Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Our Parish Mission with Fr. Dennis Corrado already begins next weekend! Fr. Dennis will join us for all the Masses next weekend, then with a special talk on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30pm. Our annual 40 Hours’ Devotions will also be underway next weekend from Sunday night to Tuesday night, so it will be a time of real prayer and growth. Please note that we have changed the Masses to 6:30pm on Monday and Tuesday evenings in order to schedule both 40 Hours’ Masses and Father’s Mission Talks. Please mark your calendars, sign up in the church vestibule for a time of prayer in the Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and don’t miss these talks.

The topic this year will be forgiveness. I was told about Fr. Dennis by a music director friend of mine in Connecticut last year. She said that he came and preached all the weekend Masses and the word slowly got out. On Monday night, there were about 200 people, on Tuesday their church was full. On Wednesday they had to put up video screens in the hall for the crowds (their church is relatively small). He is a very dynamic and genuine, challenging speaker and brings a great opportunity for our growth and reflection in making this Lent a season of real conversion and prayer. I encourage you to take advantage of this great opportunity.

Thanks for your great initial response to our parish’s responsibility for the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal. After Commitment Weekend last weekend, our unofficial totals are right at 70% of our goal for this year, a great start. Please be sure to take your part and give your contribution. Envelopes are available in the church for you to use if you have maybe misplaced the one mailed to you.

Every diocese in the country has an annual appeal of some sort in order to accomplish the works of the diocese – diocesan ministries, the formation of priests, services to the community and everyday realities of payroll and utilities for many offices. We can’t be a branch without a vine! Please be generous.

I was in the front office the other day and overheard a conversation at the window which has me thinking. Someone was requesting a Mass intention for a particular date. As you may have guessed, the date requested was no longer available, in fact, it had been requested by someone already.

We are now filling Mass intentions for October and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Intentions Book for calendar year 2014 will be full by Easter. As you know, we only have about 1,000 announced Mass intentions available each year, since one Mass each Sunday must be for the parish. Canon Law allows for only one announced intention with a stipend (suggested $10) at each Mass (a law written in answer to abuses long ago), and in the parish we have limited the number of Masses you can request each month in order to give more people an opportunity to request a Mass intention.

Since we don’t open the book for 2015 until November, what do we do in the meantime? The person who came to the window was told about the possibility of unannounced intentions, but wasn’t interested, which indicated to me a lack of understanding of what this means. You see, every time a priest celebrates a Mass, one particular intention may be used and it provides him personally with a stipend. Each time one of us concelebrates (more than one priest at a Mass), or celebrates a Mass away from the parish for whatever reason (our parish pilgrimage, for example, or when we are away) we use all the unannounced intentions which have been requested. For a while now, we have had none of these. Consider it, if you will; there is no limit to the number of unannounced Masses you may request. And if we can’t get to them all, we send them to priests in parishes or missions who don’t have enough.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

When you study liturgy, one of the principles you learn is lex orandi, lex credendi. It means, literally, the  discipline of praying is the discipline of believing. The way we pray reveals exactly what we believe.

It is a useful principle when looked at from both sides of the coin. We can learn so much about what we believe by the Tradition of rites and actions which forms the seamless expression of the Church’s worship throughout the ages. The texts, the gestures of the Mass are a catechesis in themselves. We learn by doing.

We can also intuitively know whether or not something we might be doing is appropriate by first considering the faith of the assembly and then discerning if what we do actually brings to visible experience the inner faith of the Church.

For example, if song is prayer, and prayer is always directed to God, applause praising the singer or choir is a confusion of purpose. Certainly, we appreciate the talents of those who lead liturgy, and there are times that
expressions of thanks are quite appropriate, but never in such a way as to confuse a performance for an audience with a prayer to God. Likewise, recently some commonly used songs in liturgy were suggested to be
not appropriate, because the texts directed the attention of those singing to themselves, rather than a prayer to God.
The way we come forward in the Communion procession probably says a lot more than you have ever considered. First, the one fluid movement of the people of God to the Eucharist evokes the image of God’s creation in one procession to the heavenly kingdom. We are united by one action, processing, in one voice in song, united in one gesture of receiving the Body of Christ, that which we become. It is the fulfillment of the consecration that began with the calling down of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, transformed, broken and shared that we might be transformed and shared. We are consecrated as well. The Church welcomes all people to seek the faith that is prerequisite to Communion. The one Communion that we share is the outward sign of the one faith that we share. To not share that one faith and to join in Communion nonetheless would be a lie;
for this reason we do not practice intercommunion. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Recently an usher very passionately told me, “You must tell people to stop seeking out only the priest for Communion!” What he was referring to was another example of an inconsistency between how we act  sometimes and how we believe. Since we believe that Christ is truly present under the form of bread and wine, it does not matter who is the minister of Communion, as long as they are  duly prepared and mandated for the ministry by Bishop Loverde. To refuse Communion from a Eucharistic Minister is to express a misunderstanding of the real Presence of Christ, which we cannot make of our own accord at all. At this moment we are all one.

Next time you are at Mass, consider the many gestures, postures, distractions, attentiveness, level of dress, even coming late or leaving early, and ask if these are really indicative of the lex credendi that is within
you! We have been given so much, and can do so much more with generous hearts and gratitude for what we have.

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I’d like to offer a special thanks to Joan Doherty this weekend. Her endless attention to the plants in the church have yielded what I think might be a world record in the area of poinsettia longevity. Ash Wednesday is
late this year, and those flowers just keep on blooming.

