5th Sunday of Easter May 19, 2019

Parish Office (863) 453-4757 Fax (863) 453-2620

Parish Office Hours Monday through Friday

9 AM to 2:30 PM

Pastor

Assisting Clergy Fr. Leo Frechette

Fr. Gerald Grogan Retired

Deacon Dan Hoppe

Schedule of Masses

Saturday

Confession 3:30 PM English 6:30 PM Spanish

Vigil Mass 4 PM English 7 PM Spanish

Sunday 8 AM and 10:30 AM

Holy Days

Vigil Mass 5:30 PM 8 & 10:30 AM Daily Mass

Monday-Friday 8 AM First Friday

Mass and Holy Hour 8 AM

Visit us on the web! www.ologap.org

The beginning of an intimate Life-long relationship with Jesus.

Congratulations 2019 OLG High School Graduates

Page 2 Our Lady of Grace

Our Lady of Grace High School Graduates

Javier Gomez Badillo, Avon Park H.S.

Nicholas Scott, APHS & SFSC (AA)

Diana Guzman – Gamez, Avon Park H.S.

Chloe Noelle Vicino, Avon Park H.S.

Lilianna Fuentes, Avon Park H.S.

Edgar Eugenio Badillo, Avon Park H.S.

Mayra Yvette Eugenio Badillo, APHS.

Martin Perez-Badillo, APHS.

Finn Losa, Avon Park High School.

Cole Losa, Avon Park High School.

Paolo Pineda, Sebring H.S.

Zach Price, Sebring H.S.

Jacob Sutermeister H.S.

Jorge L. Martinez, Lake Placid H.S.

Thank you for OLG Scholarship Awards

OLG Golf Tournament, chair Dennis Kellner and committee members.

7 $1,000 scholarships

OLG Women’s Guild 2 $1,000 scholarships.

OLG Social Committee 2 $1,000 scholarships.

Knights of Columbus 1 $1,000 Scholarship

Memorial Carolyn (Carrie) Colangelo

$1,000 Scholarship

Only those students who applied for received OLG Scholarships. Other students may have been worthy of them but did not apply for them.

We are proud of all of our graduates and wish them God’s choicest blessings as they continue their next step in their pilgrim journey through life.

OLG High School Scholarship Award Winners

The following OLG High School graduating seniors were awarded $1,000 Scholarships:

Paolo Pineda, Sebring H.S. Javier Gomez Badillo, Avon Park H.S.

Nicholas Scott, APHS & SFSC (AA) Diana Guzman – Gamez, Avon Park H.S.

Chloe Noelle Vicino, Avon Park H.S. Lilianna Fuentes, Avon Park H.S.

Edgar Eugenio Badillo, Avon Park H.S. Mayra Yvette Eugenio Badillo, APHS. Jorge L. Martinez, Lake Placid H.S.

OLG Scholarship Award members included: Judy Pounds (Chairperson) Dennis Kellner,

Tina Starling, Jim and Marlyn Conroy.

5th Sunday of Easter Page 3

US: Survey Shows ‘Accompaniment’ Key to Vocational Discernment Georgetown U. CARA survey of the Ordination Class of 2019

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate’s (CARA) survey of the Ordination Class of 2019, encouragement and accompaniment are key to fostering priestly vocations. Of all responding ordinands, 92% reported being encouraged to consider the priesthood by someone in their life, giving credit to an average of four individuals for influencing their vocation. A majority of respondents (69%) stated that

their parish priest was a key figure in their discernment process. Support from friends (43%) and fellow parishioners (39%) also had considerable impact. The ordinands also cited parents, other family members, teachers/catechists, school chaplains and campus/youth ministers as having contributed to their discernment of a priestly vocation.

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, Chairman of the Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations reiterated the importance of individual accompaniment in vocational discernment. “As Pope Francis stated in his exhortation, Christus Vivit, sensitive and patient listening is key when helping young people discern. Priests, consecrated men and women, and the laity can all echo the voice of Jesus who calls men to serve in the holy priesthood as good and faithful shepherds.”

