which we live. There is so much information and ideological propaganda coming at us all the time and in every mode of communication, that it is incumbent upon us to have a clear and coherent organizing principle to assess and evaluate all this information. This organizing principle must be our Catholic faith. We can’t just put on our “faith glasses” when we go to Mass each Sunday, and then lay them aside during the rest of the week. Like permanent contact lenses, we must always be viewing, judging, and evaluating the world around us through the lens of our Catholic faith. This is what we try to instill in our young people in our Catholic schools.
But even more important than teaching the Catholic faith and learning about Jesus, we must come to know Jesus as our friend. We must create opportunities in our schools where our students can truly encounter the risen Lord. This happens primarily through prayer and the sacraments. All of our 24 elementary schools afford the privilege to attend Holy Mass every single day in our schools. But these encounters with Jesus also occur in conversations among our students, in the hallways and in the cafeterias, in the gymnasium and on the athletic fields, on retreats and other extracurricular activities in our schools.
We are constantly trying to build school communities of faith and opportunities to encounter Jesus. The primary goal and purpose of Catholic education is to form, equip and send disciples of Jesus Christ into the world to carry out the great work of evangelization, like we learn in the Acts of the Apostles. If we are not doing this, then we are failing the Lord.
At the end of this month, I will have the honor and joy of ordaining three young men to the priesthood of Jesus Christ for the Diocese of Lincoln, and five young men to the transitional diaconate. These three newly ordained priests will, providentially this year, be celebrating their first Masses on the Solemnity of Pentecost. Please pray for these men as they begin their pastoral ministry in our parishes. Thank you for cultivating their faith, particularly you parents. And please encourage your sons and your daughters to consider the priesthood or the consecrated life as they discern their vocation in life.
