Dear Friends,
Thank you all once again!
I am especially honoured that the Administrator took time out from his busy schedule to wish me a happy birthday in such a Tone!
Yesterday, I went to visit St Anne's Church in the town of Penetanguishene where I spent my earliest years.
It is a very Baroque RC Church with French and Irish Canadians as its most numerous parishioners.
It was here that Samuel Champlain landed in the 1600's and where Franciscan Recollet Father Joseph LeCaron first preached to the native peoples in 1615.
The Church has a statue of Father LeCaron at the front with statues of STs. Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalement as well - it was the first Jesuit Shrine Church of the North American Martyrs in Canada, bult in 1886.
I stood at the back as a funeral Mass and sermon were being conducted at the time.
I remembered mom taking my brother and I there more than 40 years ago (it has a beautiful stations of the Cross and all the walls are painted with brightly-coloured pictures of Biblical scenes, including the ceiling!).
My father was unable to have children due to a condition exacerbated by tuberculosis.
He took pills for it, but not regularly. My mother wanted desperately to have a child and prayed at that shrine, lighting many candles.
I was finally conceived and born, on the Old Calender feast of St John de Brebeuf and the North American Martyrs.
It was a truly blessed day for me and I thank God for bringing me closer to Him by means of it.
Alex
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