Saint Ann Roman Catholic Church

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Pastor's Corner

This Week's Bulletin - August 1, 2010

LITURGY LIGHTS UP LIFE - Each year we celebrate the Transfiguration of the Lord twice: 1) on the second Sunday of Lent, and 2) on August 6. I am struck by these words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the leader of the Catholic Church in El Salvador who was martyred in 1980 by a government agent. "This Lent, which we observe amidst blood and sorrow, ought to presage a transfiguration of our people, a resurrection of our nation. The Church invites us to a modern form of penance, of fasting and prayer---perennial Christian practices, but adapted to the circumstances of each person. Feeling in one's own flesh the consequences of sin and injustice, one is stimulated to work for social justice and a genuine love for the poor. Our Lent should awaken a sense of social justice." The movie Romero is available in our Parish Library.

TRANSFIGURED CONSCIOUSNESS – I was so stuck some years ago when one of our parishioners said that the reason she was raising her children in the faith was so that her daughters and sons might have an “alternate perspective” to the culturally dominant, pervasive and loud perspectives of “red state v. blue state”, “liberal v. conservative”, “us who are all right v. them who are all wrong”.

CURIOUS – For decades I have been struck that the first atomic explosion on July 16, 1945 was titled “Trinity” and that the bomb has been developed near the city of “The Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi” (a/k/a, Santa Fe, New Mexico). The next time you are in our Church Hall (perhaps at today’s “Meet & Greet” after Masses), check out the quote about St. Francis of Assisi near the world map.

CURIOUS-ER – The first of two atomic bombs was dropped on August 6, 1945, the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord.

CURIOUS-ER PLUS – The second of the two atomic bombs was dropped on the one city in Japan that had a heavily Catholic population and took place on same date (August 9) on which Edith Stein had been gassed in Auschwitz in 1942 and Franz Jaegerstadder had been beheaded in Berlin in 1943. Saint Edith Stein was so counter-cultural that she chose the name Teresa Blessed BY The Cross when she became a nun, and the title of a website about Blessed Franz Jaegerstadder is “Against the Stream” .

ALTARED CONSCIOUSNESS – “Altered states of consciousness” is an expression we use occasionally. Our mental states may be altered by food, mood, drugs, chemicals, homones, music, the Phillies, etc. Our coming to the Altar each Sunday, however, is intended to effect an altered state of soul so that we see, judge and act as the Lord sees, judges and acts. Our being “in the Lord”, our Holy Communion with and in Him, have the express purpose of transfiguring our perspectives, judgments and actions.

PARISH RESOURCES – Our Parish Library offers material on Bishop Oscar Romero, St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Teresa Blessed by the Cross, and Blessed Franz Jaegerstadder, as well as the books Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Gary Wills and The War Prayer by Mark Twain. While I am no pacifist, I have come to see that a religion that does not offer an alternate perspective to culturally dominant perspectives is worthy neither of God nor of us.

Related Thoughts:

The West?

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