Dear Friends in Christ,
As we continue in the year of Eucharistic Revival for the whole of the Catholic Church in the United States, we also want to focus on liturgical renewal in our parish. The time of the pandemic caused changes to many of our well-established customs as Catholics. We cannot underestimate the value of habits that we have formed. For example: the habit of attending Mass in person each Sunday, the habit of going to confession on a regular basis, the habit of blessing ourselves with holy water to recall our baptism as we enter into the church, and so on.
One way that the Church speaks about the value of habit is with this brief, Latin phrase: lex orandi, lex credendi. Literally translated this means: the law of praying is the law of believing. In other words, the way in which we celebrate the liturgy, pray the prayers, proclaim the Word of God, receive the Holy Eucharist indicate to us what we really believe about the mysteries that we are celebrating. Pope Francis recently wrote about this reality in a way that should be familiar to all of us:
“Still thinking about how the Liturgy forms us, another decisive question is the education necessary to be able to acquire the interior attitude that will let us use and understand liturgical symbols. Let me express it in a simple way. I have in mind parents, or even more perhaps, grandparents, but also our pastors and catechists. Many of us learned the power of the gestures of the liturgy from them, as, for example, the sign of the cross, kneeling, the formulas of our faith. Perhaps we do not have an actual memory of such learning, but we can easily imagine the gesture of a larger hand taking the little hand of a child and accompanying it slowly in tracing across the body for the first time the sign of our salvation. Words accompany the movement, these also said slowly, almost as if wanting to take possession of every instant of the gesture, to take possession of the whole body: “In the name of the Father… and of the Son… and of the Holy Spirit…. Amen.” And then the hand of the child is left alone, and it is watched repeating it all alone, with help ready nearby if need be. But that gesture is now consigned, like a habit that will grow with Him, imparting to it a meaning that only the Spirit knows how. From that moment forward that gesture, its symbolic force, is ours, it belongs to us; or better said, we belong to it. It gives us form. We are formed by it. Not many discourses are needed here. It is not necessary to have understood everything in that gesture. What is needed is being small, both in consigning it and in receiving it. The rest is the work of the Spirit. In this way we are initiated into symbolic language. We cannot let ourselves be robbed of such richness. Growing up we will have more ways of being able to understand, but always on the condition of remaining little ones” (Desiderio Desideravi, 47).
As we gather together in church to pray – or even as you gather together to pray at home with your families and children – please remember that the way we pray really does say something to us about what we really believe.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Fr. Thomas J. Byrne