About a month ago, as you know, our new statue of the Blessed Mother arrived for the center of the Atrium Gardens! I want to once again thank the parishioners who donated her, along with those who donated the beautiful new granite benches and those parishioners who have donated for the landscaping – we are blessed to have tremendously generous parishioners here at St. Mary’s and the fruits of that generosity can be seen very clearly.
I wanted to give a brief background on the statue itself. This particular statue is based on a statue known as Sedes Sapientiae, which is Latin for “Seat of Wisdom,” one of the titles given to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The original statue was carved in Italy in the 1930s for St. Edward Seminary in Kenmore, Washington. When that seminary closed in the 1970s, the original was transferred to the Cathedral of St. James in Seattle where it is placed in a courtyard near a flowing fountain. The company which manufactured our statue has done three reproductions throughout the country prior to ours. She is made of granite, stands life-size at 5’ 10” tall and weighs in at a very “un-life-size” two thousand pounds! We are going to dedicate the statue on the evening of our annual May Crowning and everyone is invited to attend. May Crowning is a beautiful tradition throughout the world and at St. Mary’s and begins at 6:30pm on Thursday, May 12th, the eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Following the May Crowning in church we will process to the Atrium Gardens and the statue will be dedicated, please mark your calendars and plan to join us! This weekend we are also celebrating First Communion for our parish second graders, please be sure to keep them in prayer! This is also the final month of school for our 8th Graders, please pray for them as they complete their time in grade school and prepare for graduation and high school. Finally, as I mentioned last weekend, please keep the priests of the Archdiocese in prayer over the next few days as we head out for our annual Spring Assembly of Priests. This past Friday evening we celebrated the Sacrament of Confirmation for our parish teenagers – truly a time of great rejoicing! In our own day and age it requires a great deal of strength to both live and defend our Catholic Faith and this strength can only come from the Holy Spirit who touched the hearts of our newly confirmand in a particular way through the Sacrament of Confirmation. Congratulations to all of our teens who were confirmed and may the Holy Spirit continue to pour His gifts into their hearts and enflame them with a love of God that never weakens!
Next Sunday we will continue our special sacramental celebrations with the celebration of First Communion for our parish Second Graders – once again, the Lord will touch the hearts of our children in a particularly profound way – by the gift of Himself in the Eucharist. May they always stay close to the Mass and the gift of the Eucharist! Please pray for our newly confirmed teenagers and for our children who will be celebrating First Communion – we are a community and so even if we don’t have a member of our family celebrating Confirmation or First Communion, it’s important to pray for them as the entire community receives graces when these celebrations take place and are something we all can rejoice in! Speaking of the request of prayers, I, along with many priests of the Archdiocese, will be gone for a few days the first week of May at our annual Spring Assembly of Priests. This annual gathering usually focuses around a specific topic applicable to our priestly ministry; gives us the opportunity to honor those priests celebrating ordination jubilee years; listen to our Archbishop as he addresses us; and gives us an opportunity for fraternity and camaraderie. Please keep us all in prayer. As you may know May also serves as the time for ordinations to the priesthood. Please pray for the three men who will be ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese and also please be sure to pray for an increase in vocations to the priesthood. If you recall, last year I published a series of articles laying out the Archdiocesan planning efforts centered on demographic shifts in the Catholic population, as well as attempting to make sure that priestly ministry is available as much as possible in an era of a declining number of priests. As I pointed out, we cannot ignore this reality of the fewer numbers of priests and while we have been talking about it as a diocese for many years, the reality continues to come to the fore – for instance, this year there will be three new priests for the Archdiocese, fifty years earlier, in 1966, there were 23 priests ordained for Milwaukee. The reality is that the face of priestly ministry has changed and will continue to change and these changes will probably become more visible in the near future. While the declining number of priests is a very real situation, I do believe that there are many, many more being called to the priesthood than we see being ordained. We live in a culture where commitment, sacrifice and a sense of the centrality of spiritual realities over earthly realities have all been obscured – in order to encourage more priestly vocations we all need to honor these three things in our own vocations thereby bearing witness to young people of their importance and their beauty. Please pray for vocations every day – pray that the Lord will continue to call men to serve Him as priests, but also pray that those who are called may see clearly their call and be given the courage to say “yes” to it. If you know of someone at St. Mary’s who is or should be considering the priesthood, please let me know and if you who are reading this are thinking about the priesthood, please let me know or visit the Vocations Office website, www.thinkpriest.org – one never regrets saying “yes” to God! As we continue our examination of the Anointing of the Sick, we want to take a moment and to examine the scriptural roots of the sacrament. As we discussed before in previous articles, each of the sacraments is rooted in Christ’s own life on earth – continuing His mission and work through His Mystical Body, the Church. We saw in our previous article how important the care of the sick was to Christ and this is a command that Christ gives to His Church, “heal the sick!” He says (Matthew 10:8) and the Church has done this ever since.
