Letter from the Pastor
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June 13, 2021
Now, that the Easter Season concluded and we celebrated the two fundamental truths of our Christian faith: the Holy Trinity and the Holy Eucharist, we begin Ordinary Time in the Church’s year. We count the Sundays with the ordinal numbers, today being the Eleventh Sunday of the Year.
As you may have noticed more people are feeling comfortable in coming back to Mass on Sundays. It is so good to see all of you returning. Some of you, I hadn’t seen in over a year. It may be a good time to reflect and refresh our knowledge and understanding about the Mass and the Eucharist. So what is the Mass?
We Catholics are very accustomed to celebrating memorials. Remembering is very important for an individual, as well as a society. We must always remember where we came from and how we got to be where we are, and where we are headed. We need roots to keep us grounded. The Mass is a Memorial, but not as a mere memory, or an event simply recalled from the past.
Our Lord belongs in the Heavenly realm, He condescended to us, as St. Paul wrote, “He emptied Himself…” He lived on this earth for 33 years; we can walk the same roads that He walked. He knew that after He conquered death and sin for us, paid the price for Adam’s sin, brought us back (redemption) with His Precious Blood; He would return bodily to His Heavenly realm.
Before His greatest act for us, His Passion and Death, He wanted us to remember Him, not as a dead person, as in a picture or video but in reality, as a living God. So on the night before He died, He gave to His Apostles, and in turn to us, His Sacred Body and Blood, not a symbol but as His real Body and Blood, His Soul and Divinity. He gave us His total Self, His Divine Presence.
So at every Mass, we commemorate the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Not merely remembering as something that happened centuries ago; and in our mind we simply imagine or recall the event, rather that historical event is made present to us, here and now, in every Catholic Church in the world.
The sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated, time and again, across the world and down through the centuries, but each makes present Christ’s singular sacrifice on Calvary, for as Hebrews 10:10 teaches: “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
Christ is really present in the Eucharist – as present as He was to the Apostles during His life and as present as He was to them in the Upper Room after His crucifixion. And that He is really present in His Church.
Without the “real presence” of the Body of Christ –the Eucharist, we are merely remembering some event that happened centuries ago but is no longer present to us now. Yet the Catholic faith has always held that Christ lives and is as present to us as He was to those who saw and heard and touched Him. We are not transformed merely by remembering something past; we are transformed by encountering a real person.
The gift of the Eucharist is a great mystery of faith; it is a wondrous gift of God’s love, it is our joy and the grace of God, which we can believe in so great a Sacrament. The Mass is everything for us, it is the source of our holiness, our life and it is the summit to which we look and yearn.
As we have learned last year, for four months, the unimaginable happened; no public Mass or Communions were offered due to the pandemic. However, the Mass always continued privately. The Mass was always offered throughout history, even through persecutions. People were willing to be tortured and killed so as to attend Mass, people hid their priests to their own peril, went to caves and forests to attend Mass.
Without the Mass, we have nothing.