Pastor’s Letter & March 28 Bulletin

Pastor’s Letter & March 28 Bulletin

26 Mar 2021 | Posted by: chadmin

The March 28 bulletin is now online. 

Dear friend,

With Palm Sunday this weekend, we begin Holy Week. Each year Holy Week allows the opportunity to not only remember what Jesus did for us in His Passion, but to in a sense walk with Him to the Cross to share with Him in the Resurrection. The tradition of covering sacred images and crosses invites Catholics to focus not on what Jesus did for us but to enter into what He is doing for us now. While Jesus died once on the Cross, and that one sacrifice was once for all of us and all time, the active remembrance in the Mass allows the Cross to become present to us in the Eucharist. In a special way, the Holy Week liturgies by the retelling of all the Passion stories allows us to enter more into the moment of His Passion. The Church allows us to cover the statues and images beginning with the 5^th Sunday of Lent in order to assist our liturgical focus.

The Triduum is the shortest liturgical season of the year. The Triduum includes Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday into Easter Sunday. The Three Holy Days. It is a true blessing to celebrate the Triduum liturgies with parishioners this year. While the ability to Livestream is a modern technological gift, there is nothing that adequately replaces praying together at church. Last year our churches were closed prior to our celebration of Holy Week and Easter. While we are open this year, we will do a few things different than previous years.

Holy Thursday we will have our usual 7pm Mass of the Lord’s Supper with the Altar of Repose in church available until midnight. You are welcome to come to Mass without reservation or to visit church before midnight to spend time in the garden with Jesus present in the Eucharist.

Good Friday will be a bit different. Instead of nonstop liturgies throughout the day, we will have a bit more structure and limitation. The Stations of the Cross and the Divine Mercy Chaplet will be prayed from noon to 1pm. There will be no further public prayer until the 3pm and 6pm liturgies of the Lord’s Passion and Communion distribution. Typically we do this liturgy once on Good Friday at 3pm.  Because our crowd is often quite large, we will have the same liturgy at 3pm and 6pm on Good Friday.

The church will be open for additional Confession times on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

The Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday and the three Easter morning Masses are scheduled on Eventbrite. We are working to get as many people into church and the banquet room as possible. If you have not reserved a pew or are not yet on the waiting list, please contact the office. We will do everything we can to get as many in as we can. I will Livestream the Vigil and the 9am and 11am Masses as usual. I will distribute Communion after the 9am and 11am Masses outside in the parking lot.

We will do our best to get as many in the church building and banquet room as possible; but, with outside distribution, we will make sure anyone who desires the Easter Eucharistic Sacrament will receive. I hope you have a blessed week.

God bless,

Father David