It could never happen here

Ecco homo ("Behold the Man") by Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632)

Three years ago, Palm Sunday 2020, was the first time that we sent out a livestream video of Mass.  “Two weeks to stop the spread” had continued past three weeks and now stretched toward a distant and unknowable vanishing point.  We could not simply wait.  I asked Thad Ruszkowski for help with the technical side; he and Mike Ward ran cable from the school to connect to the internet, and he and Karl MacMillan assembled all the equipment they were able to beg, borrow, or buy, and launched the transmission.   Fr. Russo set up a YouTube channel, and he and Fr. Berhorst concelebrated with me.  For reasons I cannot recall we started at 7:30 that morning.  Lights, camera, action – right?

If you were watching that morning, you were almost as surprised to hear the Crowd part of the solemn reading of the Passion as Karl and Thad were when they realized that they had to say it.  Unlike subsequent Masses, which started at 11:00, and we were joined by Fr. Petty for a few weeks, had John Henderson on the organ and our section leaders singing, and had Daniel, Christina, and Jessica Dao serve, there was no music, no server – it was a grim affair.  

We all noticed noise at the doors of the church at some point during the Mass, but not noise like someone was trying to get in.   When we unlocked the doors afterward for the faithful to visit the church, we found taped to the door a bulletin on Maryland State Police letterhead.

Groups of more than 10 people in a gathering or at an event are prohibited.  This includes social, community, spiritual, religious, recreational, leisure, and sporting gatherings and events.

If the requirements of the Governor’s Executive Order are not complied with, the Maryland State Police and our law enforcement partners will take the appropriate enforcement action, in consultation with the local state attorney’s office.  Violation … could result in a misdemeanor conviction and up to one year in jail, or a fine of up to $5,000 or both.  

My jaw dropped.  My first thought was relief that our doors were obediently locked, and our number inside under ten; then, sympathy for the trooper who, doubtless against his every impulse and training, had to do this most outrageous and unthinkable-in-America thing.  I took the notice, and kept it.

It was indeed a hard time.  There was real fear, and there was real danger.  There was also ignorance, mendacity, and self-interest, and these shaped and motivated many a consequential action.  A notice forbidding worship, placed on the doors of a church, by the police?  In our home town?

The Church is the Body of Christ on earth.  As such, it should surprise us not at all that the Church also suffers.  This is not merely the sadness of God that His people are cut off and carried away from Him; it is not merely the lamenting of His ministers that they are prevented from fulfilling their sacred functions.  It is also, and perhaps first of all, more than a disservice, but rather an injury to each and all of the people whom Christ has made His own.  It is the diminishment of grace and goodness in the lives of all the faithful; a trauma, a debilitating wound that has immediate and lasting effect in their lives and in society.  Souls, beautiful immortal souls, fall into desuetude, and death.

This is not China, where recent decrees have made it harder or even impossible for Catholics to worship at all there.  This is not Nigeria, where roving bands of jihadist militants burn Catholic churches with the worshippers inside them, fire into crowds outside of churches, and abduct and often murder priests and Christian schoolchildren.  This is not Nicaragua, where Communist tyrants imprison and expel the clergy, dismantle the communities, and disperse the people.  This is not Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Bangladesh.  And yet: the motivations and manipulations for Catholics to stay away from church are real, insidious, and sometimes even governmental.

It would be naïve and even foolish to continue to assume goodwill or good faith on the part of many of our leaders, official and unofficial, or even all our neighbors.   Yet we know that the cross of Christ Jesus is our only hope, and the only path to life and redemption for us and them.  We know that Christ humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Because of this, God greatly exalted him.  

To let drop the Faith because the Church suffers would satisfy and succor only your worst enemy.  Come; let us take up our cross and follow Him.  Three years have passed, and it is Palm Sunday 2023.  Jesus enters Jerusalem, where awaits the Cross.

