Pastor’s Corner — October 5th, 2025
Parish Festival Oktoberfest: (This Weekend October 5th 2pm-6pm)
Please plan on coming to our parish festival this weekend, held on the Parish School grounds 1001 Charles Orndorf Dr, Brighton, MI. This festival is a great family event that brings together our parish and school communities and is replete with bounce houses, obstacle courses, and FREE beer and German food. We also will have with us again the Tommy Schober and the Sound of Sorgenbrecher German band. There is still time to turn in your Raffle Tickets in the large barrels at the Church entrances or into the front office. Please do so by Sunday October 5th by 1pm.
Parish Safety Team Meeting: October 8th
Like I mentioned last week (before the Grand Blanc incident), yes, we have had a Church safety team and they’ve been meeting for well over a year. The St. Patrick Safety Core Team will be holding its first meeting on Wednesday, October 8th at 6:30 PM in McCann Hall. During this meeting, we will review the implementation of the new weekend Mass safety program. While we already have current and former law enforcement members involved (we’d like to get more) we would love for others to join our team. For questions or additional information, please contact Ryan Nardozzi at rnardozzi@stpatchurch.org or call 810-229-9863 ext. 207.
Small Group Information Night Resources
Thank you to all who came to our small group information night last week. We recorded this talk for anyone who wasn’t able to make it, but wants to learn more about the benefits of sharing life in committed small groups and some practical tools. You can watch the video and see the handouts on the parish website.
Catholic Scams and AI Deep Fakes
I’m sure most people on the Internet these days are aware of the power of artificial intelligence (AI) applications (Chat GPT, Gemini, Grok, CoPilot and more) to generate fake pictures, videos, and audio. It’s been well known that criminals can take your voice (usually from an audio or video clip of you) and use AI to generate a clone of your voice. It’s so good that it can be difficult to tell the difference between your cloned voice and your real voice. This is a huge problem for many reasons.First, scammers can do that to mimic the voices of your loved ones and call you to tell you that they’re in an emergency and they need you to send them money. It will sound just like them, but it’s not them.
Second, we are starting to see this in the Church. People have cloned well-known Catholics such as Bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Mike Schmitz and Pope Leo XIV and are putting out audio “talks” of what they are saying….except it’s not them at all; it’s all just AI deep fakes. Just this past week I had two separate parishioners send me audio “talks” (on YouTube) of Pope Leo XIV and Fr. Mike Schmitz, except they were total fakes. I could tell immediately based on the content of the talks that they were AI generated fakes. But it’s not easy for many people to tell the difference.
To stay free of Catholic AI deep fakes here are some recommendations.
1) Try to follow people via official and trusted social media and news media channels.
2) If there isn’t a video of the person saying something, be suspicious of an audio only talk.
3) For now you can tell if a voice is AI because it’s kind of repetitive.
We live in a scary world in which a lot can be faked online. We need to be cautious and careful not to get sucked into deception online.
Pope Leo is Asking us to Pray the Rosary for Peace
In the Church, the month of October is dedicated to the praying of the Rosary. Pope Leo has asked every Catholic to pray the Rosary every day this month:
“Dear brothers and sisters, the month of October is now approaching, and in the Church it is dedicated in a special way to the Holy Rosary. Therefore, I invite everyone, every day of the coming month, to pray the Rosary for peace: personally, in the family, in the community.”
We desperately need peace in the world. In Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, and all war torn parts of the world. We need peace in our country as well, especially in all of our hearts. As a reminder we already pray the Rosary and Divine Mercy Chapel every day before daily Mass at the parish. But if we can add this in our homes with our families, it would be great. Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Women’s Conference next Weekend
As you know, I’m speaking at the Michigan Catholic Women’s Conference next weekend. I’m hoping to see a lot of women in our parish there. Come Holy Spirit!
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias