The imitation of Christ →

Catholics are used to hearing that we have a priest shortage in the United States. Yet if we have learned one thing in the past few weeks, it’s that we should consider ourselves lucky. As the coronavirus pandemic has made its way to our shores and the public celebration of Masses has been canceled across the country, the vast majority of American Catholics are finally getting a taste of what it’s like to be a Catholic in the sparsely populated regions of the United States, much less in the Amazon.

When is the next time that any of us will receive the Eucharist? Only God knows.

The Light of Life →

In a world in which dispelling darkness is as simple as flipping a switch, many of us have lost sight (no pun intended) of how often light is used as a metaphor for our Catholic faith. We catch a glimpse of it during the ceremony of the new fire at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, and the elevation of the Easter candle by the priest as he intones Lumen Christi (“Christ, our light”), and we reply Deo gratias (“Thanks be to God”).

But until the advent of electric light, it meant something visceral to Christians to say that Christ is our light, the God who became man in the dead of winter to dispel the darkness of the world, and who rose radiant from a pitch-black tomb at dawn on Easter morning. Throughout most of the time that man has walked the earth, night was dark in a way that it no longer is for most of us, and for four or five months of the year, it was long and cold, too.

Love in the ruins →

Sitting in the darkened chapel here at OSV, watching the flame of the sanctuary candle flicker, my thoughts turn often to the two greatest Catholic novelists of the 20th century (at least in my estimation): Evelyn Waugh and Walker Percy.

In Waugh’s case, the sanctuary candle calls to my mind the opening and closing chapters of “Brideshead Revisited.” In Walker Percy’s case, his entire body of work — novels, short fiction, and nonfiction — seems more relevant today than at any point in my lifetime. As a trained psychiatrist, a convert to Catholicism, a novelist and a victim of poor physical and (at times) mental health, Percy was fascinated by the way in which people reacted to dire situations — war, hurricanes, epidemics.

We’ll leave the light on for you →

We celebrated Mass this St. Patrick’s Day, Msgr. Campion and I, once again in a darkened chapel. Just minutes before we walked down the hall to the chapel, we received notice that Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend had suspended all public Masses “until further notice.”

While ours was a private Mass, Monsignor made the prudent decision to make it the last one in the chapel. He will be celebrating his private Masses elsewhere without a server until public Masses can be resumed.

Tomorrow, the only lights in the chapel will once again be the sanctuary candle and the spotlight on the crucifix.

A Lenten journey through death into life →

During Lent, in the Eastern Church (both Catholic and Orthodox), priests consecrate the Eucharist only on Sundays and feast days. Throughout the year, daily liturgies are less common in the Eastern Church than they are in the Western Church, but in Lent, any daily liturgies (again, outside of feast days) take the form of the Liturgy of the Presanctified.

“Presanctified” refers to the previously consecrated bread, reserved from the Sunday liturgy. The faithful gather for a liturgy that is similar to a standard one, but without a consecration, and when the time comes for the distribution of holy Communion, the reserved body of Christ is distributed to the faithful.

In the distant past, the Roman rite practiced something similar during Lent, but today, the last remaining vestige of this practice in the Western Church is the Good Friday liturgy.