A rushed and crazy week has come to an end - no posting, due to creeping insanity. I was meant to be packing, in between all the normal parish/diocesan duties. Of course, that has not happened yet. Although the rushing around has been exceedingly silly, there were two bright spots. On the real Feast of Corpus Christi - Thursday, I went with another priest to the Benedictine monastery of St. Benoit du Lac, about an hour and fifteen minutes from my parish, over the border in Quebec. After celebrating the Mass of Thursday of the Ninth week of the year, we arrived just in time for the beginning of Mass at St. Benoit. Although the monastery Church is a rather ugly modern building, everything else is as it should be. The monastery is doing rather well - at least 50 monks, novices, postulants etc. That is, in itself an extraordinary fact, given the terrible decline of the Faith in Quebec. Mass is chanted in French and Latin - how lovely to hear the sequence "Lauda Sion" chanted - and all the other appropriate chants. We had a little procession around the monastery grounds and then we repaired to a local restaurant to celebrate the Feast Day in an appropriate manner. The other high point in a week of 'packing denial' ( I wonder if I need to see a therapist?) was the Ordination yesterday of our two new young priests. A wonderful day! The Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph, which seats 1100, was packed, the music was actually really good, the Bishop preached well - and our two new members of the true "Band of Brothers" looked as happy as the cat ( or cats) that got the cream. Reading the news of the martyrdom of Father Ragheed and the Deacons in Iraq, I preached for Corpus Christi Thursday Sunday on the tradition of the Divine Pelican, the "Pie Pellicane" as the 'Adoro Te Devote' addresses Him. I reminded the faithful of why and where Father Ragheed died: after celebrating Mass with his people. I concluded with the timeless words of Ronnie Knox "We shall see the doctrine of the holy Mass as a thing worth living for, if we can see why....it is a thing worth dying for."
1 comment:
Oh for homilies like that... What we got was a homily explaining how the feeding of the five thousand was a miracle of sharing, that Christ didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes He only helped people to share what they had. Oh for a homily that mentioned both the Divine Pelican and Ronnie Knox... Pray for those of us who still have priests who think they need to tone down the faith (although to be fair that homily was not at our regular parish, we went to a neighboring parish because of scheduling difficulties).
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