September 12, 2004

As summer draws to a close, it seems that we have had very little of a lull in these weeks. Many of our parishioners have been on vacation, but a great many stayed in the city and were joined by an increasing number of tourists and visitors. The season reached a high point on Thursday, September 2, with a visit to our parish by the President of the United States, his father the former President, and their First Ladies. They joined me for some quiet time in the rectory followed by a prayer service in the church. The President is a man of sincere prayer and was intent on a holy hour for meditation. As this was to be private, no media or photographers and no public announcements were allowed until the actual day. The Presidents were joined in our church afterward by other officials including the President’s advisors, members of the Cabinet and Congress, the Governor and Mayor and former Mayor. It was not easy to maintain privacy with central Manhattan closed to traffic, hundreds of Secret Service and security and armed guards on the church roof, but such is the protection required in these days of terrorism and confused people.

As we resume the normal pace of parish life, we note that 2005 will be the 50th anniversary of the chartering of the parish. In preparation, there are some worthy and exciting projects in store about which I will soon be writing. No parish responsible to Christ can be satisfied with itself as an enclosed “community” nor should its chief efforts be spent on the social entertainments of ourselves, although these are harmless and even helpful in due proportion. Our chief efforts must be in catechesis, spiritual formation, and evangelization. In such a time of challenge and growth, we should consider words written by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and which I had the privilege of reading to our two presidential visitors and their guests:

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

Fr. George W. Rutler