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JUSTICE JOTTINGS
March 2024
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MSJC EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES | |
MSJC's Lenten Justice Journey Continues | |
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Stations of the Cross Event
Hosted by the LGBTQ+ Initiative
When: Monday, March 25 at 8pm ET | 7pm CT | 6pm MT | 5pm PT | 2pm HT
What: Join us for a powerful stations of the cross experience during Holy Week. Participants will pray, reflect, and mediate on each of the 14 stations, through the reading of the stations, personal reflections, and striking imagery.
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A Lenten Journey with Immigrants and Refugees - A Weekly Reflection and Action Resource
Created by our Immigrant Justice Issue Team
This resource provides weekly reflections which can be used by individuals or shared with faith communities and used collectively. It is a way, during this season of Lent, for us to unite ourselves with the struggles and difficulties refugees and immigrants face daily. If you would like to receive weekly reminders of these reflections please sign up here to join the team's monthly Immigration & Refugee Update mailing list. Here is a list of additional resources for you to check out as well.
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Marianist Meatless Mondays
Created by MSJC's Integral Ecology Issue Team
Want to have an impact on climate change? Want to engage with other Marianists committed to sustainability? We invite you, and our entire Marianist Family, to commit to NOT eating meat one day each week for the rest of Lent or beyond! Here are our suggested recipes for the next month (before next Justice Jottings comes out):
Please save these recipes, or a personal favorite, and commit to this action challenge. You can sign up as an individual, family, or community below so we can support your efforts and stay in touch.
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The Lenten Justice Journey Calendar is linked below. We challenge you to pick at least one more way you want to engage with this work throughout the rest of the month/Lent. While a few events have already happened, know that you can go back and sit with any resources, reflections, or action challenge you may have missed. Blessings on your Lenten Justice Journey! | |
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Immigrant Justice Dialogue
When: Tuesday, April 16 for two hours starting at 7pm ET | 6pm CT | 5pm MT | 4pm PT | 1pm HT
What: Our Immigrant Justice Team invites you to a virtual dialogue session led by Dr. Jason Combs, Ph.D., Director of the University of Dayton Dialogue Zone on Tuesday. Participants will dialogue about the current USA immigration situation. We will begin by explaining the method of dialogue. Then persons with a variety of close immigration experience will share their views. Following that, participants will break into dialogue 'rooms'. Dr. Combs will conclude the session asking participants to share what they experienced.
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Imago Dei Assembly
When: Thursday, June 27 - Sunday, June 30
Where: Mount Saint John in Dayton, OH
What: MSJC's LGBTQ+ Initiative is delighted to host Imago Dei: Embracing the Dignity of LGBTQ+ Persons, an assembly for the Catholic LGBTQ+ community. Imago Dei aims to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a 1974 groundbreaking conference centered on LGBTQ inclusion and ministry. We hope to honor those who foresaw the importance of developing pastoral care and outreach, and to envision how we can continue to respond to the needs of the LGBTQ+ community within our Church and world.
Read more about the event on our website. We have also recently updated all plenary and concurrent sessions here for interested individuals to check out! Early bird registration, which includes a 25% discount, ends on April 1st. Scholarships are available as needed. Please reach out to us at info@marianistsjc.net if you have any questions. Can't wait to see you in June!
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SAVE THE DATE: MSJC's 2024 Giving Day
MSJC's annual Giving Day will be on Tuesday, April 23rd this year. Giving Day provides an opportunity for everyone to come together to support and expand the work of our seven active volunteer project and issue teams. Mark your calendars and more details to come!
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MSJC REFLECTIONS & RESOURCES | |
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Guest contributor Fr. Joe Muth from Baltimore shares his reflections on his parish's ministry to LGBTQ+ persons:
It is a Challenging and a Hopeful Time by Fr. Joe Muth
As the pastor of St. Matthew Church in Baltimore, Maryland for 30 years, I was part of a group which started a gay and lesbian outreach group called LGBTQ+ Educating and Affirming Diversity (LEAD) in the final twelve years of my ministry. It is still active today. In addition, we have helped about 14 other parishes start a gay and lesbian outreach group. This past year our archbishop even developed guidelines for other parishes that want to start a gay and lesbian ministry in their parish.
It is amazing to me that this ministry is growing. It seems to me that we are in a very different time. There is still much work to do and many people to welcome. It has always been inspiring to me that many of the Catholic gay and lesbian community have the determination to stay in the church. In my opinion, the hierarchy of the Church could learn so much about faith from the gay and lesbian community if they would only listen. Maybe the synodality process started by Pope Francis will be a help... [Read more from Fr. Joe here!]
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Read this recently published letter to the editor of the Dayton Daily News by team member Bill Hirt:
We are in a perilous time in this country and in our war-torn world. We have religious traditions in this country, but many of them are tainted with scandals and excesses by religious “leaders”. This has left our faith communities un-focused on strengthening our national resolve to bolster each other in peacemaking and reconciliation to pursue a more perfect Union. I have a suggestion that I hope we can all consider in this pivotal election season. I would like us to try a common plea, every day . . . to say a prayer . . . to call upon our “better angels” to give us wisdom to do justice, to act with civility and respect toward each other, to build a healthier and caring future for our children, not to demean and distort the news about our institutions and fellow citizens and leaders. I am convinced that the mystery we will likely never understand of “angels” does embody what we also call “grace” . . . the grace and energy and power to move mountains . . . accumulated in the “wisdom of the ages” in what Martin Luther King called the “moral universe”. That is our source of wisdom and grace and resolve to restore damaged relationships. We desperately need however to ask for it daily, to connect to it, to notice the channels of it in the goodness of our fellow citizens, not in their shortcomings or mistakes. We need to ask for it every day, especially this year, this election season. As Abraham Lincoln appealed to the nation in his First Inaugural Address, let us ask that “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
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BEYOND MSJC OPPORTUNITIES | |
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Reversing Global Warming Virtual Group Opportunity
Feeling hopeless, and maybe helpless, when thinking about climate change?
Then join us for Reversing Global Warming, a 5-session workshop offered on Zoom, 5 Thursdays, April 25 – May 23, 7-9 pm (ET). The goal is to help you determine where and how you can make an impact on global warming and provide a supportive setting and group to move you to action. You can make a difference! More details on this flier.
The program is free, but you must register. For more details about the program and to register (send us your name, email and phone #), contact:
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