Assumption of Our Lady
✠ The Bishop’s Corner ✠
Blessed Assumption! Our Lady’s greatest and most ancient feast refreshes us with the thought of Heaven’s gardens, the true paradise, and Our Lady the First Fruits of Redemption. “Ipsa propitia pervenis,” says St. Bernard. With her kindness, you’ll make it.
August is named after an emperor, who also has an adjective. It is first dedicated to the Son, Eternal Wisdom of the Father. Next, we honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady shares with her Son the scriptural references to both in the Books of Wisdom.
The grass and gardens often dry up here in August. The ballyhooed and promised rains never quite deliver. The heat builds like tension in an oppressive land, our own, for example. Thunder sounds, lightning flashes. No moisture, Eldon used to say. We pray for relief, just enough to get us by. But God knows best. “He hath done all things well,” the Last Gospel told us last Sunday.
Fresh gravel has been laid on the garden path. Busy Mark Lotarski, planning both a new school year and the 2022 calendar dedicated to teacher saints, found time to clean the grotto pond, filling it with the traditional Assumptiontide blue water. Make a visit. Sit a bit. We’re not going out in procession today, though. The Sunday schedule is a little too tight. We’re blessing the flowers in church this morning, and the little ones will, as usual, lead us into the High Mass as the angels who filled Mary’s tomb with flowers.
As they do to soften up an already battered public, the Government has floated the idea of forcing the deathvax for interstate travel. We shall see. But I am glad we have our seminarians with us now, in these so uncertain times.
Fr. Rodrigo da Silva, our Brazilian priest, asks for prayers for his country. They at least are protesting the Communist Covid mask and jab. But the revolution seeks to oust their pretty good president to replace him with an open One Worlder, as they did here in November. Times are indeed uncertain.
Appropriately enough, my trip last weekend to Milwaukee was one of those “best of times, worst of times.” We had a fervent First Friday, First Saturday, and record number of 21 Confirmands. Most of them were able to assist at the Saturday Morning of Recollection. The ceremonies were inspiring, the choir and servers excellent, the little church packed.
But American Airlines and the perpetual rains did me in with cancelled flights, long waits, worry and lost luggage. I am grateful I could find a server’s cassock that almost fit which I used for Mass and the Recollection. But we have 21 dedicated new Soldiers of Christ and a church full of freshly Confirmed in the Faith faithful. This is what matters, and I thank God.
These last weeks of August are customarily quiet once today’s great feast is done. But soon Labor Day comes to set the tone for the ninth month, September. Stay tuned.
May Our Lady bless all who honor her on this ancient feast which gives God such glory.
– Bishop Dolan