CARA is retained each year by the Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations to conduct a survey of the men scheduled to be ordained to the priesthood in the coming spring. This year, CARA identified and contacted a total of 481 men to be ordained to the priesthood in 2019. Of that number, 379 responded for an overall response rate of 79%. Of those respondents, 284 (75%) were ordinands to the diocesan priesthood and 95 (25%) were ordinands to the religious priesthood. Some of the major findings of the study are: the average age of responding ordinands was 33, slightly younger than the previous two ordination classes. By comparison, respondents of the Ordination Class of 2018 were an average of 35 years old and respondents of the Ordination Class of 2017 were an average of 34 years old. A majority of responding ordinands (75%) were born in the United States. Of the remaining 25% who were foreign-born, the most common countries of origin were Mexico (5%), Nigeria (3%), and Columbia and Vietnam, each representing 2% of the foreign-born ordinands. More than half (55%) of the respondents completed their undergraduate education before entering the seminary and 68% reported having worked full-time, with education being the most common work experience (11%). A total of 89% of respondents were baptized Catholic as an infant. Of those who became Catholic later in life, the average age of conversion was 18. Eucharistic Adoration (75%) and the Rosary (73%) were the most popular and influential prayer practices that respondents regularly engaged in before entering the seminary. Regarding their activity in parish ministry, 78% of respondents served as altar servers, 53% served as lectors, and 44% served as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion. Vocation programs also demonstrated significant impact upon the respondents’ discernment with 68% having participated in at least one vocation program before entering the seminary. Of these programs, “Come and See” weekends were the most popular (52%) followed by Quo Vadis/Discernment Retreats (15%). Among the ordinands who had access to a Spirituality Year, Pastoral Year or other programs outside of the seminary, 80% reported that the Spirituality Year, Pastoral Year Internship, and Thirty Day Retreat contributed to their discernment at least “somewhat.” Notably, 73% of respondents indicated that the Spirituality Year contributed “very much” to their vocational discernment. The entire CARA survey, can be accessed at: http://cms.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/vocations/ordination-class/ordination-class-of-2019.cfm

Page 4 Our Lady of Grace

Jean Vanier, friend of the intellectually disabled and founder of L'Arche, dies at 90

Jean Vanier was born on 10 September 1928 in Geneva, where his father, Georges Vanier, a Canadian diplomat, was serving. He was the fourth of five children. His parents were both devout Roman Catholics.

In 1942, when he turned 13, he asked his father’s permission to enter the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, England. Georges Vanier gave Jean his

blessing. It was, he would later say, one of the most important moments in his life – “because if my father trusted me, then I could trust myself, and if my intuitions were true, then I could work with them”. Jean Vanier believed that he owed his enormous physical stamina, and his extraordinary discipline, to the Royal Navy. In 1950, he resigned his commission. He tried his vocation as a priest. He lived for a while in a Trappist monastery, and then in a community near Paris, where he combined prayer with manual work and the study of philosophy. He studied for a PhD in philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris, and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Then in 1963 his friend and spiritual guide, the Dominican priest Père Thomas Philippe, invited him to visit the village of Trosly-Breuil, north-east of Paris, where he was living as chaplain to Le Val Fleuri, an institution for around 30 men with mental disabilities. Here Vanier encountered a paradox that he would often meet again: that places of suffering were often also places of great beauty. “Prisons, psychiatric wards, slums, leprosy colonies: there’s something frightening, but also something beautiful, a sense of wonderment. It’s mysterious. Maybe it’s the discovery that, amidst all the chaos, these people are human beings. I saw anger and pain in the faces of these men, but also great tenderness.”

He decided to act. In the summer of 1964, without any clear idea of where it might lead, he invited two men with mental disabilities, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, to make a home in a tumbledown stone cottage in Trosly-Breuil. The cottage had no lavatory, one tap and a wood-burning stove, and Jean called it L’Arche – the Ark. Although he had set out thinking he was doing something good for Raphael and Philippe, Vanier quickly began to realize that he was being transformed by them. They were, he would later say, “teachers of tenderness”.

Like the mustard seed, L’Arche began to grow. Those who visited Vanier in Trosly were inspired by what they experienced. Some chose to stay. Today there are 154 L’Arche communities in 38 countries – places where “normal” people share family-sized houses with men and women with mental disabilities, “The sixties and seventies were the age of community,” he would reflect in old age. “It was the hippies in America; it was Woodstock. It was a huge moment.” By 1968, L’Arche had welcomed 73 men and women with mental disabilities – or “core members”; by 1970, 112; by 1972, 126. In 1968 Vanier gave a retreat in Canada, and the first L’Arche community was opened there the following year. In 1971, Jean Vanier’s sister, Thérèse, opened the first L’Arche house in the UK, in Kent. There are now communities in Inverness, Edinburgh, Preston, Liverpool, Manchester, Brecon, Bognar Regis and Ipswich. Gradually, L’Arche spread

5th Sunday of Easter Page 5

to countries including India, North America, the Ivory Coast, Honduras, Burkina Faso, Australia, Poland and Palestine.

In 1997 Vanier was honored by Pope John Paul II. He took with him to Rome a group of men with mental disabilities. After spending much longer with them than was strictly timetabled, the Pope made to leave, then turned back to address them: “I want you to lead my church into the new millennium.” From the start, L’Arche welcomed people of all faiths and none. Stephan Posner, the current head of L’Arche in France, is Jewish, while in Bangladesh and Palestine Christians and Muslims live together, and in India many in L’Arche are Hindu. People with mental disabilities, Vanier would say, are a force for ecumenism: they have an instinct for communion, but they do not – cannot – split hairs over questions of dogma and belief.

Invitations to speak and give retreats came thick and fast, and Jean was constantly travelling, be it to Belfast during the Troubles, Rwanda in the midst of civil war, prisons and universities, or, on one occasion, to senior bankers at Goldman Sachs. In the summer of 2017, he travelled to London to meet the Queen. As a naval officer, he had accompanied her and Princess Margaret to South Africa on HMS Vanguard in 1947. Seventy years on, having been moved by Summer in the Forest, a film about L’Arche, she had asked to see him again. Neither was dry-eyed.

