The Beacon

With more 3,000 combined years of service to the people of the Paterson Diocese, 58 religious sisters and three religious priests were honored at the annual Jubilee Mass for Religious on May 18 in St. Mary’s Assumption Church in Passaic. These religious, who are marking milestone anniversaries this year, have dedicated their lives to serve the Church through various ministries in the Diocese and beyond.

Bishop Serratelli made a pastoral visit to St. Jude Parish in Hopatcong where he celebrated the vigil Mass for the Fifth Sunday of Easter May 18. During the Mass, the Bishop administered the Sacrament of Confirmation to young people of the parish.

Bishop Serratelli made a pastoral visit on the Fifth Sunday of Easter to St. Paul Parish in Clifton May 19, where he was the principal celebrant of Mass. During the Mass, he administered the Sacrament of Confirmation to young people of the parish, who had prepared for the reception of the sacrament for the past two years through the parish’s Confirmation program for the teenagers.

The annual diocesan May Crowning was celebrated in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Paterson May 19. Bishop Serratelli led the coronation of the Blessed Mother with several priests joining him and homilies by two young diocesan priests, who were ordained in 2018 — Father Krzsyztof Slimak, parochial vicar at St. Peter the Apostle Parish in Parsippany, and Father Jader Avila, parochial vicar at Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Wayne.

Robert Gil jokes that, during 38 years of marriage, he had called his late wife, Rosie, “many things but ‘saint’ wasn’t one of them.” But Gil isn’t kidding when he speaks about his whole-hearted admiration for Rosie, who died in 2010, for her absolute devotion to God, to him, to their eight children, to the “poetry of the home.” He started to realize that there might be something more to Rosie, when priests from their home state of Alabama who knew her started calling her a “saint” and her name was brought forward when St. John Paul II was looking for an everyday housewife worthy of sainthood.

Christopher Caulfield was having fun doing something new last month: crouching down to sow various types of seeds into several trenches alongside each other that stretch the length of part of the year-old St. Isidore’s Acre garden at St. Paul Inside the Walls in Madison. Today Caulfield, co-director of the Music Ministry at St. Paul’s, the diocesan evangelization center, has been getting his hands dirty as he works to cultivate the seedlings that started to sprout on their journey to becoming a bountiful harvest.

Memorial Day is our nation’s most solemn holiday as we honor the men and women who gave their lives to guarantee our freedoms while they served our country in the U.S. military. Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day, from the days when many Americans observed the day by visiting cemeteries or memorials to war dead and decorated them with American flags or floral displays.

Bishop Serratelli ordained eight men as priests of the Diocese of Paterson during Mass on Saturday, May 11 in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Paterson — the mother church of the Diocese. He challenged these new priests to carry out their priestly ministry “with constant joy and genuine love, attending not to your own concerns, but to those of Jesus Christ.”