News - October 2026 RSS Feed

Dear family, What an exciting weekend we are having at our parish! First of all, thanks to the generosity of longtime St. Peter parishioner Barbara Tamplain, mother of local church musician Adam Tamplain, we have a new organ in St. Peter Church! I hope you can come to the recital and dedication of the organ in memory of the late Lionel Tamplain (Barbara’s husband, Adam’s father) this Sunday afternoon, October 25 at 3:00 p.m., where local organist Jared Croal will show us what beautiful music this organ is capable of making! As you probably know, after Hurricane Isaac in 2012, our pipe organ was damaged to the point of being unusable without an expensive restoration. So now, fourteen years later, thanks to Mrs. Tamplain’s generosity, we have been able to obtain a two manual digital Allen church organ in excellent condition from another Catholic church in our deanery, who themselves were able to get an excellent organ from another church! And I heard that just recently, Ascension of Our Lord Church obtained a new two-manual organ from another church. Apparently it’s a great time for upgrading our church music in our deanery! We’ll start using the organ for Sunday Masses next weekend, which is All Saints Day. The recital will be free, but feel free to make a love offering so we can give Jared Croal a nice thank-you gift for playing so beautifully on this happy occasion. (see more)

Dear family, Blessed Fulton J. Sheen! What a joy that we can now call him “Blessed”! It was a great blessing to be present at his beatification Mass in St. Louis on September 24th, and to concelebrate Mass with a thousand priests and almost a hundred bishops, with about 50,000 people in the congregation at The Dome at America’s Center. Somehow, by the grace of God, I ended up in the front row of priests during Mass, along with four other priests I knew from seminary (three from Louisiana), and with a rather famous Franciscan priest sitting right behind me. If you have a spare three and a half hours, you can watch the recording on EWTN’s YouTube channel. I actually want to do that myself soon, to see it from all the angles that I might have missed from my limited perspective on the floor of the Dome. By the way, The Dome was the home stadium for the Rams a decade ago. As we entered the Dome, if it hadn’t been such a sacred and solemn moment—the procession at the beginning of Mass—I absolutely would have followed my impulse to jump up and slap the door frame as we “took the field.” see more