Faith Resources

OAPCE

Fall 2023 message from the Liaison Bishop

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

The school year that started a few weeks ago is an important milestone for the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education (OAPCE). Founded in 1939, the Association is about to celebrate 85 years of existence. This is a unique occasion to reflect more deeply on the role of parents in Catholic education.

In his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, The Joy of Love, (2016) Pope Francis declared that “the family is the first school of human values.” (§ 274) Thus, parents are the first educators of the children God entrusted to them. In 2018, echoing Pope Francis, the Bishops of Ontario wrote the apostolic letter Renewing the promise. They remind parents that “God has gifted you with children and you are their first and most important educators. Yours is the task to immerse them in the unconditional love of God found in Christ Jesus.” (§ 16)

In today’s world, this is not an easy mission. Your most important commitment is to continue to invest in your role as first and most influent educators of the children God gave you in his love. It requires from each and every one of us a renewed personal encouter with Christ, the risen Lord. Like any human beings, your children’s hearts desire God. You are the voice that reminds them on a daily basis that God’s love is calling them.

In his 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, pope Saint Paul VI wrote, “for the Church, the first means of evangelization is the witness of an authentically Christian life, given over to God in a communion that nothing should destroy and at the same time given to one's neighbor with limitless zeal. As we said recently to a group of lay people, ‘Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses’.” (§ 41) As parents, you are certainly called by God to be witnesses “of an authentically Christian life.” By giving yourselves wholeheartedly to your family, you give yourself to God and his project of love for the whole of humanity.

My prayer for all of you who are Catholic parents, for our Catholic schools and for all those who dedicate their life the Catholic education or our children, is that together we might turn our hearts to Christ. In return, Christ will introduce us once again in the communion with the Father. He will renew in us the gifts of the Spirit. In the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we will become more and more witnesses of Christ for our children and for the whole humanity.

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

OAPCE

Summer message from the Liaison Bishop

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

Summer is about to start. After a very full year of work and commitments, it will be good to have some time for ourselves and for our families. As vacation time is near, I like to remember the invitation Jesus made to his apostles after they came back from their first mission. “He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mk 6:31) It is important therefore to take seriously that time of rest.

What is fascinating is that, while he wants his apostles to rest, he himself continues his mission. Once they arrived in that deserted place, many had followed them. “He saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” (Mk 6:34) Jesus refused to let them go without food. With the help of his disciples, he fed five thousand men with five loaves of bread and two fish. “they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish.” (Mk 6:43) Jesus will continue to be at work in our families this summer.

As members of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education, it is important to take our summer rest seriously. We can take that time off while continuing to evangelize the members of our families. In his June 4 message, pope Francis’s words suggested that “we can think of God […] through the image of a family gathered around the table, where life is shared. […] it is not only an image; it is reality! It is reality because the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that the Father poured into our hearts through Jesus (cf. Gal 4:6), makes us taste, makes us savour God’s presence: the presence of God, always close, compassionate and tender. […] The invitation he extends to us, we might say, is to sit at the table with God to share in his love.”

What a beautiful invitation: to sit at the table with God. Allow me to continue to quote pope Francis. By allowing God to sit at our summer table, “we commit ourselves to bear witness to God-as-love, creating communion in his name.” What a summer this will be! We will be strengthened by our rest and by the loving presence of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That way, we will be able to start anew our mission in September: to “bear witness to God-as-love,” to “offer everyone the food of God’s forgiveness and Gospel joy.”

And I conclude with pope Francis’s words: “may Mary help us to live the Church as that home where one loves in a familiar way, to the glory of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

A wonderful summer to you all!

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

OAPCE

Lenten message from the Liaison Bishop

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

Dear members of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education (OAPCE),

From Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday, the whole Church is living the Season of Lent. The word “Lent” translates the Latin word Quadragesima, which simply means forty. It is a reminder of the forty years the people travelled in the wilderness between its liberation from Egypt and its entry in the promised land. Most importantly, it reminds us that, right after his baptism, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights…” (Matt. 4:1-2). As followers of Jesus, forty days before Easter, we walk in his footsteps, led up by the Spirit and learn from him how to overcome temptations.

Lent is a time of penance and prayer. Most importantly it is also a time of preparation for Baptism. The Sunday Readings of Lent in Year A are oriented towards the main symbols of our Christian Baptism. Like every year, on the first Sunday we read the Temptations Gospel, then the Transfiguration Gospel on the second Sunday. The three other Sundays are oriented towards baptism. With the Samaritan woman, we contemplate Jesus as the source that brings us to eternal life: “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). With the man born blind we are reminded that Jesus is the “light of the world” (John 9:5). Since those two signs, water and light, were given to us at baptism, with Lazarus we confess that Jesus is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).

As Catholic parents, we have a responsibility towards our children, whom we presented to Baptism. We committed ourselves to teach them the Gospel. Through are daily lives, we can show them what it means to be “baptized in Christ.” The Season of Lent is a time when we take seriously our commitment to drink from the well that is Christ, to allow his light to shine in our lives by considering ourselves “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 6:11)

May this Lent 2023 reminds us of God’s grace and allow us to take seriously our baptismal commitment. The season of Lent will thus prepare us to celebrate the Paschal Mystery.

A good Lent and a Happy and Holy Easter to you all!

Assuring you of my prayer and blessing,

+ Yvan Mathieu, s.m.

OAPCE

Easter message from the Liaison Bishop

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

In a few days, at the end of the forty days of Lent, we will celebrate the mystery that is at the center of our catholic faith: the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds his readers that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (v. 17) “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” (v. 20)

No wonder the Good News of the Resurrection is at the heart of Christian Faith. That also explains why we celebrate this mystery in the course of three days, the Easter “Triduum.” In fact, if we prepare our celebration of Christ’s Passover by forty days of fasting, we celebrate the mystery of his Resurrection for fifty days, between Easter Sunday and Pentecost.

The Resurrection of Christ is the mystery that gathers us in the Catholic faith. It gives us hope that, at the end of our journey on earth, we shall be united to Christ in eternal life. Once again, let us listen to Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: “since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. […] Therefore encourage one another with these words.” (4:14,18).

This new life already started for us on the day of baptism. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Rom. 6:3-4) This is the life we asked for our children when we asked the Church to baptize them.

This gift of life comes with a mission for parents. Remember the words of the risen Lord to the disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:19-20a).

As members of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education, we are the first witnesses of our Catholic faith for our Children who are baptized in the Death and the Resurrection of Christ. I pray that we take that responsibility seriously. May this Easter celebration make us grow in Love, Faith and Hope, relying on the risen Lord’s promise to the whole church: “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20b).

Happy Easter to you all!

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

OAPCE

New Year message from the Liaison Bishop

✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM

Dear members of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education (OAPCE),

First of all, I offer you my best wishes for the new year that just began.

The Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;

the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Num 6:24-26)

On December 31, 2022, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI passed away. His life, his teaching and his death are a great inspiration to all of us. At the General Audience of January 4, Pope Francis spoke of his predecessor as “a great master of catechesis”. “Jesus, the risen Crucified One, the Living One and the Lord, was the goal to which Pope Benedict led us, taking us by the hand. May he help us to rediscover in Christ the joy of believing and the hope of living.” Taking our children by the hand so that they may discover in Christ the joy of believing and the hope of living, this is precisely the mission of Catholic parents.

The last words Pope Benedict pronounced were “Lord, I love you”. What a nice way to conclude one’s life. May we teach our children how much God loves them. May we also teach them to answer him using the same words: “Lord, I love you”.

May 2023 be a year of blessings for all parents, all children, especially those involved in Catholic education.

Assuring you of my prayer and blessing,

+ Yvan Mathieu, s.m.