This weekend all of the Catholic schools will celebrate Catholic Schools Week. Our own St. Clare will also be part of these celebrations with a kick off Sunday Mass, and Open House from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. Please spread the news, invite families and friends, and let us be bold about Catholic education. Promotion of our school is part of our Evangelization effort. There are some $$ incentives for taking part in this quest.

What a weekend for our St. Vincent de Paul Conference! We participated in the Kroger-Gleaners Bringing Hope to the Table project and were able to fill 24 grocery carts with donated non-perishable food and personal items. Our intrepid pantry coordinator Diane McCloskey deserves a HUGE round of applause for organizing the 29 volunteers who stepped forward to lend a hand in making this colossal endeavor a success! By Diane’s calculations, those 29 people gave 131 hours of service and handled at least 1,963 items.

It is a busy weekend of community service in our parish. By the time you read this, you'll have had an opportunity to donate to the Warm Hands, Warm Hearts program through Christian Service and our SVdP Conference will be in the midst of our Kroger/Gleaners Food pantry drive. We have some volunteers out at our Kroger location on Crocker Road near Metro Parkway, and other volunteers working here at St. Clare organizing the donations of food and personal items and stocking our pantry.

The winners of the Keep Christ in Christmas Poster Contest sponsored by the K of C are...

Happy New Year and Thank You for the generous year-end contributions we have been finding in our SVdP mailbox! Your generosity is greatly appreciated and allows us to continue to serve our neighbors in need. Our next big project is the Gleaners/Kroger Food Pantry Project. We’ll need lots of volunteers for the weekend of January 17 and 18, and you don’t need to be a member of our SVdP conference to get involved!

The winners of the November 16th St. Clare of Montefalco K of C Spelling Bee competition, 6th graders Nicholas Lundberg and Frank Blackman, will be competing at the District Level competition on January 11th in the St. Clare Social Hall starting at 1:00 p.m.

It is an Eastern tradition to mark the doors of our homes with chalk and this inscription: 20+C+M+B+15. The number of the New Year is split at the beginning and end. The initials C, M, and B represent Casper, Melchior, and Balthasar, and the three crosses stand for “saint”. The letters also abbreviate the prayer: “Christus Mansionem Benedicat” which means May Christ Bless this House.

The St. Clare Warm Hands, Warm Hearts collection will take place on the weekend of January 17-18. Please look for our young Confirmation disciples and Christian Service members at the doors. This annual collection after masses support the warming centers for St. Aloysius and St. Peter and Paul. We provide hand warmers for their programs and additional gifts of money to support their good works.