Monday Message, November 17, 2025

KNOW

Please reserve January 24th on your calendar for a special meeting. All youth ministry leaders, safe environment coordinators, and parish catechetical leaders will be invited to a dinner and conversation about updates to the safe environment manual, volunteer covenants, and communication with parents. More details to follow, but the event will take place at Notre Dame in Easton around 6:30 pm.

Please spread the word about the Bishop’s Lecture Series, which is scheduled to take place later this month. The flyer is here.

Our friends at St. Catherine of Siena in Trumbull asked us to pass along this information about an event with Scott Hahn and others in January.

Continuing the Journey was created to bring the spirit and quality of a national conference to our local area — providing professional development that’s both substantive and affordable. It take place in April in Newark, NJ.  This weekend experience is open to Parish Youth Ministry Leaders, Diocesan Staff, Volunteers, Clergy, Religious, PCLs, DREs, Catechists, Campus Ministers, and anyone who walk and serve the young church.

To track your catechists in Catechists 2.0, go to LEAD, then My Learners, then filter by Groups, and choose Catechist 2.0. From there, you can add additional filters to see whether people are authorized to serve (have completed formation and are VIRTUS-compliant) or if they need a gentle reminder. If you have people who are teaching and are not yet enrolled in formation (you shouldn’t be), please share this link with them.

All Advent resources are now online, including the digital calendar image for you to print if you missed your share of the 10,000 we printed. Click here for details.

Please pray for our young people attending the National Catholic Youth Conference this week in Indianapolis. See details here and sign up to livestream the Holy Father’s conversation with young people.

REFLECT

So many forms of poverty oppress our world! First and foremost are material forms of poverty, but there are also many moral and spiritual situations of poverty, which often affect young people in a particular way. The tragedy that cuts across them all is loneliness. It challenges us to look at poverty in an integral way, because while it is certainly necessary at times to respond to urgent needs, we also must develop a culture of attention, precisely in order to break down the walls of loneliness. Let us, then, be attentive to others, to each person, wherever we are, wherever we live, transmitting this attitude within our families, living it out in the workplace and in academic environments, in different communities, in the digital world, everywhere, reaching out to the marginalized and becoming witnesses of God’s tenderness.

Pope Leo XIV, Sunday, November 16, 2025

LAUGH