June 16, 2002:

Father Owen's Homilies

Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 16, 2002 (Father’s Day as well)

The request of Archbishop Keleher that we send comments to him that he might consider at the recently completed meeting of bishops in Dallas came as a surprise to many of us. We lay persons are not used to being consulted. Years ago the Church Committee was a rubber stamp group. Father knew best and Father did everything that needed to be done in the parish. Someone described the role of the lay person as pray, pay and obey. The church structure, sometimes described as a pyramid, put the laity fat on the bottom looking up and having little to contribute but money, their hard work and their devotion.

Vatican Council II changed all that. The council did not look on the church as a pyramid but as the People of God with a voice. We have seen the beginning of the Pastoral Councils and Finance Committees, service as communion distributors, lectors, consultants, pastoral associates, chancellors of dioceses, retreat givers, those who make Marriage Encounter work! This participation is based on baptism. Baptism commissions all of us to be sharers in the Priesthood of the Laity. We are the Church and we offer praise and worship to God. Not all of us are ordained but we do offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice f the Mass together in our praise of God as a community of gathered Catholic Christians. Our first reading for this Sunday makes reference to a kingdom of priests, a holy people. St. Peter, in his First Letter, calls us a priestly people. There are signs that bring us together, e.g., our singing and responding together, the sign of peace, eating of the same bread and drinking of the one cup. We visit together sometimes before and always after Mass as those one in Jesus.

The Church likes us to increase this sign of unity in eating, in so far as we possibly can, of the same bread consecrated at the Mass we attend. I want to foster this in our parishes. So I would ask the Eucharistic Ministers to go to the tabernacle for hosts only when the ones consecrated at the Mass are depleted. The hosts in the tabernacle are for adoration of the Lord in the Eucharist and for the sick. We will try to achieve the ideal as best we can. This is done not just to be doing something different but that it may enhance our sense of unity as a Christian, Catholic people. We are witnesses to divine holiness not only as individuals but as members of a community of the baptized.