Watch our calendar as we enter the Lenten season this week with Ash Wednesday. May the season of Lent be a time of deep conversion and strength for you. Join us as we gather for the rich prayer expression of our
Tradition over the coming weeks.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

This weekend we are challenged to widen the circle of our identity to go beyond ourselves, to consider the Church as a much broader obligation and opportunity to realize our calling as the Body of Christ. As we traveled through Israel-Palestine and Jordan the past couple of weeks I was haunted by an awareness of our Church that seemed always broader. Not only is there a universal Church with whom we have real solidarity in the life, the breaking of the bread and the prayers, and we experienced the love of brothers and sisters everywhere we went, regardless of language or nationality. But there is also a rising tide of awareness that we who have so much have a profound obligation to share what we have with these brothers and sisters who still wait for us to share the knowledge of the faith as well as the many blessings and security which we have received so undeservingly.

One of the things pilgrimage does is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you have to go far away in order to recognize the truth that lies close to home.

To those who have suggested, in response to the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal, that our obligation lies really with the needs of our local community, I would recommend a pilgrimage of heart that causes one to travel outside of himself and discover somebody else’s life and circumstance.

Each Mass as we prayed in the Eucharistic Prayers for our Holy Father Francis and our Patriarch Archbishop Fouad, I realized that we belong to a remarkable flock, one that spans all time and geography. We are not really the Church of Fredericksburg, or even the Church of Arlington, though that is truly our local Church represented by the person of our successor to the Apostles, Bishop Paul.

To deny this is the foundation of the kind of divisions that so characterize post-modern Christianity, a literal parrochialism that allows us to think only of ourselves. We can justify our isolation because we are unique and special, and don’t have to answer, then, to the needs of others in their own sphere. A cult of opinion can stop listening to God—or anyone else, for that matter.

Our love and support has to be for our community on all these levels; our local Church of Arlington is not merely our guide, it is also our link to the universal Church in seeking response to our obligation as the larger Body of Christ.

We can’t be separate. We have to remain a branch on the vine or we dry up.

The BLA provides a lot of wonderful services and growth for ourselves in Fredericksburg — you can see Bishop’s mailing for a long list of things we ourselves benefit from. It also gives expression to the kind of outreach that only a diocese can do, as well as connectedness to world-level charity, peace and justice to which we would otherwise have no access. Please, let’s get the Appeal started and finished quickly–not because it is something we have to do, but because it is who we are.

As last year, there are matching funds for every dollar you increase your commitment from last year, a great benefit for the Church of Arlington.

I challenge each and every family in the parish to give something, no matter the amount. Not because it is a task, but because it is who you are, as a member of this Body who sees need and responds with love.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Greetings from the Holy Land. We have prayed for you everywhere we go, all this weekend we are in the city of Jerusalem and include you in our pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane, House of Caiafas, the Way of the Cross, Calvary and Jesus’ empty tomb.

As I write this letter it is Tuesday evening, my room looks out at the Sea of Galilee. This afternoon we took local minibuses to the top of Mount Tabor where Jesus is transfigured appearing with Elijah and Moses, in front of Peter, James and John. On the mountaintop is a beautiful last-century basilica with perfectly maintained architecture, art and glass by the Holy Land Franciscans. The altar in the sanctuary at the heart of the church is built directly above the crown of rock where the event took place. We 30 gathered around the main altar and the space came to life.

I noticed a remarkable acoustical quality that seemed to magnify our sounds as we sang and proclaimed the Word of God and prayed the acclamations. The sound in the lower sanctuary seemed to multiply and fill the upper church above us with a kind of infinite brightness that seemed to emanate, radiate from that altar to the entire church.

I began to imagine on that day the brightness of Christ “like the sun” and that full, fecund sound of the Father’s voice the moment it happened, first and always. I considered the nature of light and sound as it crosses space and never ends, I prayed that our light and our sound might join with that ancient glory showing in the sacred humanity of Christ and that creation-causing sound of God that still shows and echoes today in his universes– both in original form and first-time, new in us. That blast of glory still echoing came back around again on Mount Tabor today, as at every exalted altar, and in every heart who climbs to witness it, in all places known to us, and even in the silent reaches where no one has gone or been able to go to experience it. The glory of God surrounds us and permeates us. Once spoken, it exists forever that it might be heard. If not today, then tomorrow.

The event of Mount Tabor is sometimes compared to those peak moments in people’s lives when the real light finally comes on, God is encountered, we are changed, converted, transfigured; we can never go back to whom we were once before after we have experienced the heights of these thin places near to God.

But it doesn’t have to be the encounter of vastness. I have included here a photo of the view from the top of Mount Tabor. The Jezreel Valley (“Armageddon”) unfolds in front of us. We can see the mountains of Samaria to the south, Haifa to the west, Nazareth just to the north and Lebanon beyond. It seems like a forever vision. But consider how that equal infinity, the limitlessness of the infinite in the plan of God, is also found within. Take an inch, divide it by two, again by two… You can divide endlessly though the parts are endlessly, impossibly small. In the same way that light and sound of God broke forth from the mountaintop, it enters and permeates us infinitely within. I imagine we are more perfectly transfigured in this way, not merely in awe of the sheer expanse.

One thing for sure: he still shines and he still speaks. May we see, and hear.

God bless you.