It’s our annual picnic day! I hope you will join us on Sunday, after the 11:00 am Mass in the Stanley Centre and outside. A special thanks to the Knights of Columbus who are hosting our picnic meal and all our volunteers who are helping. Please remember to bring your non-perishable food items for the K of C food drive and the baby items for the Right to Life collection.
Each year, our missionary priests (Missionaries of St. Francis DeSales) who are in the U.S., gather with their community members in Texas to go on retreat. Fr. Antony is one of these missionaries, and will be attending the retreat all this week. Consequently, I will be all by myself for Masses and anything else that is going on at the parish this week. Fr. Antony will back by the weekend, spending his final weeks with us at St. Catherine before he returns to India to begin his next assignment. He will be leaving on September 30.
You may have noticed the gardens in front of the church building look a little different. If you walked down the path in the front over the summer months, parts of the garden have grown up beyond our capacity to take care of them. We therefore have had to trim them back. It will really make a difference next spring when the growing season begins all over again and we will be able to take care of things a lot better. A special thanks to our volunteers who help us out during the summer months to maintain the garden by the statue of Mary, the pond, as well as around the rectory and our other areas by the Stanley Centre and in the parking lot.