Best wishes from your Archbishop for the great Easter celebration of 2025!
Dear members of our clergy, dear men and women religious who serve in our archdiocese, all of you, dear parishioners, as well as all of you who are reading this message,
I wish you a very beautiful and fruitful Holy Week and a joyful Easter celebration! Easter is the day of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The day on which the Lord Jesus conquered the author of death and gave us back the immortal life that our first parents had lost in the Garden of Eden. That is why this day must not be a day of mourning or weeping, as Sacred Scripture says, but a day of great joy, rejoicing and exultation in the Holy Spirit. For it is He who imparts to us this wholly supernatural joy and peace that drive away our fears, our anxieties and our dread when we face the future or when we think of the trials, illness or death that are looming, or will eventually loom, on the horizon.
Yes, let us drive away, starting now, the spirit of despair or doubt that seeks to divert our gaze from heaven, making us forget that Christ conquered death once and for all. His resurrection is the pledge of our own resurrection, the Apostle Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians: “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty too. (…) If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain; you are still in your sins.” (1 Cor 15:14, 17)
Happy Easter to each and every one of you! I joyfully and lovingly impart to you my apostolic blessing on this great Day of Easter, and I also ask that you kindly include me in your prayer intentions.
Metropolitan Archbishop of Moncton