Monsignor Smith

 

What you see and what you get

Though no artist was present to see it, the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary is depicted in art just barely less often than the Crucifixion and the Nativity.  The pivotal moment of our history is also a beautiful moment, and every artist worth the name has tried his hand at depicting, “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.”  One such effort, by Orazio Gentileschi, has sneakily become my very favorite by the odd tactic of placing itself before me on a book cover in my confessional.  In fact, I think in my version it is flipped left-right for the sake of the cover’s composition, but I’ll share it with you the way I see it.

The Archangel Gabriel both kneels before and springs toward the young Virgin in her bedchamber, as she modestly gathers her blue cloak around her red dress and holds up a hand in a demure gesture that conveys not as much hesitance as acceptance.  The messenger holds in one hand a rod sprouting lilies, a sign of the recipient’s fruitful virginity, and with the other indicates the source of the divine initiative.  Making visible Gabriel’s promise of divine overshadowing, the Holy Spirit like a dove comes through the open window along with radiant beams that warm and light the Virgin’s face, and leave the angel’s in shadow.  

I had been staring at this picture for years while listening to sins, before I noticed that there were at least five colors of white in it.  The crisp linen white of the sheets is clearly different from the lacy white cuffs and collars on both angel and Virgin; the fresh white lilies, completely different yet again.  The angel’s downy white wings stand in sharp contrast, seeming almost gray until your eyes discern the effect of shadow, and the similarity yet difference of the bright white dove’s soft purity.  

And then there is all that drapery.   Fabric falls in folds throughout, a painterly tour de force and a common mark of a genre of painting that, honestly, has never really done much for me.  Well, until now, anyway, as I recognize all that crumpling and cascading as not only beautiful, but eloquent and explanatory. 

Look at the wardrobe on that angel erupting into Mary’s quiet and contemplation.  His cloak is luminous ochre rather than gold, but rich all the same.  His tunic is a marvel: rosy, silky, and iridescent.  All this is topped with ginger hair (of course?) and together makes him stand out as the visitor in this scene.  

The blue cloak that envelopes the Virgin echoes the distant and divine blue that is the origin of the dove’s descent as God’s own grace falls upon her.  Then that enormous scarlet curtain behind the bed is not simply some decorator’s trendy choice but rather the falling and manifold abundance of the Spirit Himself, red like the fire of Pentecost, finding and filling the Virgin with the Divine Word Who takes flesh from her, resonating in the red of her own tunic, half-hidden beneath the blue cloak.

For a pile of paint that has been still and solid for four hundred years (exactly – since 1623!) there is such swirl and motion as make mind and eyes spin.  The richness of the scene concentrates the riches of art and creativity in which man, art’s creator, is revealed to be the image and likeness of his Creator God.  The artist’s insight and expression find their source and their goal in the beauty that is God’s goodness in giving us His only begotten and co-eternal Son, come to save us.  This scene has captivated me for years as the resting place for my eyes, while my ears do the work of the merciful Redeemer in receiving the repentance of souls in search of absolution and mercy.  

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.  The Annunciation, March 25, almost always falls during Lent, and this year splits the weekend with the Sunday that begins the time of Christ’s Passion.  As you look at the veils that hide the images of the Christ and His saints, let them remind you not only of His precious blood, shed for our sins, but also of the hiddenness of so much of the life and death of that same Redeemer.   

And we have seen His glory.  Hiddenness is not the same as invisibility, as God’s work is not only visible, but indeed manifest in creation, whether in the created creators of the art that makes the unseen, seen; in the wine become blood; or in falling folds of the very fabric of divine communion.  

Monsignor Smith

 

Crcksstbzzzzzzzzzzz

Yes, I have playlists of my own music stored on my phone, and usually at least one audiobook too, and my car has excellent Bluetooth.  No, I never subscribed to satellite radio after the introductory period ran out when the car was new; the stations available turned me off.  So when I am driving, unless it is during one of the frequent periods when I am happy to be in silence, or the infrequent times I am talking on the cell phone, I listen to the radio.

