News - September 2018 RSS Feed

Bishop McManus said climate change is an urgent moral issue which adds to the hardship of the poor. He spoke at the Worcester Catholic Environmental Stewardship Conference Sunday held at the College of the Holy Cross and sponsored by the diocese.

Holy Name Central Catholic Junior/Senior High School held the ribbon cutting for the Joseph Tham Pham Life Sciences Biotech Learning Center Sept. 14. It was Founders Day, when the school honors the Sisters of St. Anne. After the ribbon cutting, the family and friends squeezed into the school’s tiny chapel for the baptism of Josephine Hannah Linh Yao, daughter of Han Pham and her husband, Spencer Yao. 

BERLIN - Bishop McManus will be principal celebrant at a Mass of Christian burial at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2,  in St. Joseph the Good Provider  Church for Father Robert M. Spellman, 74, who died Sept. 22 at UMass Medical Center in Worcester.

Prayer, fasting, listening and teaching are among pastoral responses in the Worcester Diocese and elsewhere to the clergy sexual abuse crisis. This week Bishop McManus told The Catholic Free Press that sexual abuse is a terrible, embarrassing, dark part of the Church’s history and “people want to know that we’re doing something about it.” 

Bishop McManus is among four people from the Worcester Diocese attending the fifth National Encounter of Hispanic/Latino Ministry, or “V Encuentro,” in Grapevine, Texas, near Fort Worth. (Encuentro is Spanish for encounter.) 

This fall, Gloria Josephs, who’s the youth ministry director at St. Luke the Evangelist Parish in Westborough, will help the Worcester Diocese’s Haitian Apostolate attempt to bring at least 17 new parishes into the apostolate’s successful twinning program that serves the Diocese of Les Cayes, Haiti. 

WESTBOROUGH - St. Luke the Evangelist Parish’s organic community garden has a waiting list. And despite the challenge of a wet, very hot summer, the Heirloom Harvest Farm continues to produce vegetables for its shareholders.

It was a good year for the annual Partners in Charity Appeal, according to Michael Gillespie, director of the Office of Stewardship and Development. The fund drive finished with $5,076,252 in gifts and pledges, topping the $5 million goal.

NORTH OXFORD – The St. Ann Parish community offered “tremendous positive feedback” about their church bell ringing again, after years of silence, Father Michael N. Lavallee, pastor, observed. He said they recognized the spiritual significance this holds for them.

WORCESTER – As St. Vincent Hospital celebrated its 125th anniversary last week, those affiliated with it spoke of faith and family. The Sisters of Providence founded the hospital on September 8, 1893. Daisy L. Burroughs, St. Vincent’s public relations manager said celebrations spanned the week.

LEOMINSTER – Through summer service projects, youth from Holy Family of Nazareth Parish and Holy Trinity Chapel honored Dorothy Day, whose cause for canonization is being promoted. The Leominster youth worked at two Catholic Worker sites in Brooklyn, St. Joseph House, a men’s shelter, and Maryhouse, a women’s shelter, where Dorothy Day did most of her service, and where she died in 1980.

In response to the current sexual abuse crisis, St. Roch Parish in Oxford is planning two days a month of prayer and fasting, according to Father Michael J. Roy, pastor. He said the idea is to do penance for the sins of perpetrators and the healing of victims, especially Oxford residents.

Requests for forgiveness and perspective were responses to vandalism at St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Milford, according to the pastor, Father Peter J. Joyce. Four young men were arrested Aug. 31 after they allegedly ransacked the church.