Catholic Arkansas Sharing Appeal 2025

Published: February 2, 2025

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor recorded the following homily to be played at all Masses in Arkansas on Feb. 1-2, 2025, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord.

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Bishop Taylor

For more than 40 years, each of our last three popes has called for a new evangelization. One aspect of this new evangelization is the need to inspire everyone who calls themselves a Christian to really live their faith and live it in a way that has an effect on every part of their life.

The new evangelization calls us to see the connection between coming to Mass and making a difference in the real world, in truly living our faith. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI gave us the theological foundation for this new evangelization in brilliant terms, rooting it in the dignity of the human person.

And now for the last 12 years, Pope Francis has used his own pastoral experience to show us how to draw on the wonders of our Catholic faith to make the world a better place, which is of course very inspiring.

Pope Francis exhorts us to allow our faith to travel that longest 18 inches from our head to our heart, whereby we devote ourselves completely to him; empowering us to really live our faith with all our heart — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — which includes doing our share to build up the Kingdom of God here and now in Arkansas.

If we are not aligned with the Kingdom of God now in the way we live our life now, how do we expect to share in the life of the Kingdom of God in the world to come? If we aren't making sacrifices to make the world a better place now, whose kingdom are we building with our efforts? Our own, or the Lord's? 

There are, of course, many ways to build of the Kingdom of God and many things are needed for the new evangelization to go forward. One way that you can do this is to support our efforts on the diocesan level, which are funded through our annual Catholic Arkansas Sharing Appeal (CASA), hence this recorded message.

A listing of all the departments and initiatives funded through your CASA donations can be found in this week's issue of our Arkansas Catholic newspaper, which is my means of communicating with you weekly about the marvelous things the Lord is doing in our midst. If you are not yet a subscriber, please sign up. The electronic version is free: Just download it from the Internet.

To receive the print version, subscription envelopes are being provided to you along with your CASA pledge card to be filled out during this Mass, following this message. The lion's share of the money you donate to CASA helps to fund our diocesan offices and partially funds, among other things, the education of our 22 seminarians and the efforts of Catholic Charities.

Our diocesan guideline for your 10 percent tithe to the Lord before taxes is 5 percent to your parish, 4 percent to other charities or more to your parish, and 1 percent to this CASA appeal.

Today we celebrate the Presentation of the Lord. In our Gospel the Holy Family goes to Jerusalem to give to God the offering specified in the law for any first-born son. It was called the "redemption of the first born." Since God spared the first-born sons of Israel when he killed the eldest sons of Egypt in the 10th plague, all Jewish first-born sons belong especially to God.

But notice, when Mary and Joseph do this, a devout man named Simeon declares that through this baby God will redeem us, all of us, not just the first born. Now the Lord wants to use us to help redeem others in the new evangelization, in which we give witness to the Lord in every facet of our lives, 24/7.

Thank you for your generosity in the past to CASA and thanks in advance for an even more generous response this year!