Pastor
~ On this Pentecost Sunday, the birthday of the Church, I want to tell you that the Archbishop of St. Louis has asked me to serve the Church by taking another assignment. Not a new assignment, an old assignment really, another assignment actually. In addition to remaining the pastor of St. Margaret of Scotland Parish, the Archbishop has asked me to also be the pastor of St. Pius V Parish. After the Archbishop shared with me his reasons for wanting me to take this additional assignment, and having a conversation about what that would mean, in obedience to the Archbishop’s request, I said yes. As you may know, I was previously the Pastor of St. Pius, and it is a community that I know very well and love very much. So, as of this July 1, I will be the pastor of both St. Margaret of Scotland and St. Pius V. They will remain two distinct parishes. I will not be moving from St. Margaret of Scotland. I hope that another priest will be living at St. Pius V, assisting with Masses and parish life. As to all your other questions, the answer is “I don’t know.” I don’t know how this will work. I don’t know what my schedule will be. I don’t know how this will affect our Mass schedule or parish life here or there. Yet, I have the faith and the confidence that all things will work together for good. The Holy Spirit is in charge of the Church, as we celebrate today, and I trust that she will show the way forward.
One of the things this means for St. Margaret of Scotland is that I intend to reconstitute a Parish Pastoral Council. You may or may not know that we have not had an active Parish Council since before I became pastor. During COVID, it went on hiatus, and I did not put any effort into reorganizing it during these years. But that time has come, especially since my presence here will be more limited moving forward. It is certainly time that the members of this parish share the responsibility of setting the direction and vision for our parish.
You see, for a long stretch of our Church history, and especially in the centuries between the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council, the Church was identified almost exclusively with her ordained ministers. The priest spoke; the people listened. The priest acted; the people watched. The priest decided; the people accepted. The laity were thought of as the recipients of the Church’s life rather than its bearers.
The Second Vatican Council returned to a deeper biblical and patristic image: the Church is the People of God. If you have been paying attention to the Prayer of the Faithful that we offer every Sunday, in the time that I have been here as pastor, the first petition is almost always, “For the Church, the People of God”. This has been intentional on my part! The Church as the People of God is a premier image directly from the Second Vatican Council. Before she is an institution or hierarchy or canonical society, the Church is a people – a baptized people, anointed, consecrated, every one of them, into the threefold office of Christ as priest, prophet, and king. In Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II constitution on the Church, the chapter on the People of God is placed before the chapter on the hierarchy precisely to teach us that the Church is not first clergy and then everyone else. No, the Church is first the baptized, among whom some are ordained for service.
Pope Francis, of happy memory, gave this conciliar vision a name that unsettled some folks: synodality. The word simply means “walking together.” It names a Church where the pastor walks with his people, in which the people are heard before decisions are made, in which the Spirit is sought in the listening of the whole Body and not only in the office of a few. To use the late Holy Father’s most piercing phrase, every baptized member of the Church is co-responsible for her mission. That is what I hope our new Council will be. Our parish listening together, walking together, praying together. I am not exactly sure what that looks like yet, but I am excited to find out. Stay tuned!
You see, the risen Lord Jesus does not entrust his mission to a group of clerics. No, he entrusts it to a people. The eleven apostles in that Upper Room at Pentecost are the first witnesses of a mission that will be extended, in the Holy Spirit, to every baptized woman and man until the end of the age. The ones who received the Holy Spirit on that first Pentecost will be joined within a generation by Phoebe the deacon, by Priscilla the teacher, by Lydia who hosted the church in her house, and countless others named and unnamed in the Scriptures and throughout history.
To think that the Church is only the clergy is to misread the feast we celebrate today. To tell the laity that their place is silence is to deny the Spirit who at Pentecost descended upon all of them – men and women, young and old – in the upper room.
If you are looking for Jesus in these difficult days and trying times, know this: He has gone into the very depths of his Body – into the heart of every one of us who is willing to walk together, in the Spirit, toward the day of his return.
The work is here. The mission is ours. All of ours. So, do not fear that St. Margaret and St. Pius will be sharing a pastor. The work of the Church is not just the work of a pastor. It is your work, my work, our work, and together we will move forward in faith, relying on God’s providence, trusting in the Lord Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
