Upcoming Events

Youth & Adults Altar Servers

Becoming an altar server is one of the best ways to get more involved with your parish and learn more about the Mass – regardless of your age. Youth and adult volunteers are needed for this ministry. Altar servers are assigned at their preferred Mass, every three to four weeks. If you are interested, please give your name, email and telephone number to Fr. Ranjan or one of the Sacristans at any of the weekend Masses. (Yellow registration forms can be found in the Gathering Centre for this purpose.)

Training Session

All new altar server are required to attend the next training session which will be at 10:00 am, Saturday June 10th. Written instructions and information is provided.

An Invitation to the ladies of the parish to join the CWL for a Baby Shower in support of Shifra Homes.

On Sunday, June 11, after the 11 a.m. Mass, we are hosting a Baby Shower in the Parish Centre for the mothers and their babies who reside at Shifra House, a maternity residence and shelter for young, pregnant homeless women.

A light lunch will be served and we will need to track attendance numbers in order to prepare the luncheon. Complimentary tickets will be available on the weekends of May 27-28 and June 3-4. The only price of admission is an unwrapped baby gift. Among the much needed items are the following:

– Baby clothes (newborn-12 mo)
– Baby laundry detergent
– Baby products (wipes, baby wash, cream, etc.)
– Baby socks, bibs
– Teething toys, Soothers
– Baby scissors & nail clippers
– Baby hairbrushes
– Baby Tylenol, Tempra, Vitamin D drops
– Vaseline
– Nasal suction
– Baby saline
– Diapers, sizes 4, 5 & 6

For those who are unable to attend, but wish to contribute, please feel free to bring your baby gift and leave it in the Narthex. If you would prefer to make a financial donation, contributions will be gratefully accepted and Shifra Homes will issue tax receipts provided your contact information is included.

Please join us on June 11th and meet Nancy Romic, Executive Director of Shifra Homes, along with some of the young mothers and their little ones. We look forward to seeing you there!

Jesuit missionaries worked among the Huron (Wendat), an Iroquoian-speaking people who occupied territory in the Georgian Bay area of Central Ontario. (They were not part of the Iroquois Confederacy, initially made up of five tribes south and east of the Great Lakes.) The area of their traditional territory is called Huronia. The Huron in this area were farmers, fishermen and traders who lived in villages surrounded by defensive wooden palisades for protection. Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was the headquarters for the French Jesuit Mission to the Huron Wendat people.

By the late 1640s, the Jesuits believed they were making progress in their mission to the Huron, and claimed to have made many converts. But, the priests were not universally trusted. Many Huron considered them to be malevolent shamans who brought death and disease wherever they travelled; after European contact, the Huron had suffered high fatalities in epidemics after 1634 of smallpox and other Eurasian infectious diseases.

The nations of the Iroquois Confederacy considered the Jesuits legitimate targets of their raids and warfare, as the missionaries were nominally allies of the Huron and French fur traders. Retaliating for French colonial attacks against the Iroquois was also a reason for their raids against the Huron and Jesuits.

In 1642, the Mohawk captured René Goupil, and Father Isaac Jogues, bringing them back to their village of Ossernenon south of the Mohawk River. They ritually tortured both men and killed Goupil. After several months of captivity, Jogues was ransomed by Dutch traders and the minister Johannes Megapolensis from New Netherland (later Albany). He returned for a time to France, but then sailed back to Quebec. In 1646 he and Jean de Lalande were killed during a visit to Ossernenon intended to achieve peace between the French and the Mohawk.

Other Jesuit missionaries were killed by the Mohawk and martyred in the following years: Antoine Daniel (1648), Jean de Brébeuf (1649), Noël Chabanel (1649), Charles Garnier (1649), and Gabriel Lalemant (1649). All were canonized in 1930 as the Canadian Martyrs, also known as the North American Martyrs.

The Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario, the site of the Jesuits’ missionary work among the Huron, is the National Shrine to the Canadian Martyrs.