Dear Friends, 

On September 12, less than a month away, Illinois’ medical aid-in-dying law (commonly referred to as assisted suicide) will be in force.  

While Governor JB Pritzker signed the “End of Life Options” Act into law on December 12, the delay until September was built-in to give the Illinois Department of Public Health and health care providers time to establish the required processes and safeguards. 

Just a few days ago, Bishop Paprocki, the Lutheran Care Center, and four Illinois physicians sued the State of Illinois over this unjust law. The Thomas More Society filed the complaint on their behalf, asking a federal court to block the law before it takes effect on September 12.  

As you you know, this law is frought with problems. Not only does the law violate the natural and moral law when it allows and promotes suicide, it also requires faithful medical professionals to help facilitate patient suicides in violation of the Hippocratic Oath, centuries of legal and medical tradition, and their deeply held religious convictions.   

Dr. Mary Keen, one of the four doctors in the suit, explains the impossible situation the State has put her and many other doctors in: “The State’s demand that physicians begin helping patients accomplish assisted suicide violates everything I know as a health care professional, as well as my deeply held Catholic convictions on the dignity of every human life. As a doctor, I have a responsibility to meet my patients’ existential pain with loving accompaniment, not with abandonment.” 

Not only does this travesty strike at the vocation of the physician, it attacks the foundation of Catholic and religiously based healthcare. 

“At the heart of the Catholic Church’s healthcare ministry is the healing work of Christ—to stand with the suffering, to comfort the dying, and to affirm the God-given dignity of every human life,” said Bishop Paprocki. “Illinois’s assisted suicide law undermines that mission by forcing Catholic hospitals and those who serve in them to push death onto their most vulnerable patients. We must be free to serve the sick and the dying according to our faith, not according to the state’s mandate.” 

While not a pleasant subject to discuss, in the coming weeks I will devote the pastor’s column to the topic of assisted suicide and why the Catholic Church opposes it. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

This Saturday the Church celebrated the great Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, meaning we believe God assumed Mary body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life. 

It might sound strange, but I think we can learn a little about the Assumption from St. Catherine of Siena’s experience of levitation. 

St. Catherine of Siena, a great Dominican mystic and Doctor of the Church, was widely reported by many different witnesses to have experienced levitation on multiple occasions.  

In her crowning spiritual work, The Dialogue, St. Catherine explains the inner spiritual realities that result in levitation. The explanation comes during the Heavenly Father’s concluding remarks to St. Catherine about the stages a soul must rise through to attain perfect love. 
 
God the Father, speaking of St. Catherine, says, “Though she is mortal she tastes the reward of the immortals, and weighed down still with the body she receives the lightness of the spirit. Often, therefore, the body is lifted up from the ground because of the perfect union of the soul with me, as if the heavy body had become light.”  

Thus, what draws her body up from the ground is the loving union of her soul with God. In short, the soul is drawn up in love so powerfully that the body can’t help but follow. 

Our Heavenly Father continues, “It is not because its heaviness has been taken away, but because the union of the soul with me is more perfect than the union between the soul and the body. And for this reason the strength of the spirit united with me lifts the body’s weight off the ground.”  

So perhaps we could say that Mary’s union with God was so perfect that it led to her Assumption. 
 
It will be a great marvel at the end of time when all our bodies are resurrected by the Love of God, and an even greater marvel to see the soul drawing the body towards God in the loving union, prefigured for us today in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary who has joined in perfect loving union of body and soul her Resurrected Son in Heaven. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

This past Thursday, August 6^th, we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. 

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. There, before their eyes, He is transfigured: His face shines like the sun, and His clothes become dazzling white. Many see this great mystery as a foretaste of the Resurrected Jesus, an illuminating display of his divinity to His inner circle of disciples.  

But it’s not only that. Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets, appear and speak with the Lord to reveal that all Scripture finds its fulfillment in Him. Then a bright cloud overshadows them, and the voice of the Father is heard: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 

That raises the question: listen to what? Jesus hadn’t said anything coming up the mount. Previously, the last thing He’d said was to predict His Passion after Peter had professed his faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Then, after they’d made their way down the mount, Jesus must step in to heal a boy the disciples could not. Jesus then repeats the prediction of His passion. The glory revealed on the mountain does not remove the necessity of suffering; it makes the coming suffering meaningful. 

Taken together, the before-and-after framing shows that the Transfiguration is not an isolated moment of glory. It is a revelation given in the shadow of the Cross. 

• Before: the cost of discipleship is announced. 

• On the mountain: the glory that awaits is revealed. 

• After: the disciples are sent back into the ordinary struggles of faith and mission, carrying both the memory of glory and the call to follow the Lord. 

In Matthew’s Gospel, the Transfiguration stands as a hinge: it confirms who Jesus is, clarifies the path He must walk, and gives the disciples (and us) a reason to hope while walking that same path. 

Pope St. John Paul II helps us to better meditate on this great mystery when he made it the Fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary.   

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth