So began a DoR priest’s Easter Sunday sermon. He continued by saying the following:

“I say this motivated by Christian charity. If you are a Catholic who has come back to the Church . . . Wait, let me rephrase that. If you are a Catholic who chose to walk out on the Church, and is now back at Mass, you are not in a state of grace. You must make a full sacramental confession before you receive Holy Communion.”

What greater gift is there than a priest who will actually say to these twice-a-year Catholics that what they are doing is not okay? While it is excellent that these people are motivated to step into church, they must be motivated to do so Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year. However, they do not see the need to do so when they get the same message every Sunday they show up: “Jesus loves you just the way you are – don’t change a thing.” If that is true, then there’s no need for Mass, is there? Also, when these people come to Mass, they are confronted with “liturgical irregularities,”  trite preaching, horrible music, much of it stuck in the years between 1965 and 1980, and no sense of the sacred. The Mass, for them, is something they “do” a couple times a year to pay-off the Lord of the Universe, the Great High Priest, Jesus Christ.

So what can we do to get people coming to Mass with regularity? In the words of Fr. Rego, we must “Preach Hell.” If the people have no sense of sin, there can be no sense of grace. If we return to the sacred at Mass, and have Gregorian Chant in lieu of tambourines and air guitars, and precious metals in place of clay, glass, and wooden  “sacred vessels,” we will begin to see people asking questions like, “Why do we do this? What does it mean?” This is our springboard into proper liturgical catechesis, people. Restore a sense of the sacred, and the people will begin to realize that the Mass is not something casual and free-to-be-manipulated by anyone who chooses to do so. There will be a sense of awe, being at Mass and being completely powerless. The Mass is an experience of God, and for us to feel that there is no mystery, no mystical captivation, is to not fully comprehend the presence of God.

If more priests begin their Christmas and Easter sermons with words like this, I guarantee you, you will see people begin to question their complacency. After the priest made this announcement, at the end of Mass there were people lining up to do two things: 1. Confess their sins and 2. thank the priest for his explanation, because it “made me realize that I was in a state of grievous sin.”

It’s not hard. Get one or two good priests, get a solid group of the faithful, such as us, and coupled together, orthodoxy will once again reign supreme in the Diocese of Rochester. We are merely hibernating, friends. And the winter is almost over.

Resurrexit sicut dixit. Alleluia.

Tags: Holy Week and the Triduum, Liturgy, Orthodoxy at Work

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