Today's Live-Streamed Mass

Worship Aid for the 3rd Sunday of Lent

 Lenten Observances

• Fasting: Food equivalent to one regular meal, one small meal - Ash Wednesday and Good Friday
• Abstinence:  No meat - Ash Wednesday and ALL Fridays (special dispensation for St. Patrick's Day this year)

 Lenten Soup Suppers: Fridays at 6 pm in the School Cafeteria.

 Stations of the Cross: Fridays at 7 pm in English, 8 pm in Spanish

 Parish Penance Service:  Wednesday, March 29, 6:30 pm

 Lent Confessions: Wednesdays 6:30-8 pm and Saturdays 3:30-4:30 pm (as usual), Please plan to come early in the season to save time.

 Eucharistic Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament:  Join us every Wednesday during Lent in the Chapel from 7-8 pm.

 Lenten Evening of Reflection for Women:  Please join us for a Lenten Evening of Reflection on March 18 from 7-9 pm. The evening will include a talk by Fr. Rich and the opportunity to get to know other women of the parish. RSVPs appreciated. For more information or to register, please email StBWWP@gmail.com.

 Join us on Monday, March 20, for our monthly Taizé Prayer Service, at 8 pm. Come pray for Christian unity in our community and in the world. All Christians are warmly invited; invite your friends.

 Monday, March 27, is the next Catholic Women's Group Dinner at 5 pm at Saratoga Pizzeria, 8050 Rolling Road.  We meet for this casual meal on the 4th Monday of every month.  No need to RSVP; just come and enjoy the delicious food and sparkling fellowship.  For more information, please email us at women@stbernpar.org.

 If you couldn't fill out a Bishop's Lenten Appeal pledge envelope and need more time to prayerfully consider pledging to this vital appeal, you may return your envelope any time. The funds from the BLA provide a way for leaders of all ministries, volunteers, and people from all walks of life to grow as a community to enrich parish life, teach the faith, help those in need, and inspire faith in those outside the Church. You may make a gift at: www.arlingtondiocese.org/BLA.

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

I’m hoping you were able to take advantage of our parish 40 Hours’ Adoration and Mission Talks this week. It is a sacred time – not that you can’t drop in at Church for a visit anytime – that is a special focus of our parish praying together. Lent always seems to be a challenging time for me anyway, but especially this year it was good to keep refocusing on how Jesus is present to us all the time.

Especially I enjoyed the talks by Fr. Don Heet. His point about how 60 years have passed since the Second Vatican Council really hit home. Anyone younger than me was born afterward: for most people the Vatican II has been allowed to fade into ancient history. 60 years before the Council the world wars and great depression had not happened yet. 60 years before that the world was still twenty years before the Civil War. So much happens it is easy not to think about the things that really matter. Our mission talks this week brought back to me many of the things that I hold precious about the Church and why I became a priest in the first place. One person remarked this week how she wished she had heard a lot of this long ago. Suddenly so many things make sense.

When I was a kid the priest was like God, and Father didn’t mind you thinking so. It was for partly this reason that I wasn’t interested. It seemed like a divide I would never cross. Priests were holy, we were not.

Vatican II defined the Church in a new way, and as Fr. Don told us, it was probably for this reason that the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, was most debated and took the longest for the Council to write. Rather than defining the Church by the hierarchy as had been done for centuries, politics were set aside. The Church was first defined as the People of God and second, the hierarchy, as those who serve the People of God. I remember first learning this in college and later in seminary. Suddenly the ministerial priesthood seemed possible for someone like me, because all of us already participate in the common priesthood of Christ as baptized persons. This teaching of priesthood as something in which all the baptized participate, in turn, helped me to understand that “People of God” didn’t mean “believers” as was originally understood with the Hebrew people of the first covenant. People of God, literally, means all the people that God made. Because we are made by God, we have an inherent dignity that calls all of us to a reverence and charity for all people that forms the foundation of Jesus’ mandate to serve.

Today Pope Francis continuously warns the Church about falling back into a clericalism which would allow a priest to set himself apart from, or above others, or encourage such attitudes among the faithful.

Fr. Don, in a very effective way, presented all of these reforms of Vatican II not as new innovations, but rather the restoration of many things which needed to be reintroduced into the life of the Church. It has inspired me once again to plan a series of parish classes to help everyone know what it really means to say, “I am a Catholic.”

