Dear Assumption Family,

Next week is Assumption University's Espresso Your Faith Week, a week-long celebration that highlights the spiritual life of Assumption University and celebrates the gift of faith working in our lives and in our community.

While the majority of events will be able only to students on campus (see attached brochure for the entire schedule), we invite the wider Assumption family to join us on Monday, April 12 at 7:00PM EDT (via Zoom) for an Agape Latte with our very own Fr. Richard Lamoureux, Vice President for Mission at Assumption University, as he shares with us lessons learned in life and how faith has been pivotal through all of his adventures. (Zoom Meeting ID: 960 9509 5233)

What's Agape Latte? Come see for yourself!

A storytelling series on life and faith that invites your favorite Assumption faculty/staff to share powerful personal stories and transformative moments in their own lives about times they saw God working in their everyday life and about friendships, hope, forgiveness, family, vocational discernment, love, failures and loss, discovery, prayer, and the human experience so come and be inspired!

 Click here for more information - PDF file

A Letter from
Rachel Dean

He is Risen! What a gift to be able to say these words in person this Easter. I have such clear memories of Holy Week last year and the contrast to this year is striking. We were a month into quarantine, and I streamed my church’s service alone from my apartment in Alumni. I tried to keep reminding myself that my feelings in the midst of all of the unknowns of the upcoming weeks and months were far more like what the disciples were experiencing that first Triduum than my “normal” worship experience, but I must admit I did not want perspective.

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Today’s reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

What does it mean to live from the power of the resurrection? What does this look like? I’m reminded of one of Emeritus Pope Benedict’s most quoted statements: “being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” It’s the second half of this statement that helps us understand what living from the resurrection really means – to encounter an event, a person a new horizon, a decisive direction for our lives.

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Today’s Paschal Triduum reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

The liturgy of our Easter Vigil begins in the darkness of night, especially appropriate in the context of our pandemic year. There is actually something consoling about the darkness. God is telling us that He is fully aware of the night which is around us and within us, and that He has already struck his light at the heart of it.

This is the light that enables us to see, shows us the way, gives us direction. For those who give themselves to it, the Easter mystery means opening up pathways of hope for ourselves and our world. Those pathways always take the form of an Exodus, a passage from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom. From exile to homecoming, from death to life. The true pathway of hope is to follow along the path of Christ.

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Today’s Paschal Triduum reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

In a normal year, the world never fails to offer examples of human tragedy or natural disaster to sharpen our focus and deepen our meditation on the Cross. This year of pandemic is different only insofar as the sufferings are universal in scope and more immediately personal. None of us has been spared the loneliness, the disconnection and the sadness brought on by the world health crisis. If the effort to relate to the pain of the Cross has usually required some kind of imaginative projection, it has a different aspect this time around. The cross that we have been asked to bear puts us in right alignment with the mystery of our crucified God.

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A Letter from
Emily McCall

Rend Your Hearts

“Yet even now,” says the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Joel 2:12-13

As I sit here this Holy Week and I reflect on the past few weeks of Lent it seems as though it's passed by in the blink of an eye. To be honest, this Lent has been difficult for me. I haven’t been as steadfast in my Lenten offerings and fasts as I desired. I have felt overwhelmed and distracted by upcoming decisions and transitions in my life, making it hard to be present to the present moment and tempting me to cling to those things in which I seek false comfort. Yet even now in these last few days of Lent, I have the hope that Christ can bring about deep change within my heart.

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Today, Holy Thursday, we celebrate the Mass of the Last Supper. Please join us!

Mass will be at 7:00 PM at St. Joachim Chapel.

It will also be live-streamed through our YouTube Channel and Facebook page.

Today’s Paschal Triduum reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

For so many of the Catholic faithful, the celebration of Holy Thursday arrives in the midst of a whole year of “fasting” from the Eucharist. This has been a fast imposed in the interest of public health, but it constitutes, in the order of truth, the greatest of all the pandemic deprivations.

Normally, fasting means the voluntary sacrifice of lesser goods for the purpose of attaching ourselves more firmly to a greater good. What can it possibly mean, then, to “fast” from the greatest of all goods? It means to do without something so much at the heart of our Catholic life that we are left, in its absence, as mere shadows of our true selves. In this respect, there are no substitutes. If we have reason to be grateful for our technology, the “watching” of Mass is so far from the real thing as to belong to a different order of reality.

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Pain. It is a feeling that everyone knows. We have all experienced it differently to varying degrees and at different points in our lives. It’s not something you can escape. Why is it that the Church focuses on a man in the most excruciating pain possible?

Bring to mind this image of a man on a cross and let’s reflect on this image with Bishop Barron: