Lenten retreat will find the joy in the Cross

WEST HAVEN — A Lenten retreat of two days will start Feb. 24 at Saint Mary Catholic Church in West Haven.

This retreat has two purposes: To celebrate Lent and, at the same time, to promote religious vocations.

The first day people will be attend Mass, pray the Stations of the Cross, enjoy some meatless soup and bread, and listen to presentations by Father Gustavo Vidal, pastor of St. Mary, and Ann O’Donnell, a Fr. Kolbe Missionary of the Immaculata, and then watch a movie about Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

During the vocations night, "some people are going to speak about their vocations calls and why they choose to follow a ministry in their communities," said Donna Masik, organizer of the retreat.

The movie was selected because of the special journey that Father Maximillian Kolbe had during his life as a priest during World War II, when he was imprisoned at Auschwitz, a concentration camp.

"His last proper words were ‘I am a Catholic priest,’" Masik said, adding that St. Maximillian was able, even in the concentration camp where they were starving, to reach the people because he converted a little shell into a chapel, where the prayers could be heard from the outside.

On the second day of the retreat O’Donnell will present her theme, ‘Finding Joy en the Cross,’ which will be followed by time for the Sacrament of Reconciliation and a Mass.

"The reason that we chose that is because the speaker that is going to be coming is part of Fr. Kolbe’s Missionary of the Immaculata, so at the retreat they will have that statement of that spirituality," said Masik.

O’Donnell has been presenting retreats for the five years but for the past 35 years she has been giving talks during which she relates to her nine years living in Poland.

"I was asked because of my experiences; I just do what God leads me to," said O’Donnell. "It’s a Lenten retreat. We believe that our salvation came with the Cross, so there’s nothing greater than that. It’s the whole message of Christ: That even in our suffering we need to find some of our own sense – and the sense of the world’s salvation – in our own salvation with Christ."

O’Donnell hopes that people will take away from the retreat that "every situation is redeemable; that the Cross is not the end."

"People need to know that because sometimes people are very sad and they live very depressed lives," she said. "Look at Whitney Houston – a beautiful, talented woman and her life ends like this. If we put the meaning of our life just in this world it will stop in this world…Salvation is our eternal life."

O’Donnell remarked that sometime people get afraid of because all the noises of this world, "and that’s why in this couple of hours on Saturday, step aside and once again believe in what hopefully we already believe. That’s what the retreat is about."