We see the institution of this sacrament in Jesus’ own day, when He sends out His disciples and we hear, “so they went out and preached that men should repent. And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them” (Mark 6.12-13). Furthermore this mission of anointing the sick is something that we hear of in the Epistle of St. James, “is there anyone ill among you? Let them send for the priests of the Church and let the priests pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick person and if they have committed any sins their sins will be forgiven them” (James 5.14-15). It is important to see in both of these citations that the use of oil was a part of the celebration of this sacrament from the very beginning. As was mentioned previously, this oil of the infirm is blessed by the bishop (though in case of need can be blessed by any priest) once a year at the Chrism Mass. The oil is the matter of the sacrament and combined with the ritual prayer (the form) that goes along with the administration of the oil on the forehead and palms of the sick person. We will turn in our next article to the looking at the administration of the sacrament itself, but before we do, we need to take a look at the effects and graces which flow from its celebration. The Anointing of the Sick offers the sick person strength, peace, comfort and courage in the midst of their illness. It also unites the person who is ill with the Passion of Our Lord. Flowing from this union of the person’s suffering with Christ’s own suffering the entire Church benefits as she is sanctified by this offering up of the suffering as is the soul of the person who is sick. Finally, the sacrament can help prepare the person for the final journey through death, granting them graces for a peaceful death. In our next article focusing on the sacrament we will review the ritual for the celebration of the sacrament and then also briefly look at Viaticum and then discuss when it is appropriate to receive this sacrament. (This article is part of a series of articles on The Sacraments which will appear in the bulletin over the course of this year.) We have spent some time during the Lenten Season looking at one of the two Sacraments of Healing – namely, the Sacrament of Reconciliation – now it’s time to turn our attention to the second sacrament of healing, the Anointing of the Sick – sometimes called Extreme Unction or Last Rites. We will examine the sacrament first in light of the experience of human illness, then turn to Christ’s own concern for the sick and the scriptural roots of the sacrament prior to examining its celebration.
Illness and sickness are disturbing realities of the human condition. In the midst of illness we experience powerlessness, limitation and the finite nature of human existence and this gives us a glimpse into the reality of death. Sickness and illness can make us feel isolated from God and from others and, in some sense, even from ourselves, as we find the things that we are used to doing or able to do are not possible in the same way – even thinking itself can be difficult. The General Introduction to the ritual book, “The Pastoral Care of the Sick” which contains the anointing ritual, states, “suffering and illness have always been among the greatest problems that trouble the human spirit. Christians feel and experience pain as do all other people; yet their faith helps them to grasp more deeply the mystery of suffering and to bear pain with greater courage. From Christ’s words they know that sickness has meaning and value for their own salvation and for the salvation of the world. They also know that Christ, who during his life often visited and healed the sick, loves them in their illness” (General Introduction, #1). Perhaps some of the most familiar stories from the gospels are those which show us this concern and love that Christ has for the sick and His desire to help them and to heal them – we have only to think of the healing of the paralytic, the healing of the man born blind, etc., to see that a fundamental and significant part of Christ’s public ministry was the healing of the sick and a pastoral solicitude for them in their illness and pain. Those who are sick stand in deep need of God’s grace, lest they become discouraged or fall into despair or find their faith being weakened. At the same time, when one encounters Christ in the midst of the suffering due to illness, then the illness itself can help us to mature and to discern what is of true value and provoke a search and return to God on a deeper level. It is to accomplish this union of the suffering and experience of the sick to Christ that the sacrament comes into play – while there may be times when one does recover physically from their illness because of the sacrament even more importantly is this uniting of the suffering and ill person with Christ. The anointing of the sick “gives the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who are sick; by this grace the whole person is helped and saved, sustained by trust in God, and strengthened against the temptations of the evil one and against anxiety over death. Thus the sick person is able not only to bear suffering bravely, but also to fight against it. A return to physical health may follow the reception of this sacrament if it will be beneficial to the sick person’s salvation” (General Instruction, #6). This union which is brought about between the person in their illness and Christ Himself can be a great source of consolation and strength, as well as sanctifying the soul of the person who is ill. Christ’s love for the sick is so clear that He actually identifies Himself with the person who is sick, “I was sick and you visited me” as He says in St. Matthew’s Gospel. In our next article we examine some of the scriptural roots of the sacrament as well as the graces which flow from it. (This article is part of a series of articles on The Sacraments which will appear in the bulletin over the course of this year.) |
Fr. PeterArchives
June 2023
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