Detail of one of the six new paintings in the Abbey's retreat facilities.
September 4, 2016 Oblate Sunday
Oblate Sunday is the link to RSVP and for class information and any reading assignments. Please RSVP. It helps the abbey kitchen to know the count for lunch. They plan the meals and then buy the needed food.
Retreat is the link for information and registrations forms.
The Saving Grace
The monks request body wash, please help if you can. See
The Saving Grace.
Gift Bearers for Oblate Sunday. If you would like to be a Gift Bearer, please reply to this email.
Abbey Mass Times
Keep up to date on Abbey Mass times, monks' public prayer schedule, and times for lectio divina (divine reading) by visiting AbbeyMassTimes.com. Gift Shop hours are also posted.
Social Media
Thank you to everyone who liked, shared, and followed the abbey's and the oblate's social media postings. Those who are helping the abbey in this way deserve much praise and thanks. You understand the importance. There is not an abbey activity that is not helped by your efforts. Thank you.
For those who may think social media is an unknown meaningless youth frivolity and are not involved in any social media --- you may be right!! -- but consider these statistics:
Social media statistics
For context, as of July 2015, total worldwide population is 7.3 billion
The Internet has 3.17 billion users
There are 2.3 billion active social media users
91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels
Internet users have an average of 5.54 social media accounts
Social media users have risen by 176 million in the last year
1 million new active mobile social users are added every day. That's 12 each second
Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day
Social media business statistics
38% of organizations plan to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media channels in 2015, up from 13% a year ago
People aged 55-64 are more than twice as likely to engage with branded content than those 28 or younger
Social video statistics
Facebook now sees 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users. The
Saint Leo Abbey monks are doing a great job in their use of video on the abbey's social media accounts. And they are beautiful and inspirational.
Snapchat users watch 6 billion videos every day
US adults spend an average of 1 hour, 16 minutes each day watching video on digital devices
78% of people watch online videos every week, 55% watch every day
Google statistics
Google processes 100 billion searches a month
That's an average of 40,000 search queries every second
Those searches are carried out by 1.17 billion unique users
Every day, 16 to 20% of that day's queries have never been asked before
More than half of Google's searches come from mobile devices.
What Can You Do?
Beth Davis recently had some excellent suggestions for the oblates' Facebook page. If you have any ideas, please reply to this email.
