A Note From Our Pastor: April 5, 2026

This is my second Easter at St. Thomas and St. Philomena parishes. At long last, Easter has arrived. And I must admit, I am quite ready. As much as I love the arrival of Lent each year and benefit from it, I am happy to have climbed the holy mountain of Easter. As the great Easter Proclamation (the ancient Exsultet), declares, proclaimed in the warm glow of candlelight, ”O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human”.

As our Church declares, “Easter is not simply one feast among others, but the ‘Feast of feasts’, the ‘Solemnity of solemnities’” (CCC, 1169). So, what makes it all that? In a world that is marked in so many ways by signs of death, this celebration reminds us that death is not the last word. Despite the ways that death touches us—as the reality of our own mortality occasionally confronts us; as those we love experience physical death; as we hear about death, near and far—death is not where it ends.

God—as He does, time and time again—turns it all upside down, and death, the greatest of all human disorders—is somehow transformed into life. And this radical solution to our dilemma came by virtue of Jesus’ sacrifice: ”O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer! (Exsultet). Simply put, if not for what we celebrate at Easter, there really is no other human hope. Or as St. Paul said it, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith” (1 Cor 15:14).

But this occasion is great also because our community is given new life in those who have entered into this Church, at both St. Thomas and St. Philomena. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), and so by virtue of baptism, several new members have been grafted to the vine that is Jesus Christ. What a gift they give to us by their lives and their witness.

And this great feast brings a good number of visitors and occasional church-goers. Welcome. Know that this is your home too, and all we do is made more beautiful because you are here. Please prayerfully consider God’s voice within you, perhaps calling you to join us again…and again, and again...

”Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice, arrayed with the lighting of his glory, let this holy building shake with joy, filled with the mighty voices of the peoples” (Exultet).

Yours in Christ,

Father Todd O. Strange