WTOP can be useful for traffic and weather.  I have been known to enjoy a Nats game on 106.7 The Fan.  American University has a station (88.5?) that often plays excellent bluegrass.  But by and large, I am a classical fan.  

Nowadays every “feed” is personalized and customized, whether it be streamed music and video, the products advertised and offered, and even the so-called “news,” are honed by the omnipresent algorithms to be “just what you want to hear”  -- which often includes just what (they) want you to hear.  This honestly become oppressive.  

It can be liberating to relinquish my input and simply listen to what the station programs for everybody.  The music on our local WETA is usually okay, but the programming is better on WBJC, 91.5 out of (gasp) Baltimore.  And with that distance comes a distinction:  reception.

Here around Silver Spring, I am close enough to get fine reception, but the same is not true as I move around the metropolitan area; and when I head for the hills for my day off, it gets really spotty.  Moving north on I-270, the signal begins to weaken, and static interferes.  Usually I am enjoying the music enough to stay tuned despite the static.  Sometimes, I catch myself enjoying the static, or more accurately, I enjoy listening to good music through static.  

I am not sure why I appreciate static on the radio.  I am not old enough to have listened to baseball late at night from distant Chicago or New York stations on my transistor AM radio.  I am reminded of the daring ones under propaganda and misinformation of communist oppression huddled around a forbidden receiver to hear Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or Radio Martí.  Now those beacons of freedom are shut down otherwise neutered, and all the misinformation anyone can dream up is available right here at home.  That’s why I stick to classical music, with a helping of static on the side.  

More than just nostalgia, there is something real about it.  It reveals something about where I am.  As I head into the District, the signal weakens, but if I head north up I-95 it stays strong well into Delaware.   Oddly, it is quite strong over in Loudoun County Virginia when I am heading to or from my parents; I think it’s a higher elevation.  As I drove down the western slope of South Mountain toward Hagerstown, I lost it completely, but a few miles further west it came back, staticky but listenable, as I emerged from the mountain’s shadow.  

There was the day when I was on the other side of the radio broadcast; I worked at the campus station all four years of my undergraduate time.  “This is WLUR, 91.5 FM, and you are listening to Classical Showcase.”  I learned a lot about music in that time, and a good bit about microphones, too, which has come in handy in ways I could not have foreseen - but I digress.  During those years the digital recording revolution was sweeping the world, and compact discs brought crystalline recordings without the hiss and pop of long-playing vinyl and their needles and tonearms.  We oohed and aaahed, and my Christmas present my senior year was a disc player, so I could spend what little money I had on my very first CDs.

Here we are, not yet forty years later, and my housemates make fun of me whenever I refer to discs of any kind, CDs or DVDs or any other such obsolescent media.  I disregard their mockery, and do not mention my old LPs, which of course I kept.  Oddly enough, there seems to be a revived enthusiasm for vinyl; not only old records (antiques?), but new music is produced in this cumbersome, fallible format, which leads me to believe that not only old people, but also newer generations see the value of pops, hisses, and imprecision.  Digital media, it seems, are not only pristine, but they also eliminate nuance and richness by reducing everything to their binary code, ones and zeroes.

Maybe, hearing the evidence of the medium through which we are listening, whether it be static on the radio or imperfections in the record, reminds us of the mediating reality of the medium – there is something, and maybe someone, between us and what we are trying to hear.  Even though we cannot separate the one from the other, we can distinguish between them.  In our days of digital immersion, online experiences, and the so-called “metaverse,” it is helpful not to get fooled into thinking that the medium is the message, or that the virtual is real.  Now that people’s perceptions of events are held up as concrete and compelling, it is helpful to be able to distinguish between event and experience, in the hope of holding onto the real instead of the imagined.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (Jn 1:14)  God sent His Son, not a representative, interpreter, or message; nor artifact, book, or facsimile.  All of these things, though, can help us to Him; and a little static can reveal the difference.  

Monsignor Smith

 

2020 Hindsight

Looking back at where we've been.

Living so close to the nation’s capital and engulfed as we are by people who fixate on its every palpitation, we know many politically-minded folk who track time in four-year cycles.   Baseball people, it seems to me, understand time in a two-year paradigm: This Year, and Next Year.  Next Year seems already to be getting some interest from Nats fans.

But for us who live and breathe the calendar of the Liturgy of the Church, time unfolds in a three-year frame: A, B, and C, or more poignantly, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for the Gospels that anchor the Sunday Mass lectionary readings.  As you’ve noticed, we are in Year A, Saint Matthew, which should tip you off that this Palm Sunday we will have the longest setting of the Passion.   

Also every three years, on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent, we have special catechetical Gospels, all taken from the Gospel of John.  As you might guess, “special” also means “really long.”  For centuries in the Church of Rome, these Gospels were read at Masses at which catechumens were in proximate preparation for admission to the Christian Mysteries, the Sacraments of Initiation:  Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion.  These Masses occurred at designated major churches in Rome, on Wednesdays of Lent.  Wednesday was the other day of fasting and penance, along with Friday.  Because by the mid-20^th century, this penitential aspect of Wednesdays had disappeared from common culture, if not yet from the liturgy, the reformers of the Missal after Vatican II moved these vital passages to the Sunday lectionary, in Year A.  The Samaritan Woman at the Well (3^rd Lent); The Man Born Blind (4^th Lent); and The Raising of Lazarus (5^th Lent) are all powerful revelations of Jesus’ identity and call.  Now we all get to hear them on Sunday, every three years  --  and they are optional for the other years. 

But, you may say, but I don’t remember those readings.  No shame there – you haven’t heard them since 2017, SIX years ago, because 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th Lent are The Masses that Were Not back in 2020.

Because of the three-year cycle, I always pull up the intercessions from three years previous in preparing the new ones.  Last week I noticed that in my 2020 file, there were intercessions for Ash Wednesday, 1^st Lent, 2^nd Lent, and then…nothing.  3^rd Lent 2020 is The Weekend the World Stopped.  The governor made his decree on Thursday, and it went into effect on noon Saturday.  I was so moved to see the triple-sized crowd at Saturday morning Mass that day, as people came for a farewell Communion.

On the other side of campus, our teachers had a professional development day scheduled for that Friday.  Whatever they had planned on professionally developing, they ditched; and instead coolly, quickly, and professionally developed everything they needed to move all instruction online for the coming “two weeks to flatten the curve.”  (Remember that?!)  On that Monday morning, our school was ‘live’ online for all of our kids.  The county-run schools required about a month to begin remote instruction.  So much for two weeks!

I do have intercessions from Palm Sunday 2020; that was the first Mass we live-streamed, once we realized the whole two-week thing was a decoy.  It would be three and a half months before we were allowed back in church – late June, and over a month after the rest of Maryland was so permitted.  That was awful, and it did damage to souls that is fully known only to God – but the rest of us can discern enough to make a good guess.

Being liturgically oriented means having a natural cycle of three years as part of our frame of mind and of time.  Three years later, walking again through each day and each step of that disaster gives me clear eyes to look at what stands before me now, and what lies ahead in years to come.  I want to promise that never, ever again will I collude in the privation of the People of God of the Holy Sacraments and Divine Worship.  As with the very Faith entrusted to us, what fills me with resolve as well as confidence in God’s help with this project, is looking back. 

Monsignor Smith

 

Running out of esteem

Memento mori

Here at the Holy House of Soubirous, we are talking about Three Years Ago as we move through the anniversary of the arrival of Covid and all of destructive restrictions that accompanied it.  Even as we now rejoice to be clearly out of the pandemic, it is easy to see how we have not returned to the near-mythic “how things were before.”   Still, there is fear and mistrust even within the communion of the Church; and still, some cling to safety, or perhaps merely comfort, at the expense of the Sacraments and the practice of the Faith.  

This week, we celebrated the Confirmation of our young people; Bishop Mario Dorsonville conferred the sacrament on 42 young parishioners, as he has many of the seven years since he became one of our Archdiocesan auxiliary bishops.   This time, however, is his last, as the Holy Father has named him the new Bishop of Houma-Thibodeaux in Louisiana, and by month’s end he will be in his new home, far from us and everything he has known until now.  It was hard to say goodbye.

Bishop Dorsonville also conferred Confirmation here in 2020, less than two weeks before the shutdown for the pandemic.  That year, Saint Bernadette was the only parish in the Archdiocese of Washington to celebrate Confirmation as a parish.   The next year, 2021, Bishop Dorsonville was back, as we were the first parish to celebrate confirmation as people moved tentatively back together to worship.   He was here last year, too, as restrictions and limitations continued to drop.  Can we call this year’s “back to normal?”  I do not know.  But under the direction of new DRE, Jasmine Kuzner, it sure went smoothly!   That was the consensus from the bishop, his helper, family members, and other visitors, who also complimented the music provided by our parish choir-youth choir combination under John Henderson.  You are accustomed to great music, but try not to take it for granted.

So looking back to Three Years Ago put this marvelous and holy event in grateful perspective, taking nothing for granted.  Also, looking back at my column from three years ago, I found the following reflection, which seems almost naïve now that we all know what penance the Lord had prepared for us during that dread Lent (and Eastertime and Pentecost and Corpus Christi) of 2020.  Let me share it with you again now, with the fervent hope that this Lent is not a medical, social, and political battle, but only (only?!) a spiritual one.

How is your Lent going?  You made it to Mass for Ash Wednesday, or -- maybe you didn’t.  You avoided meat all day Friday – except for lunch (doh!).  And your rosary-every-day resolution has been going great – since you found your rosary yesterday.

Lent happens.  Lent gets off to a rocky start some years.  Lent can start strong, but then we get distracted, or annoyed, or just hungry, and whoosh – there goes our Lenten resolve, right down the drain.  And once we have broken our perfect (or near-perfect) record, we think – Oh well; that’s gone.  And we stop trying.

Doubtless you have heard of “low self-esteem.”  Sometimes we can have “low Lent-esteem.”  We don’t really have our resolutions or Lenten “plan” ready, miss the first week or two of Lent, or drop the ball after a while, and we think that we have blown Lent this year, it’s beyond salvage, and we will just wait and do better next year.

Well, as the angel invariably says when he appears with a message from God: Fear not!  (You can check Scripture that angels really say this.)  All is not lost; Lent and its sweet benefits are still available to you, even at this late date.  

One of my favorites among the Lord’s parables is that of the vineyard-owner and the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16).  Remember, the owner goes out into the market square several times as the day goes on, and keeps finding workers whom he hires and sends to his vineyard to work with the ones he brought on at the break of day?   He even hires and sends several “at the eleventh hour” (five o’clock in the afternoon).  Then, at the end of the day, they present themselves to the paymaster and all receive the same daily wage.  And the vineyard owner says to the disgruntled workers who had been there all day, “Are you angry because I am generous?” 

He doesn’t have to say anything to the workers who came on late, because they are too busy dancing for glee at their good fortune.   They are taking home way more than they truly earned, and way more than they expected to get when they finally presented themselves in the market square.  

The Lord Himself makes it clear what work we are to undertake for him: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  All three, NOT ‘one of the above’; they all work together to heal our souls and rebuild our relationship with the Lord and one another.  This is the work of Lent, and he is still looking for folks who have not yet gone to His vineyard.

One could take this a step too far, and just wait until the last minute; but of course, we never know when our last minute really will come, do we?  Better to go when the Master calls and sends us.

So yes, it is late – the second Sunday of Lent, already.  But the Master is looking for workers to tend His vineyard, even when that vineyard looks remarkably like their own souls.  Do not fall into the grim cycle of low Lent-esteem!  Do not fret the progress of the day that has already gone and cannot be retrieved.  Come now, because He calls you now.  You will take home way more than you truly earn, and way more than you expected to get when you finally got around to the undertakings of Lent.

Monsignor Smith