May 16, 2004

In this continuing Easter season, the Church celebrates the Resurrection in many joyful ways, but the “center and summit” of all celebration is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by which the Risen Lord becomes present. In these days of confusion and distress permeating all aspects of culture, it is needful for us to offer our worship as decently as we can for our own salvation and that of the whole world. Last year in the encyclical letter, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Pope John Paul II called for a true renewal of this sensibility. Especially in the United States, the Eucharistic life has been neglected and even offended by serious abuses. In the Archdiocese of New York regular Mass attendance is down to 19%, which is better than in some other places, and there is widespread presumption by people who neglect confession before communion.

On the Feast of St. George this year, His Eminence Francis Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, published an official Instruction, Redemptionis Sacramentum (The Sacrament of Redemption), with practical reforms of abuses which have crept into many parish liturgies. In the following weeks our bulletin will quote some of the texts. Cardinal Arinze has said that external conformity is not enough. Faith, hope, and charity, which also manifest themselves in acts of solidarity with the needy, are demanded by participation in the Holy Eucharist. Article 5 says: “A merely external observation of norms would obviously be contrary to the nature of the sacred Liturgy, in which Christ himself wishes to gather his Church, so that together with himself she will be ‘one body and one spirit.’”

Cardinal Arinze was born in Nigeria in 1932 and was baptized by Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, the first West African to be beatified. Last Wednesday, while in New York, His Eminence visited our parish and celebrated the 12:05 Mass. It is a tribute to our parishioners that the Cardinal was so pleased with our church and the way the Liturgy is celebrated here. There is always room for improvement. Our gradual efforts have not always been understood, and some people in the past were not aware of how things are supposed to be. We can be glad that our parish has anticipated virtually everything in the new Instruction which concludes with the hope that “...by the diligent application of those things that are called in this Instruction, human weakness may come to pose less of an obstacle to the action of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, and that with all distortion set aside and every reprobated practice removed, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ‘Woman of the Eucharist,’ the saving presence of Christ in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood may shine brightly upon all people” (Instruction, 185).

Fr. George W. Rutler