Text marking the fiftieth anniversary of St. Francis Parish in Bend

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Jacks William Stone, Pastor St. Patrick's Catholic Church Madras, Oregon (50th anniversary of founding of St. Francis Parish, Bend--June 27, 1960) "The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field. This indeed is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it grows up it is larger than any herb, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and dwell in its branches...And again, the Kingdom of heaven is like the leaven which a woman took and buried in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened." (Matt., XIII, 31-33) The Catholic Church is Jesus Christ, overflowing the limits of time and place and communication Himself to men always and everywhere. The Church is the most extraordinary institution the world has ever seen, not only incomparably great, but absolutely unique. The celebrated non-Catholic historian, Lord Macaulay, wrote that "no other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose in the Pantheon...the proudest of royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of Sovereign Pontiffs...and the Church remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor." She is the visible manifestation of the most tremendous growth of any institution in man's history, but a growth in which is maintained the same essence of Faith, Morals and Worship which She possessed when founded by Christ. It is growth of a kind found in the development of an acorn into an oak, or to retain the figure used by Our Lord Himself, the development of a mustard seed into the tree whose branches overspread the earth. In one of the last conversations between Our Divine Saviour and His Apostles on earth, He said to them: "You shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the uttermost parts of the earth." With these words He actually outlined the pattern of growth which would characterize His Church. From the reception of converts in Jerusalem on the First Christian Pentecost following St. Pater's first sermon, the Apostles quickly fanned out into the rest of Judea, and into neighboring Samaria and Galilees thence to Syria and Asia Minor, to Northern Africa, to Southern Europe, and from there, with the spread of civilization going hand-in-hand with the growth of Christianity, "even to the uttermost parts of the earth."