Saint Martin Church

08/03/2026

August 4th at 4pm
Drive Thru Picnic Prices

Burgoo 25.00
Mutton 20.00
Chicken 15.00
Pork 15.00

07/29/2026

A little beauty around St. Martin Parish today. 🌸🦋

Our flowers are showing off, and this beautiful orange sulphur butterfly stopped by to say hello.

Sometimes it’s the little things that remind us just how beautiful God’s creation is. 💛

07/28/2026

07/27/2026

This week I am going to return to the Creed. In the last of these columns, I wrote about the theology of the Father in the Creed. There is not a lot there, but what is there is important. This week I'm going to move on to what the Creed says about the Son. This is much more in depth and will probably take several weeks to get through it all. One thing that is important to understand is that the Creed is not a list of everything that we believe. It is a list of things that we as Catholics must believe but it is not all we believe. The Church generally only formally declares a dogma, something we must believe, when it is challenged. So, to better understand the doctrine of Jesus in the Creed it is help to look at them through the lens of what the controversy was that led to that declaration.

This week I will begin with, “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” This first sentence of the Creed about Jesus is in response to two particular controversies in the early days of the Church. One was the question of whether Jesus was the actual Son of the Father and thus God or if he was only a very special human being who was adopted by the Father as his son. We as Christians reject the idea that Jesus was only a human being who God chose to call his son. It flies in the face of the scripture and how we understand the salvation of God. If Jesus was only one of us how could his death be enough to redeem all of us. Also, If Jesus was adopted by God, then why do we bother saying that we are the adopted children of God. This controversy is why the Creed says that Jesus is the only “begotten” Son of the Father. We are God's adopted sons and daughters; Jesus is his begotten son. The second controversy revolves around whether Jesus was around from before the beginning. No one challenged that God was eternal. That he existed before the world came to be. However, there was a disagreement about whether the Son was around at the beginning. As Catholics we believe that Jesus is co-eternal with the Father. In other words, he as long as there has been the Father there has been a Son. The prologue to John's Gospel testifies to this when it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” To establish this point is why in the Creed we say he was born of the Father before all ages.

I'm going to conclude this week’s column by saying that especially in the section of the Creed about the Son there are going to be things that we do not understand. That is fine. I had an entire semesters course on just this section of the Creed and there is much that I just don't get. However, there are somethings that we must accept on faith.

07/21/2026

🔥 St. Martin Parish Drive-Thru Picnic is almost here! 🔥

Skip the cooking and let us take care of dinner!

Enjoy delicious homemade burgoo, smoked chicken, mutton, and pork, prepared by our St. Martin Men's Club. Every meal purchased helps support the ministries and mission of St. Martin Parish.

📅 Tuesday, August 4
🕓 Starting at 4:00 PM

Just drive through, pick up your meal, and enjoy a great dinner while supporting our parish. We can't wait to serve you!

Please share this post and help us spread the word! ❤️

07/20/2026

This week I'm going to continue what I started last week as a reflection on the importance of the Creed. I will, over the next few weeks, go through the Creed part by part and discuss what each part means and what it tells us about our faith. Today I'm going to write about what the Creed says about God the Father.
​The Creed begins by speaking about the Father, but it doesn't really say much about Him. It just says, “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth of all things visible and invisible.” In the whole of the Creed this is all that it says about the nature of the Father, and that's not much. The reason for this is that there is very little that we know for certain about the father, but there is more in that short phrase than we think.
​The first statement of faith in the whole Creed is, “I believe in ONE God.” This is an essential statement that seems obvious to us today. Of course, we believe in only one God, but this was not something that was taken for granted in the beginning. In fact, many opponents of the Church, argued that we professed faith in three gods, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, from the earliest days of the Church we have always maintained that we believed in one God. A triune God made up of three persons, but one God. It is important that the very first thing that we say about our faith is that we believe in one God.
​The next part of the statement, “The Father,” is equally significant. Anything we say about God will fall short truly describing the essential nature of God, but these statements of faith tell us real about God. So, the fact that we are instructed to call God “Father” means that title in some way describes the nature of God. We do not believe that God fathered the Son in any biological way, nor do we believe that he is our true father as we understand that word here on Earth. However, using the word father to describe God is the closest our human minds can come to comprehending the relationship between the Father and the Son and between God and us.
​The next phrase is fairly self-explanatory, “The Almighty.” We believe that God is all-powerful that nothing is beyond his power and that he can do all things. So, I will move on to the last phrase, “Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” In this we state our faith that God created all things. That nothing was created without God's intervention. It also means that we believe that there is more to creation than what we can see. It is important to note that the Creed makes no statement about how God accomplished this act of creation. Next week we will begin to get into deep waters when I begin to talk about the nature of Christ

07/13/2026

Most people love the story of St. Nicholas because of the acts of his life that inspired the legend of Santa Claus. However, Santa Claus in the legend bears little resemblance to the real St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas would probably not have been described by anyone who knew him as jolly, and he almost certainly wasn't fat. St. Nicholas was a great theologian who fought hard for the truths of the faith and was instrumental in writing the Creed that we profess today. My favorite story about St. Nicholas has nothing to do with him as the inspiration of Santa Claus. At the Council of Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed was written as the definitive statement of what we believe as Christians, St. Nicholas became so angry with someone arguing that Jesus was not truly God that he got up from his seat walked over and promptly punched him. This begs the question to me of what are we willing to fight for. What seems to us to be an obscure point of theology, something that is of no importance at all, was worth throwing punches for St. Nicholas.

So, how much thought have we given to the words that we recite every Sunday as our profession of faith. We say every Sunday that we believe these things, but have we ever stopped to think what it means that we say Jesus is God from God, for example. Are these simply words that we recite week after week or do we truly believe what we say. You might think that I am exaggerating but I'm not when I say literal wars were fought over what words should be used in the Creed. One of my professors in seminary often said, “Don't mess with the Creed. People bled for these words.” It is hard for us to fathom being willing to go to war over what words are used in a prayer, but this was part of the history of the Creed that we recite every Sunday.

I'm not saying that we should start fist fights or wars over the wording of the Creed, but if it was considered so important in the past that those things happened, then we should take some time to stop and think about the words we say and what they mean for our faith. To help with that I'm going to spend a few weeks singling out parts of the Creed and talking about what they mean for our faith and why they are important. We won't be starting any fights but maybe we will walk away with a better understanding of what we believe.