Fr. Todd 11/9/25

Dear Sacred Heart and St. Mary on the Lake,

             I will be taking the 5^th and 6^th Graders from Sacred Heart this Tuesday to the St. Louis Center in Chelsea.  The St. Louis center serves individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in an intentional, faith-based community.  It is run the Servants of Charity.  I am grateful for the good work they do upholding and protecting the dignity of those our world so often looks past.  I am grateful for our kids to be able to see it firsthand.  

We celebrate this weekend the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica.  This can seem like a mightily strange feast day- we are celebrating the dedication of a church in Rome that many Christians will never see in person in their lifetimes.  Yet, it is a sign of the faith we have all received, and all that Christians have suffered in following the Lord, so that we ourselves can know Jesus.  It was illegal to be a Christian for the first 300 years of the Church’s existence.  St. Paul himself persecuted the growing Church before his conversion.  But major, systemic, state sponsored persecutions of Christianity began particularly under Emperor Nero in AD 64.  This continued until the peace of Constantine when he granted the Edict of Milan in 313.  The Edict of Milan declared that it was no longer illegal to be a Christian in the Roman Empire.  While there is no way to know the exact number of Christians who were killed because of their faith in those centuries, we know it was thousands. 

Once it was no longer illegal to be a Christian and we could have public places of worship, the first public Church in Christendom was the Lateran Basilica.  We take the freedom of worship for granted.  It is hard to imagine not being able to have public Churches, to have to hide our faith lest we suffer persecution, and potentially even die because of following the Lord. This feast day reminds us to not take our faith and the freedom we currently have for granted.  

   Even now Christians are still killed for their faith.  This is a picture of Coptic Christians right before their martyrdom by ISIS in 2015.  These three were part of 21 total martyred that day.  May we be grateful for our blessings, our freedoms, and let us pray for those even now are denied them.  

God Bless,

Fr. Todd