CATHEDRAL OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENT
The Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament Parish in Altoona, PA is a welcoming and compassionate community of believers striving to grow as God’s people.
As disciples of Jesus Christ, we offer lifelong faith formation for children, youth, and adults; and we live out Christ’s invitation to serve our sisters and brothers.
We gather to worship in prayer and song and invite all to joyfully participate in word and sacrament, especially the Eucharist.
SERVING THE PEOPLE OF GOD IN THE CITY OF ALTOONA, PA SINCE 1851.
SUPPORTING THE MINISTRIES OF CATHEDRAL PARISH
By clicking on the Get Involved link, you will find valuable information on how to make a financial donation to the Cathedral. The weekly offertory, the annual Catholic Ministries Drive, Bequests, and contributions to our Endowments are ways by which the blessings God has given to you become a blessing to the parish.
PRAYER FOR POPE LEO XIV
O God, who in your providential design willed that your Church be built upon blessed Peter, whom you set over the other Apostles, look with favor, we pray, on Leo XIV our Pope and grant that he, whom you have made Peter’s successor, may be for your people a visible source and foundation of unity in faith and of communion. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen. Excerpt from the English translation of The Roman Missal © 2010 International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation. All rights reserved.
SISTERS OF CHARITY
The Sisters of Charity arrived in Altoona on August 20, 1870. The Sisters have had a profoundly significant influence in our diocese, especially at Cathedral parish. We were pleased to have a delegation of Sisters from their Korean province, who were accompanied by Sisters from Greensburg, present at our 10 A.M. Mass on Sunday, June 15. Gratitude is extended to Jean Koury and Steph Kilcoyne who provided refreshments and acted as tour guides.
DAILY MASSES
Monday-Saturday-Noon
WEEKEND MASSES
Vigil, Saturday at 5:00 P.M.
Sunday Masses at 8:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M.
SACRAMENT OF RECONCILIATION
Wednesday at 7:00 P.M.
Saturday: at 12:30 P.M.
By appointment: by calling or texting 814-937-8240
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 27, 2025
GOSPEL MEDITATION
Once I went to a hospice facility to celebrate Last Rites for an elderly dying man. His family had told me that he had been uncommunicative for days. At the conclusion of the ritual, we began to recite the Our Father prayer. To everyone’s surprise, his lips moved, clearly mouthing the words to the Lord’s prayer. Stripped of most of his faculties, the man could still pray those precious God-given petitions. A lifetime of prayer had planted the words even deeper than his failing consciousness.
Do we want the Lord’s prayer to be as deeply embedded in us? If we want to be people of hope, we should. Recall that our Lord immediately follows the prayer by saying: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9). We only ask, search and knock because we hope that the request is not in vain. Everything we could possibly hope for is contained in the prayer. Praying the Our Father deepens our hope.
We should consciously pour all our hopes into the Lord’s prayer; we should allow it to be an expression of hope, not simply rote words. Then, over time, it builds up our hope in God. It sinks deep into our souls and bodies. How blessed we are when these words of hope are on our lips, even when everything else seems to fail.
–Father John Muir
EVERYDAY STEWARDSHIP
The teachings of our Catholic faith are inexhaustibly deep, but they are also amazingly simple. Today’s readings take us back to the basics, reminding us how we as Christian stewards are to approach our relationship with God and others. The Gospel reading from Luke takes us back to the basics of prayer. In this passage, some of Jesus’ disciples ask our Lord to teach them how to pray. Jesus offers them the beautiful prayer which we call the Our Father. This prayer is so rich that it still forms the
basis of our approach to God the Father over 2,000 years later. At the same time, it is so simple, we teach it as a first prayer to young children.
The Our Father is truly a steward’s prayer. In it, we call upon God in an intimate way, as Father. We ask that His will be done (not ours) and that His kingdom come (not ours). In other words, we remember that He is our Creator, everything is His, and our focus in life should be on His priorities, not our own.
At the end of the Gospel passage, Jesus offers one more “basic” for us stewards about our relationship with the Father: Ask Him, seek Him, knock on His door. He can hardly wait to bless us, His children. Remember that this week, then go and be a blessing to others. Stewardship is really just that simple.
2025 Catholic Stewardship Consultants
PRACTICING CATHOLIC – RECOGNIZE GOD IN YOUR ORDINARY MOMENTS
Ask and You Shall Receive
It’s easy to look at today’s Gospel reading and come away with a view of God as disinterested and irritated, reluctant to give us what we need unless we bang down his door, hound him to the furthest reaches of heaven, wrench him from his reverie and force him to answer just so we’ll finally go away.
Well, that’s not what Jesus means by the parable of the friend at midnight — but it’s also not surprising that we would think that it is. The whole point of this Gospel is that communication between God and man has been broken. It’s not as easy as it once was, as it should be, as it could be. In this parable, there exists many barriers between the supplicant and his friend. The time of day is not ideal. The door is locked. Their dispositions are opposite — one is in the middle of a REM cycle and the other is deeply agitated. They appear to be two people who are not primed to communicate well. Everything is working against them.
The same could well be said of God and the human race. Here we are in a fallen world, surrounded by sin and pain and sickness and death to the extent that it infiltrates not just our bodies but our souls, our minds, our attitudes.
We are the friend caught unprepared in the dead of night. We don’t always know how to talk to God (That door is thick! Will he hear us if we knock?). We don’t always know if we should (It’s all my fault that I ran out of loaves, after all). We don’t even know if we want to (It’s nighttime! He might be angry!). Everything is working against us.
It doesn’t matter, Jesus tells us. Whatever is interrupting communication between your heart and the One who crafted it, the One who desires its full and irrevocable attention, it can be overcome. There is no door thick enough, no night dark enough, no sleep strong enough.
So knock.
– Colleen Jurkiewicz Dorman