Sermon for the Patronal Feast of the Assumption 2017 (St. Mary’s, Norwalk)

Sermon for the Patronal Feast of the Assumption 2017 in the presence of Bishop Frank Caggiano

by Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

It is a wonderful thing to see so many of the faithful members and friends of this parish church dedicated to the Mother of God, Mary most holy, here for this celebration of our patronal festival.  We come here as a community to celebrate our patronal festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This feast, like every feast of the Virgin Mary, makes all things real.  Her Assumption into heaven body and soul gives us hope, a sure hope, that with faith in her Son as our Savior and in his bodily resurrection, we too, after our death,  will be with Our Lady and all the Saints in our totality, body and soul forever.   And we are celebrating our patronal feast in the presence of our Bishop who is the spiritual head of this parish community as he is the spiritual head of all parish communities in the diocese of Bridgeport.

One of the seminal events in my life that led me to the Catholic Church was while struggling through the Greek of St. Ignatius of Antioch in the Bodleian library in Oxford, reading his letter to the Romans, I became intensely aware of the role of the bishop in the early Church in the person of St. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom in Rome:  where the bishop is, there is Jesus Christ and his Church.  And Ignatius said this not because he was imitating his Lord and Savior by martyrdom in Rome.  Or I should say, not merely because of this.  It is the very office of the bishop that is the bearer of the living presence of Christ in His Church. The bishop, the overseer, is the successor the apostles, and this not merely in a list of names, although the list is vitally important.  The bishop is part of and the bearer of the Tradition of the Church with a capital T. It is not merely that the bishop personifies Jesus Christ for his flock, for this personification is not merely functional, but is by virtue of his ordination, his place in the ordo from the apostles makes him the embodiment of the Tradition of the Catholic Church founded by Christ and the re-presentation of Jesus Christ to his flock.

This understanding of the bishop in the Church is quite different from the modern conception of the bishop as the CEO of a very old and large corporation.  The sacramentality of the bishop among his flock has been severely eroded in the past century.  This has had serious consequences for the life of the Church, for if the living symbol of the Tradition of the Church is now seen in purely functional terms, then the Tradition itself is in danger of being obscured to the point of being lost for all practical purposes. Most Catholics today have little understanding of what the Catholic Tradition is.  They do not know that Tradition precedes Scripture and includes Scripture.  Tradition begins with the Apostles and what they taught based on what they saw and heard and experienced as the chosen disciples of Jesus Christ.  The Catholic Church has always understood that while the Scriptures are fundamental to the Christian faith, they cannot be isolated from the Tradition that bore them and made them the living Word of God by situating them in the living teaching of the Church throughout two millennia.

What has happened, especially in the last fifty years, is a forgetting of Catholic Tradition by Catholics both clerical and lay.  When this happened, then everything is up for grabs, the clergy try to invent new ways of doing things that often mimic the post-Christian culture that surrounds us, and the people also look to the culture that surrounds them to make sense of their faith.  I am always somewhat amused at the attempt to bring back young people to the Church by what I remember in my Protestant youth as pumping them full of Jesus, complete with exhortations and music that is designed to bring on an emotional high, all this in the hope of establishing a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ that is real and lasting.

But it is impossible to have this real and lasting relationship to Jesus Christ without living within the Tradition of the Church, the living Tradition that is empowered by the Holy Spirit in every age.  But the Tradition is never general: it is specific and concrete in terms of doctrine, in terms of what it means to live a Catholic life, in terms of sacred art and sacred music, in terms of relationship to the world.  To ask a young man or woman to understand what the Catholic faith is and how it is lived without placing him or herself within the Tradition is like asking someone to sing a song without knowing what music is.

Priests ask me how we are able to get so many altar servers who serve on a regular basis.  I answer quite simply:  because once they see and hear for themselves the Tradition, as embodied in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, then they want to be part of this and it becomes the way they look at their lives and their relationship to the world around them.  Catholic Tradition is deeply and wonderfully attractive to young people, but only if they see it, hear it, experience it for themselves.  And there is no better place to experience it than in the Traditional Roman Mass celebrated in solemn form, where time and space open up to eternity itself and where gesture and music and glance and bow and sound and smell all point to the real presence of Mary, the Saints, those we have loved and see no more, and above all the Real Presence of Jesus Christ himself.

Bishop Frank:  we are blessed to have you with us on this special day in this special parish of St. Mary’s.  You are Christ among us today in a real way.  And our love for Christ spills over into our love for you.  May you always remember who you are in the deepest sense and may you have the courage to bring Holy Tradition to all of your flock so that they may know and love more deeply our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.