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Since my arrival in 2011, one of my persistent prayers has been for a New Pentecost for the Church in central and western Oklahoma. 

In the final weeks of the Easter Season, we are celebrating an important yet difficult mystery of our faith. Compared to the shocking truths we celebrate in the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, Jesus’ ascension is less accessible at face value. 

What does it mean to belong to the Catholic Church? To be a member of the Church?  Is it membership in the sense of belonging to a club or a political party, that is, something that we can join and leave as we please? Though many Catholics may consider it so, our baptism has more durable consequences.  

On April 19, 1995, the Wednesday following Easter, a bomb strategically placed in front of the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City extinguished the lives of 168 people, many of them children in the building’s day care center.

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!  Another Lenten season has concluded with the joyful celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ at Easter. Lent provided an opportunity for us to reflect on our deepest identity as human beings, as children of God, and particularly as Catholics. 

It is common for people to express their intense interests as something they are “passionate about.” Someone can be passionate about golf or food or the Oklahoma City Thunder or exercise. For each of these passions, there is something deep within us that moves us to action.

This week, throughout the world, people will be celebrating the feast day of Saint Patrick, marked by different cultural practices from the way we dress to the things we eat and drink.  

We have begun our Lenten journey toward Easter. Since it’s a spiritual journey – a journey of faith – the destination is not a physical one.

The history of the Catholic Church in Oklahoma is a fascinating and still unfolding story. It was an intrepid band of Benedictine missionary monks who arrived in 1875 and established the first permanent Catholic settlement in Indian Territory.

Each year in January, we take time to pray with and for Christians worldwide during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which is observed in the Northern Hemisphere this year from Jan. 18 to 25. 

We have concluded our period of Advent preparation and now celebrate the joyful season of Christmas. Merry Christmas to you and to all your loved ones!

On Dec. 11, the day before the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I blessed a beautiful bronze statue of Our Lady atop our replica of Tepeyac Hill on the grounds of the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine. This was the first public event at the shrine, and it was open to the public. 

On Nov. 2, The Oklahoman featured a story about a student-athlete at one of our Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. On its face, the story was celebrating this student’s athletic success, but it was about more than that.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the final Thursday in November throughout the United States. The precedents for such a day of thanksgiving go back much further in our history. 

On the Via Veneto just north of the Piazza Barberini in Rome is a well-known church called Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappucini. To many tourists it is more popularly known as “the bone church.”

The liturgical calendar is the Church’s schedule of feasts and seasons that mark the rhythm of our life of faith. The cornerstone of the liturgical year is Sunday, the Lord’s Day, which is always a “little Easter.”

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God!” These words of the English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins find an echo in our hearts whenever we experience moments of transcendence or awe before the wonder of God’s creation.

It has been 10 years since I began walking the Way of Saint James, the Camino de Santiago. The Camino is a network of historic paths leading from various points in Europe to the tomb of Saint James the Greater, the son of Zebedee, friend of Jesus and the first apostle to give his life for the Gospel. 

Each year we have an opportunity to renew our prophetic commitment to promoting human dignity and sanctity of every life from conception to natural death.

This column was originally published in 2016. As this edition of the Sooner Catholic is published on August 21, I will once again be on pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago with Bishop Wall and Bishop Conley.