Installation mass for our new pastor

After multiple decades of being served by Franciscans, and in fact multiple decades of being served by the same pastor, at the end of June, our parish got in a new group of priests, the Missionaries of the Precious Blood. Today, we had a special mass to formally install our new pastor.

You may never have been to an installation mass. Nearly all the people I talked to at the reception in the church hall afterwards had never seen one. I certainly never had, even though I have attended parishes that have had multiple changes of pastor while I attended. I think this is a shame, because it was beautiful.

It involved the profession of faith and oath of fidelity, which is made up of the Nicene Creed and a lot of statements about submitting to the teachings and authority of the Church. It felt like something between a renewal of baptismal promises and a renewal of wedding vows. I told him afterwards that it was actually kind of romantic, like he was renewing spousal promises to the Church.

Then our auxiliary bishop took him around to different places in the church corresponding to various aspects of his pastoral ministry: the baptismal font, the reconciliation room, a table with our oil for Anointing of the Sick, the pulpit, and the altar. At each station, he asked our pastor if he would faithfully exercise this particular ministry, and then asked all of us in attendance if we would do our part (by presenting our children for the sacraments of initiation, seeking reconciliation, praying for and with our pastor, availing ourselves of Anointing of the Sick and sending for a priest to minister to the dying when necessary, etc.). Finally he sat our new pastor down in the presider's chair and declared that he was officially installed as our new pastor.

The mass was mainly in English, but given we are a heavily Italian parish (two of our five weekend masses are in Italian) there were bilingual elements. The Gospel was proclaimed in both Italian and English, the bishop managed a few sentences of the homily in Italian, and a number of the hymns and mass responses were in Italian. To crown the whole affair, the bishop gave the final blessing in Latin. Our special masses are often bilingual like this, and I think it's a lovely way to bring the whole parish together.

I've got to say, it was both moving and edifying. What a great catechetical moment for the parish, to get a grand tour of what it means to be a pastor and what we the faithful are called to do as a parish community! And if I had been a young man nursing a potential vocation to the priesthood, I imagine I would have found it especially meaningful (I did hear there were a couple of seminarians in attendance). Hearing an explicit declaration of fidelity to the Magisterium was pretty cool too.

This is authentic community-building. You don't need embarrassing party games, liturgical impromptus, or piling laypeople on the altar willy-nilly. A formal binding together of priest and people to support each other in their mission as Christians, followed by cake in the parish hall, works pretty darn well in my view.

Inaugural post, yay!

In the beginning, two nerds created the blog. And the blog was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the page.

And then they said, "let the blog be filled with random posts of whatever we feel like writing about. The oddity, and the nerdity, and discussing all the creeping things that creep upon the earth. Also books and video games and theology and stuff."

And they said, "Once there's a post on the page, however dumb, it will no longer be an intimidating empty blog."

And they saw that it was good.