SlovenčinaA message from His Excellency, Bishop Jozef Halko, to Slovaks residing in Canada and the United States
Dear fellow compatriots in the United States and Canada,
I am excited to be meeting all of you this year when I arrive as a pilgrim with a relic of St. Cyril.
The goal of our meeting is to deepen our sense of community, to realize, that the ones who unite us are Jesus Christ and the ones who followed him, namely St. Cyril, whose relic we will venerate during our gatherings.A few months are what separate us from our meeting. I invite all of you now to pray that our assemblies and the journey, so to say, of the relic of St. Cyril will bring about, above all, a truly spiritual experience. We in Slovakia will create a special Facebook page for all those who desire to spiritually unite and accompany the journey of the relic, so that a bridge may be built to connect Slovaks with the Slovak communities in the United States and Canada. A bridge, a spiritual bridge, that will inspire us to experience together our national identity which is fundamentally a Christian one. And it is this Christian dimension, Catholic dimension, which will be enhanced by the presence of a relic of St. Cyril.
What Sts. Cyril and Methodius brought to Slovakia was the Word of God understandable to the people living here, and the very first words they translated were:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.It is in this hope and through our prayers that we ask God to bless all that happens during our gatherings to come in a few months.
I look forward to our meeting.
