Executive Cell Team (ECT) Resources

Thank you for your “yes” to this important next step in implementing the pastoral letter. Your roles in your parish are vital; we see them as the fans of the flame of the Holy Spirit in your home parish.

Hope: The Practical Virtue for Challenging Times

This video series hosted by Deacon Michalak, invites viewers to rediscover the strength that flows from Christ’s love and to anchor our lives in the promise of his healing presence.

This series is a beautiful opportunity for PECS small groups to pray, reflect and grow together during Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Groups are encouraged to watch the episodes, enter into the suggested readings and let the message of hope guide your journey toward and after Christmas.

• Session 1: Deacon Michalak reflects on how Christian hope carries us through trials, renewing our hearts and restoring our trust in God’s faithful action.
• Session 2: Deacon Michalak invites us to reflect on the theological virtue of hope, a confident and joyful expectation rooted in the promise of Christ. He guides us to understand that Christian hope is not simply optimism, but trust in the one who holds our future, and it calls us to live in light of that promise here and now.
• Session 3: Deacon Michalak explains that hope is not optimism, idealism, or wishful thinking that “everything will be fine.”
• Session 4: Deacon Michalak reflects on how despair and presumption are sins against hope. He reminds us that Jesus is our living hope and that faith allows us to glimpse, even now, what God is bringing to fulfillment, while inviting us to remain open to God’s work within us.
• Session 5: Deacon Michalak invites us to look honestly at our interior life and our struggle to live the virtue of hope. At different moments, all of us face challenges to hope, discouragement, fatigue, self-reliance, or quiet despair.
• Session 6:  Deacon Michalak invites us to deepen our trust in God through daily prayer and gratitude, learning to remember all that God has already done for us. Drawing from the powerful witness found in the book The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur —and its influence on Fulton Sheen—this reflection reminds us that no matter how uncertain the world may feel, we are always on the journey with God. He desires us more than we desire Him, and He remains our hope and our glory.