Over the next five weeks we will continue publishing a series of updates from Fr Joe. The full and complete update can be found in a printed booklet and available in the gathering space of the church.
Update TWO:
Last week I gave a general update about the things happening in our parish since the quarantine began.
This update will look at our liturgy and the first thing we will look at is our servers, eucharistic ministers, ushers, etc.
This part of the update won’t really make a ton of sense unless I give you a bit of background. Please stick with me.
At the beginning of my second year here, our liturgist and I began meeting to create an Acolyte Program for our parish. The idea we had was to intensively train a group of people in Liturgy – two people for each ministry within our Mass: lectors, servers, ushers, Eucharistic Ministers, etc.
Once these people were trained, they would be made Acolytes by Bishop Earl and they would then basically take over training all ministers at Mass. All this was to help us enhance the dignity, reverence and joy of our Masses and take the heat off any one person/employee/volunteer to coordinate, train and schedule this massive effort.
We had a rollout plan that basically collapsed shortly after the Quarantine was called by the State. It was our plan to walk people through the program, what we were doing, why we were doing it, etc., and begin having the acolytes train people in these ministries, but the State did not allow us to do any of that.
What the State did allow at this point was for us to pick ten people and submit their names as people who would be able to travel to the church to help with religious gatherings each day. How this was perfect for us was it allowed us to simply take the ten men we had been training and plug them in, submitting their names to the state for travel approval to work. Our plan fell apart, but it appears God had His plan for it all and it seems to be working.
When we finished the training and I spoke to Bishop Earl, one of the things he told me was that he was a bit reluctant to name this group acolytes because Church rules only allowed men to be Acolytes. Neither of us could figure out a way around this, so we decided to pray and see. At this point, we were still in Quarantine anyway.
Well, then a crazy thing happened: a couple months later, Pope Francis announced that he was changing the rules so that women could be named Acolytes…wow!
This is, more or less, where we are now. We are gathering a group of women to train as Acolytes so that, when their training is complete, we will have a nice group of men and women leading the way in training our lectors, servers, ushers, Eucharistic Ministers, sacristans, etc.
So, in the end, we will have a small group of men and women who will be in charge of training people for all the various ministries during Mass. These men and women will have read books about the liturgy, attended classes and prayed together in order to strengthen their ability to lead us in liturgical ministry. I’m very excited about this.
Please remember that this is a lot of work and that it’s going to take us a bit of time to get back to normal. We are striving hard to make this happen, but we are limited by our schedules and work load.
Beyond this, a couple other updates about Mass. Fr. Le is taking over liturgy. All of this has been slowed down for the year that I was working alone here. Fr. Le has been one of the best blessings of my life and I just can’t thank God enough for him. He works hard, is kind and is always ready to jump in where he can. At the same time, he helps me to slow down a bit and not try to do everything!
The Doctors Lee are helping us pray so well…I just love our music and I’m so grateful to God. One of the things you may have noticed over the last couple years is how much focus we are putting on the Psalms. I love this because frankly, you know more Scripture than you think, because you know the songs we have been singing. Our Church teaches us that Psalms are an extremely important part of our Masses and I’m so glad they are helping us do that.
So, that is a lot of updating on Mass, but I know it’s info we all needed. The Mass is, in many ways, what defines us as a Church and I’m so glad I get to pray it with all of you.
Next week we’ll take a look at our future projects in our new Church!
I thank God every day for the joy of being your priest.
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