In the panel to the left you will see the highlighted words, NEWS/EVENTS.  Click on the link UNDERNEATH, COMING UP,  for details about upcoming activities in the St. Therese Parish Community, as well as basic information and news. There is also "old news" in the ARCHIVED NEWS link.  Then just scroll down to find the event you are interested in reading about.

The activities change on a weekly or monthly basis and range from social to spiritual to educational--or a combination of these.  Most include involvement with other members of the Parish Community, as well as those from the surrounding areas.  Being part of a community is an important part of being a Catholic Christian.  Below are some quotes about community that you may find inspiring:

  • “The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

  • “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” -Dorothy Day

  • “Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.”  -Orson Scott Card

  • “One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” -Stendhal 

  • “Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sunday is not the full experience of community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted ‘it takes a village’.”  -David James Duncan

  • “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is... One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation... Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God's love, by man's basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a ‘stranger’ in a random universe...The human being develops when ... his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator... It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.” -Pope Benedict XVI

  • “Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.” -Stanley Hauerwas

  • “Christianity nowadays is like a big household where many cousins live under the same roof. They all belong to the same clan, but at times they have very different ideas about how to run their family affairs. Some of them, for instance, have no use for any outside devotion. God is a spirit, and He wants to be worshipped in spirit only, they say. Consequently, they have dispensed with all liturgy. They don’t want any distracting ceremonies, no incense, no vestments, no music, no pictures and images, not even sacraments—only the service of the spirit. The trouble is, however, that as long as we live here on earth, we simply are not pure spirits, but we have also a body, and in that body, a very human heart; and this heart needs outward signs of its inward affections. That is why we embrace and kiss the one we love; and the more we love, the more ardently we press him to this very heart—somehow it seems as if these cousins had overlooked that fact. But you can’t cheat the heart; it knows what it wants, and it knows how to get it.”  -Maria von Trapp 

  • “Precisely because we are so inclined to think in terms of individual greatness and personal heroism, it is important for us to reflect carefully on the fact that the compassionate life is a community life.”   -Henri J. M. Nouwen

  • “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”  -John Donne, No Man Is An Island