Kalamazoo Summers and Trinity Sundays

User’s Guide to Sunday

BY Tom and April Hoopes

May 31-June 6, 2009 Issue | Posted 5/22/09 at 2:07 PM

Sunday, June 7, (Year B, Cycle I) is Trinity Sunday.

Parish

EPriest.com offers "Best Practices" for parishes.

Father Robert Sirico of Kalamazoo, Mich., is best known for the Acton Institute. But he is also pastor of St. Mary's parish.

He says the "Growing With the Saints" Vacation Bible School helps his religious education program.

"It gives St. Mary's a solid Catholic approach not only to the ongoing formation of the children in our parish," he said," "but also enables us to have an effective outreach to the children in our area who are not Catholic."

After using a Protestant program for two years, his director of religious education, Anne Holewa, wanted to find a Catholic one. She settled on "Growing With the Saints," and she lists what it offers at the EPriest.com site.

Media

At the urging of a friend, we finally saw Miracle Maker, the puppet stop-motion movie about Jesus. It's excellent — with a couple of caveats. The surreal animated portions were a little off-putting, and the film undercut a key Eucharistic expression in the Gospel by reinterpreting what "they recognized him in the breaking of the bread" meant.

We broke our own "No Jesus movies" rule to watch it. We avoid Jesus films for our Catholic Movie Night because we don't want to plant a single image of Christ powerfully in the kids' minds. Puppets, we decided, were okay — at least once.

Readings

Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; Psalm 33:4-6, 9, 18-20, 22; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28:16-20

Our Take

When Pope Benedict XVI speaks of things, he does more than share his thoughts — he teaches how to approach spiritual matters of all kinds. Here are some quotes from Pope Benedict XVI about the Trinity (several found by Jesuit Father James Schall):

• "On this Solemnity (Trinity Sunday), the liturgy invites us to praise God not merely for the wonders that he has worked, but for who he is."

• "We are invited to contemplate, so to speak, the heart of God, his deepest reality, which is his being one in the Trinity, a supreme and profound communication of love and life. The whole of sacred Scripture speaks to us of him. Indeed, it is he who speaks to us of himself in the Scriptures and reveals himself as Creator of the universe and Lord of history."

• "From the reality of God, which he himself made known to us by revealing his 'name' to us, comes a certain image of man, that is, the exact concept of the person. If God is a dialogical unity, a being in relation, the highest creature made in his image and likeness reflects this constitution; thus he is called to fulfill himself in dialogue, in conversation, in encounter."

• "God of the Bible is not some kind of monad closed in on itself and satisfied with his own self-sufficiency, but he is life that wants to communicate itself, openness, relationship."

• "Christian theology summarizes the truth about God with this expression: only one substance in three persons. God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason, the human person, image of God, is fulfilled in love, which is the sincere gift of oneself."

• "'If you see charity, you see the Trinity,' wrote Saint Augustine."

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