Each year on the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, children in Rome gather with their families in St. Peter’s Square for Benedizione dei Bambinelli, bringing with them the Christ Child figurine from their family’s home crèche. At the noon Angelus, the Pope blesses the children, their families, and the figurines they have brought. This Sunday we will unite our hearts to the Holy Father’s and the children and families gathered with him and bless our own Bambinelli. Bring your Christ Child figurine to be blessed during Mass this Sunday.
RSVP for Wednesday School: 12 December 2018
Joining us for Wednesday School this week? Please RSVP using the form below so that we may adequately prepare. Thanks!
NB: This will be the last Wednesday School of the semester - we will resume on 16 January 2019!
Corpus Christi Updates: Immaculate Conception and the Second Sunday of Advent
Click the image for updates from Corpus Christi Catholic Community for this week.
Letter from Fr. Allen - December 7, 2018
+JMJ+
Dear Friends,
[Here] you will see a short video about the music of Advent featuring Dr. Sara Pecknold, a professor of sacred music at the Catholic University of America. I encourage you to watch. Advent features some of the Church's most beautiful and poignant music, songs filled with longing and expectation. This Sunday we will sing one of my own favorite Advent hymns: Conditor alme siderum. It is a Latin hymn dating back to the 7th century, and in the Breviary it is assigned to be sung at Vespers during Advent. We know it in its English translation by great Oxford Movement hymn writer John Mason Neal, "Creator of the stars of night." This ancient hymn enfolds within itself all of salvation history, from our Lord's first coming in great humility -
Thou cam’st, the Bridegroom of the bride,
As drew the world to evening-tide;
Proceeding from a virgin shrine,
The spotless victim all divine.
To that great day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty -
O Thou whose coming is with dread
To judge and doom the quick and dead,
Preserve us, while we dwell below,
From every insult of the foe.
Advent calls us to keep both these comings of the Lord in our minds and in our hearts, so that we may, redeemed and renewed by his first coming, then "without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing" (as we pray in the Advent preface) at his second.
Saturday, of course, we take a step out of Advent to celebrate the beautiful Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. This will be a special day in the life our community as we receive a new family, the Carlsons, into the full communion the Catholic Church. This Mass will also inaugurate a new ministry for girls, the Guild of St. Margaret Clitherow. This will be an opportunity for the girls to meet and grow together in their faith and love for the Lord, but the most visible manifestation of this ministry will be the girls' participation in leading Marian devotions at Mass on appropriate feast days. The collect for St Margaret Clitherow asks God to "raise up in our day women of courage and resource to care for thy household the Church," and that exactly is our hope for what God will accomplish in and through the members of this new guild.
God bless you,
Fr Allen
Video: Dr. Sara Pecknold on Advent Music
In this 2-minute video from Catholic News Service, the choir at St. John the Beloved in McLean, Virginia, performs O Come, O Come Emmanuel as Dr. Sara Pecknold, a professor at Catholic University of America in Washington, explains why music has a special place within the season of Advent.
Bambinelli Sunday
Each year on the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, children in Rome gather with their families in St. Peter’s Square for Benedizione dei Bambinelli, bringing with them the Christ Child figurine from their family’s home crèche. At the noon Angelus, the Pope blesses the children, their families, and the figurines they have brought. On the Third Sunday of Advent we will unite our hearts to the Holy Father’s and the children and families gathered with him and bless our own Bambinelli. Bring your Christ Child figurine to be blessed during Mass that day.
Lighting of Advent Wreath Candles: The Second Sunday of Advent
Lighting of Advent Wreath Candles: The Second Sunday of Advent
All make the Sign of the Cross as the leader begins:
℣ +Our help is in the name of the Lord.
℟ Who hath made heaven and earth.
The following Scripture is read: Isaiah 11.1-10
THERE shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist, and faithfulness the girdle of his loins. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Light the first and second purple candles in order. With hands joined, the leader prays:
STIR up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of thine Only-Begotten Son: that through his advent we may be worthy to serve thee with purified minds; through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. ℟ Amen.
The devotion may conclude with a verse from "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel":
O come, thou Branch of Jesse’s tree, free them from Satan’s tyranny
that trust thy mighty power to save, and give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.
Immaculate Conception and Advent II in 2018
In 2018, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception falls on a Saturday. This is a holy day of obligation for the Ordinariate communities in the United States. Since it is the patronal feast of the United States, is not abrogated when it falls on a Saturday. Catholics have two obligations to fulfill on this weekend -- the holy day and Sunday. Using the chart below, one blue obligation and one violet obligation must each be fulfilled separately. Both obligations can be fulfilled on Saturday, just not both at the same Mass, and only in the times indicated.
The Saturday evening celebration should be the Mass of the Second Sunday of Advent, according to the Table of Precedence. For the Saturday evening Mass, either obligation can be fulfilled, regardless of the liturgical celebration.
Holy Mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception will be offered at St. Mary's at the following times:
6.00PM Friday, 7 December (Roman Missal)
9.00AM Saturday, 8 December (Divine Worship), with the Rite of Reception into Full Communion of the Carlson Family, the Sacrament of Confirmation, and First Communions. Girls are invited to wear white dresses and bring flowers for Mary to this Mass. See this post for more information.
Corpus Christi Updates: The First Sunday of Advent
Click the image for updates from Corpus Christi Catholic Community for this week.
Letter from Fr. Allen - November 29, 2018
+JMJ+
Dear Friends,
This Sunday, difficult as it is to believe, is the first Sunday of Advent, and the wheel of our annual cycle of devotion will turn one more time, and the rush of Christmas preparations, secular and sacred and those two jumbled together, is suddenly upon us.
"Time flies!", we shout. "Where does the time go?", we ask. That sensation we all share of time rushing past - or even, perhaps when we were children longing for Christmas morning, of time so-slowly creeping past - is a sign to us, even a timely Advent-ish reminder, that though we dwell in time, we are never quite at home in time. (Here, by the way, is my favorite attempt to declare peace with time's passing, which turns, inevitably, melancholic: Sandy Denny's beautiful song with Fairport Convention, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" - I also like Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs brilliant cover.)
That sense of dislocation is an especially appropriate and helpful in Advent. Jesus is coming; history is either rushing or crawling toward its end, depending upon your perspective. As we will pray in Sunday's collect: as once he "came to visit us in great humility... he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead." Our unease with time reminds us that we share with aged Simeon his longing and expectation for Israel's consolation, that this world as it is is not as it ought to be, not what God will one great day remake it to be, when his kingdom is fully come: "a kingdom of truth and life; a kingdom of grace and holiness; a kingdom of peace, of love, and righteousness," as we prayed at last Sunday's Mass of Christ the King. C.S. Lewis wrote of our odd and unsettled to time's passing this way:
Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it--how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.
Time flies, time creeps, but Advent is a privileged time for turning again to the Lord, who is our consolation and our hope, who says, “Surely I am coming soon." To which our patient and expectant keeping of Advent embodies our reply: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"
God bless you and grant you a watchful Advent,
Fr Allen