Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

As we come to the end of Holy Week it is my prayer that, because of your participation in the Sacred Mysteries of Christ, you are changed.

It is possible to live your entire life in the Church and do everything right and pray, pay and obey and just not realize what all of it is really about.  No wonder people leave the Church, especially today when trends seem to be taking us backward rather than forward from Vatican II.  The most common reason people drift away from an organized, community-based practice of faith is because they feel they aren’t “getting” anything.  Ironically, it is because we are not giving them what they really need and teaching them how truly empowered they are by their participation in liturgy and life.

Membership in the Church is not determined by your degree of faithfulness.  Last I checked, the Church exists because we are sinners and our only hope of a remedy to sin is our relationship with God which is shaped and supported by a loving community who witnesses compassion and forgiveness.  Any more, most blogs you find will demand either strict adherance or excommunication.  This is not the mind of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who (by the way) became one of us and died for us while we were still sinners.  Thank God he wasn’t looking for perfection when considering whether or not to care for us enough to give up his life, to become our Passover sacrifice.

Please know: any exclusionary witness you may encounter in your experience of the Church is not faithful to the Holy Spirit, whose purpose is to bind us together in love and form us into the Body of Christ.  His work is a work of transformation: he makes of us a new creation.

Here is my take on what we are doing wrong.  Like the experience most people had of the Church before Vatican II, we are returning to an ecclesiology (theology of the Church) that is priest-based.  Pope Francis talks about this clericalism repeatedly as one of the major issues of our day.  Vatican II addressed this clericalism, or priest-centeredness in the life of the Church—and especially in our understanding of full, active and conscious participation at the Mass—as not centered on the priest’s sacrament of holy orders, but rather on the priesthood of all the faithful imparted in the sacrament of baptism.  It is we, the baptized who call into the present moment the saving Mysteries of Christ, and in particular as those who celebrate these Mysteries for the salvation of the world.  We celebrate these together.  Yes, the priest has a particular role as the one who presides as head of the body, but the head does not exist without the body, nor the body without the head.

That is why you cannot let today slip by without notice, without “getting” why we are here at all.  The God who loves us sinners has provided a remedy by which we become his new creation:  we gather today with the renewal of our baptismal promises at the heart of our celebration.  So go forth, now, risen, and live your baptismal call!  Live so as to give witness to the holy work that God has called you to do, to become alive in his sacraments and go out into the world in service to be, literally, Eucharist for all those who hunger and desire unity and welcome.

Happy Easter! God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

As we begin Holy Week hearing the story of Jesus' passion and death, I hope you can find a moment of uncomplicated quiet to let the moving gravity of the story to wash over your life where you are today.  Regardless of where you find yourself on the spectrum of faith—drawing nearer or drifting away—seeking intently or allowing indifference to grow—this real-time account of the love of God has power to touch you in the moment where you are and let light enter.  It is the story of God, who is love, who empties himself so completely, setting glory aside.  He becomes human, then only to give even that human life for us and for our salvation, to the point that on the Cross he knows the most complete experience of abandonment, lovelessness, being unloveable.  He cries out to love Itself, his Father, "Why have you abandoned me?"  Then the Word of God no longer can even utter a word, he is silent.  There is nothing left to give.

If there were nothing beyond the moment of death, a belief that even the Jewish leaders could not agree on at the time, this would seem so pointless, ridiculous.  But we know better.  We are personally called to enter into this Week.  As I wrote last week, we become sharers in the mystery of love, co-offerers of Christ's sacrifice to the Father, and by our full, active, conscious participation in the sacred liturgy we are—all of us—agents of sanctification and transformation.

Holy Week and Easter will look different again this year.  First of all, we are limited to 250 persons per liturgy because of health guidelines.  If you plan to attend in-person, I beg you to check the website to see if there are seats remaining before coming only to be turned away.  Make reservations if there are still seats.  We will be prepared for overflow seating with a screen in the gym and one of us will bring Communion up to the gym at Communion time for the 9 and 11am Masses on Easter Sunday.

Actually, this might be an unexpected benefit to many who have not been able to attend the liturgies of the Sacred Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Vigil) in the past:  they will be made available at your convenience!  Each liturgy, during normal times, is unique with various gestures and chants, rituals and texts that only happen once a year.  This year, however, many of these have been suspended. 

We won't be washing feet on Holy Thursday and the customary procession of the Blessed Sacrament to the gym for adoration until midnight will remain in the church.  We will process around the church while everyone stays in their pews and the Blessed Sacrament will be placed at the Holy Family shrine.  People will be able to pray in adoration until midnight there, in the church.  On Good Friday we will listen to the Passion of the Lord according to John and pray the customary prayers, but there will be no procession for the veneration of the wood of the Cross; all will remain in the pews for some moments of silent veneration followed by the simple Communion service.  The Easter Vigil, too, will be a bit shorter and (with Wednesday's slightly relaxed guidelines regarding music) will include limited musical texts.  We still don't want to do anything that could cause anyone to feel unsafe to join us.  We are blessed by your good will and care for each other by following the guidelines which have proven effective in keeping us well.  I wish you a beautiful and quiet Holy Week.

God bless you.