Since the summer, Felix Lam has been collecting school supplies from donations at church and buying at local stores to send to two Catholic schools in Haiti. It was an idea developed after his Boy Scout troop began to work with Queens-based From Here to Haiti.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy students donate through Koinonia John the Baptist, an organization that sends funds and goods to needy communities around the globe. The school’s donations are routed through Koinonia’s Lourdes Mission, which is named after Our Lady of Lourdes.
Our Lady of Mercy Church, Forest Hills, marked its 90th anniversary with a Mass on Oct. 6. that was celebrated by Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio.
With October as the month of the Holy Rosary, the faithful of St. Clare’s Church in Rosedale gathered to pray for healing, discernment and vocations, as cars and buses zoomed by.
It took more than nine months of planning, but for the first time, the “One Youth Rally” retreat on Oct. 5 brought together teens from the 10 different Queens parishes within Deanery 5 for a a variety of opportunities for the youth to grow in their faith.
After successfully batting cancer, Queens resident Leah Salmorin founded a dragonboat team for survivors of breast cancer.
“For a chaplain or priest to be there, it gives them some sense of peace and calm … and moments like this put us [chaplains] in a situation to exercise pastoral judgement. It’s about giving compassion, empathy and care. Bringing comfort to the family — that’s at the core of pastoral care, of what we do.”
This past winter, Matilde passed away on a trip to Peru, the family’s native country. The children had her body brought back to White Plains, N.Y., where they live, for the funeral. One day, while praying with the family, their cousin-in-law Manuel Mendoza felt the Holy Spirit nudge him to invite the siblings who had been married civilly back to the faith.
The danger of vaping is real. According to a Sept. 19 weekly report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of people with a deadly vaping-related lung disease rose to 530 from 380 the week before (38 states and one U.S. territory report numbers). Officials have said half of those patients are under 25 years old and 16 percent are younger than 18. Nine deaths have been reported.
At the dedication Mass, readings were done in Tagalog, Spanish, English and Mandarin. The church has parishioners from almost 50 countries, according to pastor Father John Vesey, and has seven Masses every Sunday. Some services were cancelled on Sept. 22 to encourage parishioners to attend the dedication Mass.
