St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, Defiance, Ohio

06/18/2026

Informational Meeting: Join Father David Cirata on a pilgrimage to Italy!
Visit the website for full information and registration or call or text Maggie McDaniel with questions (419) 290-8782.
An informational meeting will be held on June 28 at 6:00 pm in Emmaus Hall.

06/18/2026

06/18/2026

Matthew 6:7–15
Friends, today’s Gospel gives us the Our Father. It asks that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” but biblical cosmology sees these two realms as interpenetrating fields of force. Heaven, the arena of God and the angels, touches upon and calls out to earth, the arena of humans, animals, plants, and planets.

Salvation, therefore, is a matter of the meeting of heaven and earth, so that God might reign as thoroughly here below as he does on high. Jesus’s great prayer, which is constantly on the lips of Christians, is distinctively Jewish in inspiration: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This is decidedly not a prayer that we might escape from the earth, but rather that earth and heaven might come together. The Lord’s Prayer raises to a new level what the prophet Isaiah anticipated: “The earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as water covers the sea.”

The first Christians saw the resurrection of Jesus as the commencement of the process by which earth and heaven were being reconciled. They appreciated the risen Christ as the one who would bring the justice of heaven to this world.

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06/18/2026

Register for VBS: Vacation Bible School (VBS) registration is now open! VBS will be from 9am to 11:30am, beginning on Monday, June 29 and ending on Thursday, July 2. This year's theme is Ancient Rome: Paul and the Underground Church. The registration fee is $20. Registration forms are in the atrium or parish office.

06/17/2026

Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18
Friends, today’s Gospel asks us to do three things: pray, fast, and give alms. Let’s focus today on prayer. Studies show that prayer is a very common, very popular activity. Even those who profess no belief in God pray!

What is prayer, and how should we pray? Prayer is intimate communion and conversation with God. Judging from Jesus’s own life, prayer is something that we ought to do often, especially at key moments of our lives.

Well, how should we pray? What does it look like? You have to pray with faith, and according to Jesus’s model, you have to pray with forgiveness. The efficacy of prayer seems to depend on the reconciliation of differences.

You also have to pray with persistence. One reason that we don’t receive what we want through prayer is that we give up too easily. Augustine said that God sometimes delays in giving us what we want because he wants our hearts to expand.

Finally, we have to pray in Jesus’s name. In doing so, we are relying on his influence with the Father, trusting that the Father will listen to him

06/16/2026

DC Catholic is a ministry of both Catholic parishes of Defiance to Defiance College (DC) students, faculty and staff which seeks to proclaim the Catholic faith in fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and in communion with the Most Reverend Daniel E. Thomas, Bishop of the Diocese of Toledo, and to help DC students, faculty and staff know and love Jesus Christ in and through His Church, and to live the Catholic faith with joy and zeal, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. Connect here:

06/16/2026

Matthew 5:43–48
Friends, today, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord commands us to love our enemies.

What is the test of love? Jesus couldn’t be clearer in the discourse he delivers the night before he died. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” If love is willing the good of the other as other, this has to be the fullest expression, the final word, of love.

There is another way to test love: the love of enemies, those who cannot or will not pay you back. This also takes place in the cross of Jesus. Jews, Romans, Pharisees, Sadducees, his own disciples—everyone betrays him, runs from him, denies him, actively arranges for his death. And yet these are the very people that he loves, the very people for whom he gives his life.

The final test is what Jesus does when he returns from the dead. To the very people that contributed to his demise he says, “Shalom.” This is how we are loved; this is how we must love. Everything else is commentary.

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