Dear Friends,
I pray you and your families are safe and healthy. It’s so good to see many of you come back to Sunday Mass. With the surge in COVID we are going through as of late, we certainly understand if you are staying home until a vaccine is made widely available. Please remember that option is completely okay, especially since the Archbishop continues to dispense us from the obligation to attend Mass until after the pandemic is over.
A feature of American life that is good, but can be overemphasized in this pandemic or outside of it is radical individualism. It’s important to remind ourselves that a key component of Catholic Social Teaching is maintaining the common good. With the pandemic evolving around us, we need to consider the importance of the common good over a concept of unbridled individual desire in which whatever one desires, regardless of its effect on the greater community, one pursues. The individual decisions about your children attending an event with his or her friends, or your family’s decision to participate in social gatherings may indeed infect far more people than you can imagine. Especially vulnerable are the elderly, with whom we must protect since they are our sacred elders in our community; they are our moms and dads, our grandparents, aunts and uncles.
But because of the power of the Cross, in each and every hopeless situation we find ourselves in there is always a silver lining!
Once in ninth grade science, I had a semester long project called “Sludge.” We had to use various chemical tests to find out what was in the sludge. One of the tests involved boiling the liquid and then finding any precipitate that would be left over and analyzing it. COVID has been like a fire boiling the test tube filled with our hectic daily lives before COVID, revealing the “precipitate” of what’s been suspended in the ambient water we’ve been drinking all along, but were not so much aware. That precipitate is radical individualism without regard for the common good.
St. Paul VI and the Bishops at Vatican II taught us, “The social nature of man shows that there is an interdependence between personal betterment and the improvement of society.” (Gaudium et Spes). And to quote Pope St. John XXIII, “Individual citizens and intermediate groups are obliged to make their specific contributions to the common welfare. One of the chief consequences of this is that they must bring their own interests into harmony with the needs of the community….” (Pacem in Terris).
For the remainder of the pandemic, please make choices that benefit the entire community and not merely for your own family.
Year of St. Joseph
Check out the article in the Catholic Spirit from November 5. Archbishop has placed the Synod under the patronage of St. Joseph. The year begins December 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of the United States of America.
Day of Fasting and Prayer to end the Sin of Racism: December 2 Stay tuned for more details.
In Christ,
Fr. Rolf Tollefson