Giving Alms to the Poor During Lent

Lent is traditionally a time for prayer, penance, and almsgiving. Almsgiving includes contributing to the support of your pastors. The Society and all of our priests depend on your generosity for our very existence. 

If you saw our recent video, you know the many sacrifices our priests make to bring you the sacraments every week throughout the year. If you have not seen it yet, please take a few minutes to watch it, here. 

As former Superior General, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, so eloquently said in his Lenten letter to friends and benefactors 35 years ago,

This requires however the blessing of heaven, which we discern not least in the kindness of your gifts, spiritual and material. Let me then apply the appeal of St. Pius X as Bishop of Mantua to our own seminaries, schools, retreat houses, and priories:

…I do not ask the impossible: I know that your earnings are small, but I also know that there are many of you . . . many grains make a heap and many drops a shower! Have you yourselves not witnessed the unused church and the abandoned altar, the empty confessional? Have you not seen young men growing up ignorant of the things essential for their salvation, the sick and dying without the consolations of religion? … Do not think I wish to give you commands or lay on you harsh sacrifices. If I am asking for alms, I do so with the humility of a beggar…

 

This is the desire of your bishop. Let no one allege the scantiness of his income or the poverty of his parish, for there is no one who cannot give a cent, a fruit, a vegetable. Nothing is impossible to him who loves.

Please click the link here and give alms to support your priests.