Pastor’s Letter: June 1, 2025

Pastor’s Letter: June 1, 2025

30 May 2025 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear St. Philomena Parish Family,

Blessed weekend to you all! I am still enjoying the many fruits of the ordination weekend and the celebration of Fr. Ben Schoonmaker’s First Mass of Thanksgiving. I was joyful to look back over a snapshot of his life and to recall how God has been at work preparing him to serve as a priest of our Diocese. It was also nice visiting back to one of my previous parishes—the two most common questions people asked about were:  Do you miss being on the road for the Eucharistic Revival?  and What is your new parish like?  I was very happy to answer truthfully—I really enjoyed being a traveling preacher…but my heart is definitely in parish life! It was wonderful to share so many blessings from this past year. It has been a great first year here at St. Philomena and I am looking forward to many more to come!

Since we are celebrating the Ascension of the Lord this weekend, I thought it might be fitting to jump ahead a bit in our review of the Creed to focus on a phrase about Jesus and one of our unique Catholic vocabulary words about Jesus: “Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, through him all things were made.”

As we have reviewed before, the Creed gives us a summary of key doctrine we believe. This phrase teaches us about the true identity of Jesus Christ, emphasizing that he is true God in the same way that God the Father is true God. The phrase “Begotten, not made” was inserted in the Creed to repudiate the teaching of the heretic Arius.  Arius incorrectly taught that the Son was the first thing created by the Father (which would make the Son inferior to the Father). St. Athanasius replied with the truth that a son precisely shares the nature of the Father. When we say the Son is begotten of the Father, we don’t refer to an event in the past (God is outside of the limits of time) but to an eternal and timeless relation between the Father and the Son.

Now, on to what I am sure is one of everyone’s favorite words: Consubstantial!  =)  “Consubstantial” is a word derived from the teachings of the Council of Nicea (in 325 A.D….1700 years ago this year) which means “having the same substance.”  “Substance” means the unique identity of a thing. If you were talking about an object, the substance would be the answer to the questions “What is it?” or “What does it consist of?” One way I like to explain substance/consubstantial would be to say that the same truths that makes God the Father God are the same truths that makes God the Son God. The early Church chose this word to precisely express the divine nature of Jesus. It is an unusual word for us, but it is one that describes something very unusual—the nature of Jesus Christ. The truth is, there is no one else in history/existence who is like Jesus…so, we use a unique word that describes the truth about Him.

The last phrase of this section is “through him all things were made.” This is a direct quote from John 1:3, which describes how creation of the world happened:  through the Son. Many will think right away that the Father is usually referred to as the Creator. Of course this is correct…just as it is correct to say that creation happens through the Son. This is another way of emphasizing the unity of the Father and the Son. If both the Father and the Son are “given credit” for creation, it is a concrete way of saying that they are perfectly united and both equally God in the same way.

Sometimes for our modern ears these phrases can be tricky and these big words can be cumbersome. Yet, there is great wisdom in making sure we “get it right” when it comes to who Jesus Christ is and how he relates to God the Father. After all, the salvation of the world is dependent on these truths! Know of my prayers and blessing for this week!

In Christ,

Father Luke