More Information about our List of Names:
A brief description of why the names that have been put forward by the Archbishop, our pastor Father Mitch, and our Committee members would be appropriate for our new parish is included below for each name.
All Saints
The saints are our role models, teaching us by their lives that ordinary people can live Christ’s holy life of love, mercy, and unconditional forgiveness. The saints accomplish this by putting their trust in Christ and living heroic lives of faith. We know that the saints are in heaven as a reward for their faith in Jesus.
The saints intercede for us before Jesus, who is the mediator between us and God. They are the instruments that God uses to work miracles in the world today. These are great reasons to rely on them for spiritual support and guidance!
Today more than ever, God’s call for holiness is universal. We all can accept the challenge to become saints by choosing to do good and avoid evil, making the free choice daily to follow Christ, all the way to heaven. When we live lives of compassion, truth, justice, integrity, charity, and mercy, we grow in holiness on the path to becoming saints ourselves. That is why we should name the new parish ‘All Saints’.
St Kateri
St Kateri Tekakwitha, known as Lily of the Mohawks, is the first Indigenous Canadian to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Her mother was of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and her father was Anishinaabe.
Sadly, her community was affected by a smallpox epidemic. As a result, her face was scarred, her vision impaired, and she was orphaned at the age of four. She converted to Catholicism at nineteen, even though following her faith meant she would be shunned and perhaps even persecuted. She had to leave her community. Tekakwitha was then baptized Catherine (Kateri in Mohawk), in honour of St Catherine of Siena. She took a vow of chastity and considered herself married to Jesus.
Kateri was known to be a diligent worker, prayerful, penitent, and devout. Growing-up in a time of wars and epidemics, she had prolonged illness and died at the young age of 24. She is the patroness of ecology, the environment, people in exile, and of Native American and First Nations Peoples. Her intercessions are asked for in times of illness. Naming our new southwest parish St Kateri would mean it is a place for us to draw strength in faith, purity, and devotion to Our Lord.
Holy Spirit
The Holy pirit puts us into communion with Christ through the sacramental liturgy. When the Father sends his Word, he always sends his Breath. The mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit is brought to completion in the Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit prepares people and goes out to them with His grace, in order to draw them to Christ. The Spirit manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls his word to them and opens their minds to the understanding of his Death and Resurrection. He makes present the mystery of Christ, supremely in the Eucharist, in order to reconcile them, to bring them into communion with God, that they may bear much fruit.
“Holy Spirit" is the proper name of the one whom we adore and glorify with the Father and the Son. By becoming dwelling places of the Holy Spirit, each of us are given the opportunity to experience grace.
Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be with and in his disciples. We have received the Holy Spirit through the sacrament of Confirmation, a gift from Jesus. Naming our new parish Holy Spirit reminds us of our need to listen to and hear the Spirit more often and more willingly in our lives.
St Marguerite d'Youville
Pope John XXIII called Marguerite d’Youville "Mother of Universal Charity". Providing for the poor, her actions went against the social conventions of the day. St Marguerite d'Youville and the women who joined her in her mission to provide for the needy were mocked and made the object of ridicule by their friends and relatives who called them "les grises", meaning "the grey women”.
Marguerite d'Youville can sympathize with the unfortunate and painful situation of orphans, with adolescents worried about the future, with disillusioned girls who live without hope, with married women suffering from unrequited love and with single parents. But most especially, Marguerite is a kindred spirit with all who have given their lives to helping others.
Today, her mission is courageously carried on in a spirit of hope by the Sisters of Charity, the Grey Nuns and their sister communities. Marguerite was one woman, but this Canadian daughter of the Church had a vision of caring for the poor that has spread far and wide and is a felt presence throughout the City of Edmonton.
St Luke
Saint Luke is best known as the author of the 3rd Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. He was born in Greece and a Gentile in Antioch in Syria. He is one of the pioneer members of the church of Antioch. He is believed to be a very educated man and possibly a physician. He was highly gifted as both a writer and a painter and his works demonstrated an exemplary level of accuracy. St Luke’s writings have been proven to be historically accurate.
St Luke was a compassionate and spiritual man. He reflected these in his works which focused on prayer, Holy Spirit, and mercy. In the 3rd Gospel Luke emphasized Jesus’s compassion for sinners and for those who suffer. He evangelised through his works to continue the mission of Christ. His Gospel was the only one that told the story of Mary’s Annunciation, visit to Elizabeth and Magnificat, the Presentation. St Luke was venerated by the Catholic church as the patron saint of Doctors and Surgeons as well as painters.
As the name of our new parish, St Luke would be light reminding us of the importance of compassion for the suffering.
Divine Mercy
Divine Mercy is a devotion to Jesus Christ which is tied to the apparition of Jesus to Saint Faustina Kowalska. She is referred to as “the great apostle of Divine Mercy”. In Jesus’ revelation to St Faustina, He spoke of His final coming and asks that she prepares the world in advance for His coming.
The devotion focuses on trusting Jesus’s endless goodness and showing mercy to others. Divine Mercy signifies Christ’s mercy for us as He manifested in His Paschal Mystery in which God appears to us as a tender-hearted Father who does not give up on His Children even in the face of their ingratitude and always ready to forgive. Divine Mercy devotion gives us an opportunity to personally experience this mercy and in turn enjoin us to forgive those that hurt us. Divine Mercy as Pope John Paul II describes it; is a love which is benevolent, compassionate, and raises man above his weakness to the greatest heights of God’s holiness, this we become aware of in true devotion to Divine Mercy as we respond with sincere heart: Jesus, I trust in You.
Pope John Paul II is a strong advocate for the Divine Mercy Devotion, and he referred to Divine Mercy as a most precious fruit of faith for all generations and a bridge to the third millennium.
God wanted to give humans another chance of relating with him in an amazingly simple form through the Divine Mercy devotion. Naming our church Divine Mercy helps to achieve the aim that God wanted from St Faustina to prepare the world for His final coming by spreading His Devotion and winning more souls to Him.
Pope St John Paul II
During his inauguration homily as Pope, Saint John Paul II invited the world to “open wide the doors for Christ”. He was known for his devotion to the Mother of God and for reaching out to people across all nations and all faiths. He challenged Catholics to renew the Church and take up her evangelizing mission with fresh enthusiasm.
John Paul II spoke out on numerous social and political matters including apartheid, capital punishment, war(s), dictatorship and genocide. “Be not afraid” was his message during a visit to Poland, and this visit is said to have sparked the Solidarity Movement which led to the ultimate fall of communism in Europe some 10 years later.
John Paul II was a man of prayer, kindness and love who led the Church and the faithful through a very difficult and challenging period of human history. He should have a parish named after him in our Archdiocese.