Lent II
Bishop’s Corner
It is a soft St. Patrick’s Day, mild for March, and glowing with the promise of green and growth for Spring as I write this. I hope yours was a pleasant one. The ever so talented children of the school choir surprised me with ancient Irish music for the High Mass today, a splendid tribute to the great Patriarch St. Patrick.
The girls met on Monday and did a beautiful table for St. Joseph to receive his homage yesterday, especially in food for the poor. The boys were playing outside in the meanwhile, but driven indoors by the bitter damp wind that day. March weather!
It was just the school (thank God for every last one of them, teachers and children and clergy!) to remember poor Craig Byrne on Tuesday for the traditional funeral his family denied him, opting instead for the N.O., the No-Mass of the Novus Ordo. We sang a fine Requiem for this loyal Catholic and Gertrudian, and prayed a Rosary for him who often led it for others. I looked up his obituary, and learned that like Richard Weik he was a lover of fine music. Craig was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Fr. McGuire reported that Craig would generally touch two topics at each visit: a denunciation of the new religion, and a request for prayers for his family. Let us remember him lovingly, and all of this winter’s dead in particular.
Our Rosary Confraternity president reports elsewhere in the bulletin on what was our first proper meeting in many a year, and one of our most successful. Thanks to all who turned out for it on a fine Sunday afternoon, and stayed for the Rosary.
Thanks too for all of our Lenten Leprechauns who made this past busy week at church pass so well…the Monday meetings, St. Patrick, its Mass and music and lunch, the Lenten Friday and its pizza, St. Joseph’s Day and breakfast. God reward you with a most blessed Lent.
I wish the same to each of you. How wonderful it is this Lent to see a soul or two creep in to church and kneel around the altar for a weekday Mass, lest the Saviour be sacrificed again and seen only by angels, who have no need of it, although they love to go, and jostle for a space nearby the ineffable mysteries. Let us pray for this Lent for a little of the love of the Irish for the Mass. “It is the Mass that matters.”
May good St. Joseph, with St. Patrick and Blessed Mary,
make it ever so in our midst.
God bless you.
-Bishop Dolan