After Our Lady of Peace in Geneva was blessed with a stellar seminarian this year in Peter Mottola, Fr. Tomasso has announced that Peter Van Lieshout will be doing his pastoral year at Our Lady of Peace next year as well.

St. Stephen Church, one of the ‘worship sites’ within the Our Lady of Peace parish, features one of the only perpetual adoration chapels in the Diocese of Rochester.  It seems that the prayers of this long suffering parish are being answered.  (For a snapshot, in the late 1990’s, St. Stephen featured a two-dozen member ‘liturgical dance’ troupe and regular homilies by a laywoman.)

This promises to be a great blessing to the people of Geneva, a town which in 1979 boasted 767 students in its Catholic Schools, while Waterloo and Seneca Falls (both of whom faced school closures recently) boasted 499.   Today, the total number of Catholic School students between Geneva, Waterloo, and Seneca Falls is a mere 224.  For those of you keeping score at home, the Catholic School attendees have dropped by over 1000 in the past 30 years in these three small towns alone.

Please, this Holy Week, pray for both Peter Mottola and Peter Van Lieshout, as well as all seminarians and discerners.

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