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It’s a challenge to imagine a more fitting way for Catholics to mark the first turning of summer into autumn than with a Holy Mass celebrating shared life.
The perpetual cycle of the seasons is the most vivid reminder we have that we live and share our lives within God’s created order, which endures despite the constant chaos and disorder we as human beings manage to create for ourselves.
For 50 of those yearly cycles, ShareLife, the Archdiocese of Toronto’s charitable fundraising arm, has brought not only a measure of reliable order but faith, hope and charity to those among us whose needs are most pressing and whose ability to respond is sorely limited.
While commemorating that auspicious anniversary, it’s worth remembering that ShareLife’s own origins a half century ago were a daring response invoking the Church’s moral courage against disordered social developments. There was no guarantee — only faith — at the time that Catholics of the Archdiocese would rally to the side of the new entity created to stand apart from the anti-life actions of existing secular charities.
Yet as Cardinal Frank Leo noted in his homily at the Aug. 22 Mass celebrating ShareLife’s august existence, rally local Catholics did, and rally they continue doing, to support more than 40 agencies and ministries within and outside the Archdiocese. Vitally, he emphasized, the organization goes far beyond its primary mission focus of dispersing financial assistance.
“Our Church, in a very unique way and thanks to (ShareLife architect) Archbishop (Philip) Pocock and his prophetic gesture, has been spreading the Kingdom of God among us. ShareLife is a ‘how’; how we strengthen and spread the Kingdom of God in a manner of being. It is a way of reaching out, in that we are called to build, strengthen and spread that Kingdom,” Cardinal Leo said.
The Cardinal also thematically married the Mass to the liturgical feast of the Queenship of Mary to challenge all Catholics in building, strengthening and spreading the Kingdom just as the founders and current staff of ShareLife do each day. Mary’s Queenship is a model of humility, service and love against worldly pursuit of wealth and prestige, his homily reminded us, and as such embodies a vocation to which all Catholics are called. Heeding that vocational call, sharing each in our own way the spirit of ShareLife, can “call us forward to be those wonderful agents of transformation in the lives” of others, he said.
A moment’s pause for reflection helps us recall, too, the call that Jesus of Nazareth answered to offer the always-enduring source of transformation in our lives: the Word that is the very heart of the Holy Mass.
These are, it’s obvious to all, times of great distraction and confusion. Current events endlessly streaming into our eyes, ears and lives can leave people of even the soundest faith feeling beset, endangered. As Mary Marrocco writes, for some it brings peak anxiety when daily life can feel like “a sharp-toothed rodent ceaselessly gnawing from inside” and challenge the very capacity to sustain personal identity.
But Marrocco also guides us to understanding such anxiety is hardly as historically novel as we consider it in 2026 gusting toward 2027.
“Jesus… wasn’t speaking clinically when he told Martha she was ‘anxious’ (Luke 10:41), but He surely saw how anxiety kept her from living fully. He identifies what’s making everything unbearable for her. He isn’t scolding her for doing something wrong but offering the antidote to her affliction: His real Presence.”
That Presence, of course, is Reality emerging from the sharing of bread and wine, body and blood, and transformed through physical torment, horrifying death by crucifixion, into the sharing of resurrection and eternal life.
Cardinal Leo said events such as the 50 years of ShareLife’s life are vital moments for bringing us back to that Christ-promised eternal life. Not moments of wistful pining for the passing past. No. Moments that are now. Right now.
“After 50 years, right now is a moment to give thanks and praise and show gratitude to the Lord who’s put that desire (to love) in our hearts,” he said.
Our challenge as Catholics is to live and share the wisdom and the glory of that love throughout all seasons of life.
A version of this story appeared in the August 30, 2026, issue of The Catholic Registerwith the headline "Enduring love".
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