Dear Beloved Parishioners,
Hang on to your hat – I am going to cover a lot of ground, quickly, I hope…
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Mask optional… Per our announcement this weekend: As you know, St. Louis County ended its mask mandate on Monday morning. (though they still highly recommend them for indoors.) Thus, the wearing of a mask is optional for Masses here at St. Justin*. You are always welcome to continue to wear them, no questions asked. And to not wear them, no questions asked. And since there are people who are immuno-compromised for whom masks and social distancing are still critical, we will continue keeping sections B and D as every other pew seating until the pandemic becomes endemic…
And, to protect our immune-compromised folks, the Eucharistic ministers will continue to wear masks for the distribution of communion…
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*School parents – Please note, in the short term, for the All School Masses: since we will have all 8 grades TOGETHER in church for the first time since the pandemic began, and since social distancing and cohort cohesion will not be possible, and since we are still on the “Yellow – Mask Situational Level”, we will still require them in church for the All School Masses. (but not the levels Masses, since we can spread out…)
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Pope Francis has asked every Catholic worldwide to offer their Ash Wednesday fasting and abstinence from meat for the people of the Ukraine… In his own words: “Jesus taught us that the diabolical senselessness of violence is answered with God’s weapons, with prayer and fasting. I encourage believers in a special way to dedicate themselves intensely to prayer and fasting on Ash Wednesday.” -Pope Francis
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Masses on Ash Wednesday are 6:30, 8am (a 10am ALL SCHOOL Mass) and 7pm.
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And, very hot off the presses (I got this this afternoon) from the USCCB about the timing of the special collection for Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe:
February, 28, 2022
Dear Brothers in Christ:
As we approach the holy season of Lent, I write with a special appeal for the Church in Ukraine and the surrounding countries, where a humanitarian crisis is unfolding. This Ash Wednesday, I ask you to encourage your priests to promote the Collection to Aid the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, which will allow the faithful to make a timely contribution and provide assistance to the victims of war in Ukraine, among many other projects the Collection supports in the region.
If you do not or cannot take up the Collection on March 2, I implore you to find a way to give to the Collection by other means at this critical time. The USCCB is uniquely positioned to provide aid to the region, having built strong relationships with our brother bishops there these last 30 years, and having given so much assistance in the development of the Church’s capacity to respond to pastoral and social needs.
A robust response at this moment will allow the Church in the United States to continue to be a strong partner in the rebuilding and restoring of the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, and to give critical and timely humanitarian aid now for Ukraine.
Let us ask Our Lady, Queen of Peace, to bring a swift end to the violence, and thank you for your support of the Subcommittee and its work. I am,
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Most Reverend Jeffrey M. Monforton
Chairman, Subcommittee on
Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe
(To this end, there is a collection basket in our usual place between the baptistery and the glass walls to the gathering space. Your donations can go there…)
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So, here is a link to the Pope’s Letter to the faithful for the Season of Lent. (As a teaser, I copied a few paragraphs for my pastor’s pen this upcoming weekend)
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So, by the time I finish this missive, the Disciple Maker Index will be about to go live (at 12:02am on Ash Wednesday) Please invest 10-15 minutes of your time to take the Index ONLINE. If you click the link below, it will take you directly to the anonymous survey.
https://portal.catholicleaders.org/d/y3226y
There are paper copies in the gathering space, to the right as you are leaving… You have until April 4th to take the DMI…
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Kudos to the ACTS Mission – St. Louis and the volunteers from our own and other parishes who led our second Men’s ACTS retreat… I am so edified by the energy and passion of those weekend retreats, and by the commitment that flows from them to serve the church.
The good news is that future SJM ACTS retreat – both for the men and the women, are OURS to do and staff. The bad news is that future retreats are OURS to do and staff… So, it will take a whole village to continue the growth of this program in our parish. (Women, mark your calendars for June 2-5, 2022, for the THIRD SJM Women’s ACTS retreat…)
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The deeper dive into the Sunday Scriptures– comes from Greg Warnusz – who in one of the more challenging commentaries I have ever read, dares to take our hypocrisy as an institution dead on… (warning, a few of his examples might make you squirm. They did for me… )
Commentators frequently remark that in the gospels, Jesus reserves his strongest criticism for hypocrites, the ones who talk the right talk but don’t walk it. The gospels’ most vivid image for hypocrites is Matthew 23:27, “Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of corruption.” (NJB translation) This is about Jesus’ enemies, and the evangelist’s use of it helps his community deal with their own enemies and external critics. Maybe Matthew wanted to continue to discredit the scribes and Pharisees, so his community would find them less authoritative.
But Sunday’s liturgical gospel reading is about hypocrites within the Christian community. Jesus calls “hypocrite” any member who, so piously, would rather remove a speck from your eye than remove a plank from his own. Luke the evangelist crafted this memory of a saying of Jesus to help members of his community be honest with each other and deal productively with the not-so-honest. So why did the community need this lesson?
Jesus’ larger teaching was a challenging revision of the Judaism of his day, and it was controversial. It’s not like his first followers all said “OMG! This is the reform of our religion that we’ve been waiting for!” Early Christianity attracted opponents, whole-hearted supporters, and lukewarm supporters. It attracted Jews and Gentiles, who brought their history of mutual wariness. It even attracted Romans, who, politically at least, were bedfellows of the Empire. And they all vied for control of the movement. Some of them were willing to misrepresent their intentions.
Clinging to one’s honor and avoiding shame
The problem of hypocrisy wasn’t limited to the Jesus movement. The cause of all of it was, arguably, in the ancient culture where Jesus and his followers lived. (Sunday’s reading from Sirach, a book meant for Diaspora Jews a century before Jesus, addresses a similar problem.) To my knowledge, the best popular teacher of cultural studies of the ancient Middle East was the late John J. Pilch of Georgetown University. As I mention here often, Pilch says that culture was based on clinging to one’s honor and avoiding shame. Furthermore, they believed that honor was in fixed supply, so that one person’s rise in honorable status was another person’s fall. Looking at it from the outside (we’re not really that far removed, but anyway …), it seems clearly set up and maintained by the powerful only for the benefit of the powerful. So of course people learned to dissemble; it was the only way to protect oneself, the only way to get ahead.
What a trap this all was for the “little people!” And how badly this weakened the community as a whole! No one could trust anyone else, except, maybe, in one’s narrowly defined family. How far this was from the Reign of God that Jesus announced! The community in this bondage could never become more fair or more honest.
Jesus’ understanding of God and of God’s love for people compelled him to denounce those elements of the system. The prophets before Jesus denounced the exploitation of the powerless. The musicians who entertained the kings and priests wove appeals for the poor into their psalms. Jesus saw the picture at its biggest, and challenged it so vigorously that he had to pay with his life. So in today’s passage, Jesus attacks one crippling, dehumanizing aspect of his culture, and of his future communities, the hypocrisy.
This is why we want our communities to be free of hypocrisy, and why the Good News in its fullness is our judge in this.
Let’s examine our conscience, not for sin but for temptation.
What forces might tempt a community to behave hypocritically or tolerate hypocrisy? Look back a few paragraphs; we’re not entirely above cultivation of our own honor and status, at the expense of the powerless, that characterized the ancient Middle East. For example:
- My own denomination famously tolerated pedophiles among its leaders because it would have been shameful to acknowledge the problem.
- In the Middle Ages, church leaders sometimes compromised themselves in deals with feudal lords and kings. This might have elevated the status of the church as an institution, but it silenced prophecy.
- In the same era, by some accounts, bishops started requiring their priests to be celibate, like monks already were, for the purpose of keeping church properties in the hands of the bishops rather than in the hands of the priests’ heirs. It’s complicated and only makes sense in the context of custom and law that are now unfamiliar to us. But the spiritual arguments for mandatory celibacy advanced since then conveniently ignore the decidedly material origins of the mandate.
- Most of us loyally live in the country whose founding document stated it was self-evident that all men are created equal. Yet that declaration was penned by a holder of slaves. It tormented his conscience, and his rough draft contained a thundering denunciation of the slave trade (“execrable commerce,” he called it), but the committee scratched that in order to keep the colonies most enmeshed in slavery within the fragile union. They knew there would be no great, rich, free America without those colonies and their slaves, and so they decided to tolerate defiance of their own highest principle.
- And now, states in the land of the free and home of the brave are fearfully prohibiting educators from free inquiry into those contradictions, lest it discomfort their fragile children.
- Several years ago my diocese established a big foundation to fund Catholic education for children. It seemed noble, but in a more recent 1-year span, the diocese closed a Catholic high school and a Catholic elementary school within my parish that served predominantly non-White, students and their families, including non-Catholics. The schools did run deficits, did get heavy subsidies, did lose enrollment, and did exact hefty tuition from families. It really may all have been unsupportable, even for the foundation. And the decisions may have been made with real regret. But it could also betray a series of private decisions, by lay Catholics who could donate more and church leaders who could solicit them more, to just direct resources elsewhere. We used to say we educate them not because they’re Catholic but because we’re Catholic. Let us not lightly resume saying so, lest we be hypocrites.
- And there’s the widespread hypocrisy of those who claim the rights of members of a free society, but don’t accept the responsibilities. The most famous examples are those who, in a survey, they answered “yes” to both of two questions:
“If accused of a crime, would you want a jury trial?”
and
“Have you ever connived to get out of serving on a jury?”
My own local faith community walks its talk, in part, by refusing to walk out of its historic neighborhood. We’re doing our best to become relevant to a demographic around us that’s not what we’re used to. We’re also lobbying the higher-ups so we don’t get closed, or restricted in the future by new leaders with different agendas. I started this message-series to help my community’s leaders ask the right questions. Pray for us, please.
Questions for community leaders
- What hypocrisy have you detected and tried to correct in yourself?
- What’s a hypocrisy that bugs you?
- How could your community correct a hypocrisy?
- Is there any hypocrisy in your social-media persona?
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Finally, the Song of the Day is Senzani Na (What have we done?) featuring Monde Mdingi and the Cape Town Youth Choir. It is a repetitive hymn – just two verses – but one that you can get lost into…
Blessings,
Fr. Bill