The Lord be with you,

Today's Live-Streamed Mass

Worship Aid for the 2nd Sunday of Lent

 LENTEN OBSERVANCES

• Fasting: Food equivalent to one regular meal, one small meal - Ash Wednesday and Good Friday
• Abstinence:  No meat - Ash Wednesday and ALL Fridays (special dispensation for St. Patrick's Day this year)
• Stations of the Cross: Fridays at 7 pm in English, 8 pm in Spanish
• Parish Penance Service: Wednesday, March 29, 6:30 pm
• Lent Confessions: Wednesdays, 6:30-8 pm, Saturdays, 3:30-4:30 pm (as usual), Please plan to come early in the season to save time.

• 40 Hours and Parish Lenten Mission: Sign up for adoration in the booklet in the vestibule for 40 Hours which begins on Sunday, March 5. We will need two people for adoration round the clock from Sunday evening through Tuesday evening. There will be two additional Masses on Monday and Tuesday evenings at 6:30 pm. Fr. Don Heet will lead Parish Mission talks, an Oblate of Saint Francis de Sales at St. John Neumann in Reston, who will speak about Vatican II and why it matters.

  • Sunday, March 5 at 6:30 pm: The Constitutions on the Liturgy and Revelation
  • Monday, March 6 at 7:30 pm: The Constitution on the Church and the Declaration of Religious LibertyTuesday,
  • March 7 at 7:30 pm: The Constitution on the Church in the Modern World and the Declaration on Relations of the Church with Non-Christian Religions

• Eucharistic Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament:  Join us every Wednesday during Lent in the Chapel from 7-8 pm.

• Lenten Evening of Reflection for Women:  Please join us for a Lenten Evening of Reflection on March 18 from 7-9 pm. The evening will include a talk by Fr. Rich and the opportunity to get to know other women of the parish. RSVPs appreciated. For more information or to register, please email StBWWP@gmail.com.

 If you couldn't fill out a Bishop's Lenten Appeal pledge envelope and need more time to prayerfully consider pledging to this vital appeal, you may return your envelope any time. The funds from the BLA provide a way for leaders of all ministries, volunteers, and people from all walks of life to grow as a community to enrich parish life, teach the faith, help those in need, and inspire faith in those outside the Church. You may make a gift at: www.arlingtondiocese.org/BLA.

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

First, if I may, a couple of brief housekeeping items:

1) We are at 77% of our goal of the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal - and we are very grateful for your gifts and pledges! This 77% ($405,000!) is being given by only 11% of registered parishioners. I ask that the remaining 1/4 of our goal be accomplished by affordable gifts or monthly pledges by people who have not given before. Let’s double that percentage of participation.

2) Each week as I prepare the bulletin and type in the Mass intentions on the last page we usually have 3 or 4 Masses which are unclaimed. I usually just fill them in with something or someone. Each Mass has one intention that may be announced at the beginning of the Mass so that all in the church can include them in their prayers that day. These are opportunities to pray for loved ones which are going unused. Mostly they are 7am Masses which might indicate that people are thinking they need to be present for a Mass they request. That is not the case at all, as the benefit of the Mass applies to the salvation of whoever is named regardless of who is present. It is a great way to observe birthdays or anniversaries. There is a customary, but not required, donation of $10 for a Mass intention and it comes with a gift card for either a living person or in memory of a deceased person. Please stop in at the parish office.

This could actually be a great Lenten observance that you could make, even if you can’t get to daily Mass, to consider scheduling community prayers in memory of those who have gone before us. It is the ultimate compassionate act. In as much as we try to exercise empathy for others during the season, we could extend these acts to all those in the Mystical Body of Christ, both living and deceased.

In fact, it might be worthwhile to commit some Lent time to renewing the practice of empathy in our lives. Many people became somebody different in the pandemic. If you look at yourself and wonder how you got here, it is not too late to reverse the steps and intentionally ask God in prayer to guide you. Reach out to others with care and concern. Let others help you. It’s possible to say that we’ve not rebounded as well as we hoped.

I ran across an article from a year ago in an online mental health blog. It said, “It feels that pain is present no matter where we turn, and our empathy is rapidly depleting. Simply put: It hurts to care. Unfortunately, no one is immune to dwindling empathy. As a clinician, I witness clients and colleagues alike lament over the state of our world. I, too, feel the drain of my emotional resources at times. Decreased empathy presents as an inability to witness and aid the suffering of others because we are overwhelmed with our current circumstances.” One social worker wrote, “The pressures and uncertainty of the world affected my ability to show up for others.”

So, let us commit to praying and caring for one another.

The Lord be with you,