Few would have guessed that, away from his home in Trosly-Breuil, Vanier never felt completely at ease. It was partly, he once explained, that he hated the praise lavished on him when he was introduced to audiences. “I feel that people are saying, ‘You’re doing a beautiful work’; and that doesn’t interest me, because what they are really saying is, ‘I’m glad you’re doing it, not me.’”

Increasingly, the world came to Vanier. He led frequent retreats in Trosly-Breuil, and individuals who had read his books, and who were curious, searching or distressed, came to visit him. His wise counsel went hand in hand with an extraordinary gift of attentiveness and listening. And always his fundamental desire was the same – to help people believe that, no matter what they might have done, they were loved by Jesus “more than they dare believe”. Life in L’Arche, Jean said, had taught him “that everybody is beautiful. Everybody”.

It saddened Vanier that the Church seemed sometimes to present involvement with the poor as a vocation for just a few. “If you are blind to the poor,” he believed, “you become blind to God.” He urged people to start in small ways, by making space in their lives for somebody who was lonely, old, depressed, disabled.

In his ninetieth year, Jean was diagnosed with cancer, from which he died.

Pope Francis called him a week before he died to thank him for all he had done for people with disabilities. Many regarded him as a male (Saint) Mother Teresa for his life-long ministry among those with various disabilities.

Jean Vanier’s spirituality is captured in a small book he published shortly before he died in 2018, We Need Each Other, published by Paraclete Press. It is a response to God’s call to live together.

Page 6 Our Lady of Grace MASS INTENTIONS SATURDAY MAY 18 4:00 pm + Dr. Robert Zielinski by Peggy &

Danny. 7:00 pm + Benditas Animas del Pulgatorio

by Maria Rivera. SUNDAY MAY 19 8:00 am + Michael Merlin by Josephine

Dillon. + Joyce Fisher by Lillian Mellske. 10:30 am + Eduardo Sarmiento by Family. MONDAY MAY 20 8:00 am + Eduardo Sarmiento by

Mike ,Angie & Betty Heiring. TUESDAY MAY 21 8:00 am + Anna Vilkaitis by Paul & Justine

Devlin. WED MAY 22 8:00 am + Rainald Gervais,Sr. by Friends. THURSDAY MAY 23 8:00 am + Rainald Gervais,Jr. by Friends. FRIDAY MAY 24 8:00 am For our Parish Family. SATURDAY MAY 25 4:00 pm + Francis Schmitt by Family. 7:00 pm Benditas Animas del Pulgatorio by

Maria Rivera SUNDAY MAY 26 8:00 am + Carrie Colangelo by Jim/Marilyn

Conroy. 10:30 am + Pierre Seguin by His sister

Margot Burt.

FOR THE SICK OF THE PARISH Claudette Laverriere John Minadeo Jade Jackson Rosa Arosemena Gregory Syfert J.R. Lejeune Zulmira DaSilva Bruno Litwinski Jaxson Thrift Debra Kemmett Julie Johnston Andres Clavijo Gerald Martin Liliana Morales And for those who care for the sick, for the deceased member’s and benefactors of the parish, and for our loved ones. SAFE ENVIRONMENT TRAINING There wi l l be safe envi ronment Tra in ing Sessions at Our Lady o f Grace, Avon Park in Engl ish and Spanish on Thursday, June 6 f rom 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm and Saturday June 8 th f rom 9:30 to 11:30 am. Tra in ing sess ions wi l l be held in the Rel ig ious Educat ion Bui ld ing. A l l people work ing wi th ch i ldren or vu lnerab le adul ts must a t tend a safe envi ronment sess ion. You must prereg is ter for these sess ions. You can regis ter on l ine or by ca l l ing Bet ty 453-4757.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION This weekend is the last Sunday for Religious Education Class for grades Kindergarten through 5th grade.

Students and parents are reminded that they should be attending Mass weekly during the break.

Staff

& Ministries

Administrative Assistant Betty Heiring

betty.heiring@ologap.org

Religious Education

Angie Heiring angie.heiring@ologap.org

(863) 453-7537

Music Gene Ryan

mee@generyan.com

Associate Youth Director

Angie Heiring (863) 453-7537

Prayer Group Kevin Murphy

Women’s Guild Debbie Augusta -

President (863) 385-8872

Respect Life

Dick & Marie Carlson (863) 471-2134

Parish Council

President

Judy Pounds

Vice President Piedad Sarmiento-Noriega

Secretary

Judy Nugent

Members Debbie Augusta Maureen Cool

Darlyne Devany Jim McGann Karen Hecker Tina Starling

Teresa Torres

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The children of Our Lady of Grace have taken an important 1st step in their journey through life with a faithful travelling companion – Jesus – with the reception of 1st Communion recently. Now that the School of Religion will recess for the summer months, parents are encouraged to bring their children to mass on Sundays during summer recess.