St Joseph's Church

Blessing of the Animals will take place after the 10:00 AM Mass on Sunday, October 2, 2022. 

“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” 
St. Francis of Assisi
Feast Day, October 4

Dear Parishioners and Visitors,

Thank you! Since the information below was printed in the bulletin last month, numerous parishioners and visitors have offered to donate to the continuing effort of repairing the church’s stained-glass windows.  We are most grateful for your financial support.  All the windows in our church are precious, since they memorialize the Catholic faith that sustained the workers and families who first settled in this area.  If you wish to foster the continuity of the Catholic identity here at Saint Joseph Church, please do consider a contribution to the “Church Windows Restoration Fund”.  God bless you!

Many have inquired about the two missing stained-glass windows in the church building’s nave and narthex.  A few factors contributed to the need for their removal, repair, and restoration.  In a snow- and windstorm on January 16, 2022, two of the polymer shields that had been installed to insulate the church and to protect the stained-glass windows were blown off, exposing the two double-lancet stained-glass windows to the elements.  A contractor and a professional artisan were consulted, and their assessment was that both windows had been suffering from “age and gravity” for a number of years, and that the structural integrity of the windows had been adversely affected in recent years by the reverberations from the church bell swinging back and forth in the tower above.  In April, artisans from Artglass by Misci removed the windows, moving them to their workshops in Massachusetts, where they are undergoing a soaking procedure to remove old grout, cleaning, and reassembly of the glass components.

Despite the $22,800 repair and reinstallation estimate, these windows were memorial donations given to Saint Joseph Church in the early 1900s — one donated by the families of the loggers who worked at Camp 11, and the other donated by the parish’s Young Ladies Sodality — and they are an indispensable part of the church’s patrimony and the Catholic history of the Lincoln-Woodstock area. 

We are hoping that the reinstallation of the windows will take place around Labor Day.  In the meantime, please excuse the      temporary particle board window coverings.

With prayerful best wishes,

Fr. John Mahoney

The three parables in this weekend’s Gospel of St. Luke coincide with the unforgettable and regrettable events of September 11, 2001.  Father James Martin, S.J., shares his personal reflection of that day in his The Parable of Ground Zero: “I thought, ‘What is God like? God is like the firefighter who rushes into a burning building to save someone. That’s how much God loves us.'”