Happy Birthday! It's Pentecost Sunday

This Sunday marks the birthday party of the billion people who today make up the Catholic Church. On that first Pentecost, the party was smaller, only 120, but the attendees themselves became the birthday candles when the Spirit crowned each of them with fiery tongues.
click here to see the gifts we received!

A feast of the universal Church which commemorates the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ, on the ancient Jewish festival called the "feast of weeks" or Pentecost (Exodus 34:22; Deuteronomy 16:10). Whitsunday is so called from the white garments which were worn by those who were baptised during the vigil; Pentecost ("Pfingsten" in German), is the Greek for "the fiftieth" (day after Easter).
-Catholic Encyclopedia: Pentecost (Whitsunday)

Pentecost represents God's gracious, enabling presence actively at work among His people, calling and enabling them to live out in dynamic ways the witness of being His people.
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For Christians, Pentecost Sunday is a day to celebrate hope, a hope evoked by the knowledge that God through His Holy Spirit is at work among His people.
-Dennis Bratcher: Pentecost

Pentecost was the first day that the Spirit took hold of the followers of Christ as a group or "body", and came to stay. It was the first time the Spirit's raw power was there in anyone who followed Christ, not just the Twelve.
-Spirithome - A Fresh Blast of the Pentecost Spirit : Be Lit!

Pentecost is regarded as the birthday of the Christian church, and the start of the church's mission to the world.
-BBC - Religion & Ethics - Pentecost
read The Story of Pentecost

"Through the Holy Spirit we are restored to paradise, led back to the Kingdom of heaven, and adopted as children, given confidence to call God "Father" and to share in Christ's grace, called children of light and given a share in eternal glory."
St. Basil, De Spiritu Sancto
-EWTN: Pentecost

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!