Dearest Eucharistic Family, My youngest daughter, aged 23, is soon to be married. The planning, before long, will come to fruition and the glorious day of the Sacrament of Matrimony will forever be held for my daughter and my new son. Recently, chatting with my daughter, we shared many memories of her childhood, and her present and future hopes. We both agreed upon the blessing that is to be given the gift of Christ in the Eucharist and the call we received to attend daily Mass. There were many imperfections in the growing years, however, the weekly sacrament of confession held us accountable to overtake Christ in His compassion. How truly blessed we are to live in the sacraments of our Catholic Church. Jesus teaches us the way to salvation, the way of the Cross, and the gift of the Resurrection. Our Mother, Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, was the first to follow the way to Our Father's heart, on earth as it is in Heaven. In Saint John's Gospel, we are given a vision of light and of love. And we read in John 3:30 of Saint John the Baptist, of the decreasing of self to find life out of sin and darkness and entrance to the divine life. To find the joy Saint John the Baptist found in allowing Jesus to increase so that he may decrease was found in teaching, preaching, and ultimately dying for the sake of truth and holiness. All that John lived for was found in Jesus' love and redemption. A soul connected to God through the Eucharist can find an intimacy with our Father in heaven that forms a bond of grace, a strength to endure the hardships of life. Suffering has a purpose in the mystery of God's love, we will not see all of its glory this side of the Kingdom. We trust assured that love will find the way to hope, and faith will keep us on task. There is work to be done, for sure, to lead others to find hope from the burdens of life. I am offering many Mass intentions for my adult children, for their faithfulness to be nourished, and for Christ to increase in their lives. For my youngest daughter, to be married and to live another sacrament with the Eucharist as the foundation of her new life in Christ with a spouse, will hold many surprises in the wonderment of God's love. As we come to the close of the Christmas season and enter into a new year of grace, the mystery of Christmas will lead us to new birth. We submit to ordinary time to be made ready for Lent, to find the resurrected life in an ever-new light. Every day is made new through the Liturgy.
A daily holy reminder from Saint Padre Pio echoes, "Past to Thy mercy, future to Thy Providence, present to Thy LOVE." As one door closes, another opens for a new year. God is ready to pour forth grace upon grace for our souls to find the joy of the Gospel in the mystery of His love. Our words, thoughts, deeds, and actions, will reveal that Christ is living in us, increased by our submission to God's holy will, lived in joy, that others may come to know Jesus is with us in His Eucharistic love.
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Tradition dictates that each Jubilee is proclaimed through the publication of a Papal (or Pontifical) ‘Bull of Indiction’. The one for this year’s jubilee begins with these words:
‘SPES NON CONFUNDIT. “Hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5). In the spirit of hope, the Apostle Paul addressed these words of encouragement to the Christian community of Rome. Hope is also the central message of the coming Jubilee that, in accordance with an ancient tradition, the Pope proclaims every twenty-five years. My thoughts turn to all those pilgrims of hope who will travel to Rome in order to experience the Holy Year and to all those others who, though unable to visit the City of the Apostles Peter and Paul, will celebrate it in their local Churches. For everyone, may the Jubilee be a moment of genuine, personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, the “door” (cf. Jn 10:7.9) of our salvation, whom the Church is charged to proclaim always, everywhere and to all as “our hope” (1 Tim 1:1).’ A priest shared a beautiful story with me recently. He was asked to open his parish to large group of individuals who were displaced due to the recent floods. He had plenty of room in the parish center, but the building had no power. As the individuals set up their cots in different areas of the room, he noticed two gentlemen who parked themselves right next to an electric outlet and immediately plugged their phones. The priest approached them and jokingly said “If you have found a way to charge your phones, you must definitely be connected to a higher power than I am.” One of the men smiled and said, “Once power is restored, guess who will be the first to charge his phone?” What would happen if we all lived our lives with that kind of hope? I guess it depends on where we place our hope. Do we put our hopes in things that are passing, or do we place our trust in God? I remember watching a group of acrobats in the circus, trusting in each other before every jump. They trained and prepared, yet… at the bottom of it all was a safety net. That is for me an image of my trust in God.
The things we worry about, the things we are afraid of, they all dissipate when we truly think about how much God loves each and every one of us.
The question then is, do we believe this? Are we convinced, deep in our very core, of our identity as children of God? It is deeply grounded in this confidence that we can wait patiently for God. I do not know what the men in the parish center did while waiting for the power to be restored. Maybe they played cards or took a nap. I sincerely doubt they climbed the electric pole outside to fix the problem themselves. They knew the electric company was aware of their situation and someone would eventually come. They did all that they could, and a little bit more. They were ready with their plugged phones. Perhaps we can pray this year with that kind of hope. Trusting that God knows our needs, let us wait peacefully while remaining “plugged in” in our prayer. May he find us ready, attentive, filled with faith, hope, and love. The Holy Father closes his Bull with these words:
 “Cheo Crucifix and Grandmother Rafaela Qurindongo's Rosary” - Picture Courtesy of Rick Hernandez Whenever I go to visit my hometown in Puerto Rico, I love spending time with my parents and sharing a bit in their day-to-day lives, whether it is just hanging out at home, visiting the sick and the lonely, or checking in with family and loved ones. My parents have been Catholic missionaries most of their adult lives, following in the footsteps of my maternal grandparents, who themselves were Catholic missionaries spreading the good news of Christ’s love to communities that had been growing ever more separated from the faith of our ancestors. We do not tend to think of where our faith comes from, but for me, it is as easy as to look at the lives of those who preceded us. The lives of my ancestors, including my parents’ lives, show me what faith in action looks like and what active thanksgiving can do for the world. Their lives and others like them show a path we can use to connect back to God the Father. When I come back from those cherished trips to visit my parents, I bring back whatever latest artifact I have collected from the lives of my ancestors, an old rosary, a well-used old book, some guidance notes from a talk, or an old and worn crucifix, or maybe a statue or a picture, or some recording from a mission long ago, and I regale my wife with the new stories that I have learned. Some of these are stories of great sacrifice, love, faith, and conversion, of much risked and much gained. A few are stories of courageous people staring evil in the face and standing their ground. Some stories are of great hurt and even greater mercy and forgiveness. Yet other stories are of great sadness over opportunities lost, of someone not able to accept God’s call. What all the stories depict is the openness of God’s people to put effort into their call, for that is all that we can guarantee when doing God’s work... I really get into the stories when I tell them, almost as if I can see us present there, and my dear wife laughs and cries with me. When I was done with the retelling of the stories from this last visit, she looked at my face, grabbed my hands, and said: "Rick, this is your patrimony, it is OUR patrimony", and I could feel my face lighting up.
A heritage! And not just my heritage, but our heritage. And not just my inheritance but our inheritance, passed down through the generations by the life of our Mother Church, by the call to serve Him who loves us and His loved ones. This feels BIG and complicated, and probably hard to understand for the many, but for the faithful, we need only respond to the call with openness and a willingness to work within the call. From our heritage, the understanding will come. When I think back to my grandparents’ lives, I have no grand understanding of how they came to be that way, other than knowing they understood clearly their call to live a life of love, faith, and hope. They received the call, accepted it, and acted upon it. My grandfather understood that we are, through Christ, the inheritors of the Father. Our call to live the life God wants us to is “inherited,” it is built into our very beings. In simpler words, who we are is meant to match who we were created to be… We accomplish this “becoming who we were meant to be” by living the love and mercy we receive, and by using the gifts we are granted on this earth to love one another and glorify God with our thoughts and actions, with all our might and all our strength. These gifts that we receive, wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, and awe, are there for us to share with our brethren, with those who need us, and with those who walk with us. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are the tools in our toolbox, and these are part of our inheritance. Through baptism, we receive our status as inheritors of God the Father as His children. Our status as inheritors, as well as our call to share in the Eucharistic Communion along with our access to His gifts for us, are all our patrimony. Therefore, it is clear, that we are inheritors of our predecessors, physically, genetically, culturally, and spiritually. Notice that our inheritance is not just spiritual, there is also the physical, day-to-day component of our inheritance. As children of the Mother Church, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, we also have access to her patrimony.
Our patrimony is not of things that pass or end, but of things that persist, build us up, and are life-giving, generation after generation, until the end of the age. Our patrimony is our beautiful churches, cathedrals, and basilicas. It is our small, humble chapels. Our patrimony is our rosary beads as well-used reminders of our prayer offerings. It is our statues and images, recordings, and writings. It is our oral history, passed down through those who came before us and are now gone to share in Christ’s light. Our patrimony is our right to our Faith, Hope, and Love, it is alive in the trust, charity, and hopefulness that we espouse every day. During my last visit to the island, I stopped to spend time with my youngest brother, Father Victor Manuel Hernandez, at his parish of Our Lady of Lourdes in Juana Diaz. While there, I stopped to look at his desk, and there among many other things was this beautiful “Cheo Crucifix”. A Cheo Crucifix is given to every person who finishes missionary formation and is inducted into the Lay Missionary Congregation of Saint John the Evangelist (better known as the “Hermanos Cheos”). This is the missionary congregation to which my grandfather, Marcelino, my grandmother, Gina, my father, Manuel, and my mother, Vicky, have belonged to for decades. The Cheos have been a central part of my family’s lives since long before I was born, and it brought me great amazement to see that crucifix on his desk, for I know my dear brother is not a “Cheo”. He smiled when I brought that up and told me to pick it up to take a good look. The crucifix was made in Germany of wood and metal. It felt solidly built and had the inscribed metal plates quite faded from use, yet there, right in the middle where I expected it, was the number “4”. This was my grandfather Marcelino’s crucifix, one that had gone to every town on the island, a witness to a life of toil in the service of the greater, the holier, and the sacred. I stooped a bit because the weight of the history in my hands became apparent, and my heart swelled, remembering that towering and courageous man going out into the world trying to fulfill his mission. This IS patrimony, a reminder to us that we are all part of something greater, holier, and sacred. The weight of that crucifix on my hands reminded me that our mission to let God’s love for us be known to the whole world has been passed down to us, and we must strive to pass it down to others... This I pray for all of us, that our lives may act as a witness to God’s love for us. May we accept our call to mission, love, mercy, compassion, companionship, friendship, and active witness. May we recognize our patrimony and receive our inheritance, and may we make good use of it while on this earth. Let us pray: Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, may your Kingdom come, and may your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven! Help us this day to do your will. Help us to accept your call to serve. May we grow to be as You created us to be and pass our knowledge of You to all generations until the end of the age. Amen.
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AuthorsWe are Ivonne J. Hernandez, Rick Hernandez and Laura Worhacz, Lay Associates of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, and brothers and sisters in Christ. 
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