OK, so I know I goofed up last weekend when I wrote in my column that we were having the blessing of throats after all the Masses even though the feast of St. Blasé isn’t until February. But in my defense, I was reading our month- ly “Diocesan Memorandum” before typing the article & it was giving the liturgical dates for 2019, one of which concerned the blessing of throats on February 3rd. So my mind just skipped ahead a few months. Secondly, the Deacon is suppose to stop me from making any mistakes. He obviously failed in that responsibility. But I can assure you that he pointed it out to me afterward.
I understand that John Sabol will be preparing a webcast of the presentation he gave on the history of our parish so that we can make it available on our website. That’s great news to me as I had the flu that week but heard that it was really well done. But John discovered something as he was preparing for the presentation. The last paragraph of the deed to the parish property which was executed in 1949 said that the name of the parish is “St. Leo V” (as in St. Leo the Fifth) instead of saying “St. Leo the Great” who was actually St. Leo I (the first). John said that after looking up information on St. Leo V, he was no saint, and wasn’t very great! Since it’s in a legal document, I suppose someone could argue that the property really doesn’t belong to us. But if they want the property back, we’ll give them all the bills that go along with it!
So we bring our 70th Anniversary Year to a close with the feast of St. Leo the Great this weekend (celebrated every year on November 10th). My thanks again to John Sabol, not only for his great history lesson, but for the work he & his wife Jeannie did on the display case in the vestibule. He has updated the pictures & documents there to show Christ- mases from past years at our parish, so be sure to stop there & take a look. This week we will draw a winner for the $1000.00 Sweepstakes Raffle prize so that’s a good way to end this anniversary celebration.
This would be a good time to let you know that because we made very little profit on that Sweepstakes Raffle (only about $350), we are going to tweak it a bit for next year. We will start to sell the new raffle tickets on Saturday, Decem- ber 1st. The first drawing will be January 1st. It will run until November 10th (feast of St. Leo). We will continue to have a $100 weekly winner (and again, you can win more than once in the year!). We will have (5) $200 winners on New Year’s Day, Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and 4th of July instead of having a $1000.00 drawing on Easter and Christmas. We will still have a $1000.00 winner though on the feast of St. Leo. Many people love to play this raffle & they make wonderful gifts, especially as stocking stuffers at Christmas.