OAPCE
Summer 2024 Message From The Liaison Bishop
✠ Yvan Mathieu, SM
Trust and hope!
We are a few days away from vacation time. As we conclude the 85th anniversary celebrations of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education, summer will come as a season of well-deserved rest for all of us. As members of OAPCE, it is important to take the summer break seriously. A good way to rest until September is to consider the two parables Jesus told us on Sunday June 16th. The two parables are about the Kingdom of God.
Jesus first said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28The earth produces itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4:26-29) Throughout this year, as committed Catholic parents, we certainly sowed a lot of love, faith and hope in the fertile soil of the hearts of our children. Mission accomplished!
Jesus is now inviting us to trust in him and in his Father. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) Indeed God the Father sowed his only beloved Son in our world. The Son became one of us and Jesus gave up his life. He sowed God’s gift in the soil of our humanity, to open for us the access to eternal life. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) Let us put our trust in the Holy Spirit that will secure the growth of what we sowed throughout the school year.
We might think that we did not sow enough. That what we have done for and with OAPCE will not change the world. Let us choose hope, relying on the second parable. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” May our summer vacations transform our families and everything we’ve one as committed Catholic parents this year into sources of coolness in the midst of the heat of our world.