Sunday, Nov. 16, is the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Parish

EPriest.com offers Best Parish Practices for parishes.

The Knights of Columbus offers a renewed Squires program, which one pastor said has “given our boys a sense of holy pride in being Catholic. They have grown in a sense of the sacred, of holy respect for the things of God and for each other.”

Father Richard O’Rourke, pastor of St. Paul Chong Hasang Parish in Harker Heights, Texas, told EPriest.com that he has found the Squires an effective leadership development program for Catholic young men 10 to 18 years old. There are about 25,000 Squires in more than 1,300 local units, called circles, throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Guam.

Learn more at EPriest.com.

Family

The time has come to start the preparations for Advent, which begins Nov. 30. Check out the “Christmas Guide” in this week’s paper for excellent ideas from Leticia Velasquez.

Media

NCRegister.com features “The Top 100 Catholic Movies” under “Resources.”

Hoodlum Priest is a 1961 movie that we finally found in DVD at our local rare movies store. Like Angels With Dirty Faces, it features a priest who reaches out to society’s castoffs and ends with an execution scene. It’s a great movie to plant a vocation seed and show how necessary priests are.

Readings

Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31; Psalm 128:1-2-5; 1Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30 or 25:14-15, 19-20

EPriest.com offers free homily packs for priests.

Our Take

NCRegister.com is the web address for the Daily Blog.

Today’s first reading is from Proverbs 31. April first met the Proverbs 31 “ideal wife” in a Kimberly Hahn talk, and there is much to love about and learn from this worthy woman. A couple of points:

n She works. April has spent most of her life as a full-time stay-at-home mom, and she will tell anybody who asks that a mom doesn’t need a job to be legitimate. But moms who work needn’t feel guilty, either. Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II and St. Thérèse of Lisieux all had working mothers — just like the Proverbs 31 woman.

• She serves the poor. April knows all too well the perils of too much volunteering. Family must always come first. But this passage shows the importance of the mother’s example in helping outside the home, too.

• She needn’t lay on a guilt trip. All the same, Faith & Family magazine ran a column by Daria Sockey in the summer of 2006 in which she dreamed of what a “Proverbs 31 Husband” reading would look like. Check it out the weekend of Nov. 15-16 at the Register’s daily blog.

And lest we spend all of our time on the first reading, we must note that this Gospel is one of Tom’s favorites.

It drives home the point that the bottom line for a Christian isn’t “refrain from evil” or “believe certain things.” These are necessary, but they aren’t sufficient to be worthy of the gift Christ offers us.

In all of Christ’s parables that refer to damnation, no one is damned for sins of commission. They are damned for sins of omission: for failing to do good. Christ wants us to do something positive for him. At the Register’s website, under “Hot Topics,” find an editorial about what works American Catholics are called to in these times of change.