Fr. Schrader to offer sung Mass in Latin June 28 in Westphalia

Bishop McKnight to lead prayerful Act of Reparation

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To celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Father Dylan Schrader will offer Mass in the Extraordinary Form at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 28, in St. Joseph Church in Westphalia.

The Mass will be sung in Latin, using the ritual form of 1962.

Bishop W. Shawn McKnight plans to attend and lead the praying of the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

All are welcome to take part in this celebration. Worship aids will be provided.

Sacred Heart

Throughout the Bible, God uses the heart as a metaphor for love and compassion for the people He created.

That love took on human flesh in Jesus’s Incarnation and in every beat of His Most Sacred Heart.

“God loves us with a human heart!” said Father Dylan Schrader, pastor of St. Brendan parish in Mexico. “In Jesus, He loves us not only as God but also as man. The heart is the center of love, it’s the center of choosing and willing the good of another.”

Jesus’s heart, pierced on the cross for humanity’s sins, has been recognized since the earliest days of the Church as a vessel for salvation and an object of devotion.

That devotion expanded following Jesus’s appearance and personal revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the late 1600s.

Pope Pius XI, who led the Church from 1922-39, called for a prayerful Act of Reparation be offered each year for all sins and affronts committed against the Sacred Heart.

“It’s an expression of sorrow for having offended the Heart of Jesus,” said Fr. Schrader. “And we’re also praying for the salvation of the Church and of the whole world.”

He believes these prayers are particularly appropriate at this moment in history.

“The Church is suffering a lot because of our own sins,” he said. “Jesus looks at us, and His Sacred Heart is filled with pity. He wants what’s better for us.”

Fr. Schrader emphasized that the only way to atone for and overcome sin is though love.

“So if were looking at the sins of people in the Church at every level, what we need is love,” the priest stated. “It’s the only cure, the only remedy for sins.”

“We can’t fix the Church just by trying harder,” he said. “We need to experience the love of Jesus. And God’s love in the human form is manifest in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”

 

“Something God does”

Fr. Schrader, who is Bishop McKnight’s delegate for Mass in the Extraordinary Form, offers Mass in Latin one Sunday afternoon per month.

He offered a sung High Mass in Latin in Jefferson City for the Feast of the Exultation of the Cross last September.

About 250 people attended.

“It was life-changing!” Derek Ross stated on the diocese’s Facebook page.

Other descriptions included “sacred,” “transcendent,” “ancient,” “ethereal,” “otherworldly,” “precise,” “contemplative,” “deliberate” and “bittersweet like the smoldering incense.”

Fr. Schrader said St. Joseph Church in Westphalia, built in 1848 with additions completed in 1883, is beautiful and ideally suited for Mass in the Extraordinary Form.

It’s also within driving distance of a large portion of this diocese.

He noted that Masses will be celebrated that day throughout the diocese in the Ordinary Form in English.

“But this is an opportunity for us to offer something different and out of the ordinary,” he said.

For him, offering Mass in the Extraordinary Form offers “a keener sense of the Priesthood as being one that mediates between God and the people.”

“And it highlights that the Mass is a solemn sacrifice,” he said.

It clarifies for him that the Mass is not something the priest or the congregation does, “but is something that God does.”

It presents a sense of transcendence.

“With all the ceremonies and ritual actions, it becomes clear that this is not something that the community just invented for itself,” he said. “It’s something we have received, that has been handed down to us through the Apostolic Tradition of the Church.”

Nonetheless, Fr. Schrader noted, both forms of the Mass are equally licit and legitimate.

“It is two different forms of the same rite,” he said.

Extraordinary Form

In 2007, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI addressed the diversity of liturgical expression within the Latin Church.

In “Summorum Pontificum,” a personal edict (known as a motu proprio), he affirmed that the Roman Rite of the Church has multiple expressions, among which are an “Ordinary Form” (the way of celebrating Mass in its revised form following The Second Vatican Council) and an “Extraordinary Form” (the way of celebrating Mass in 1962, prior to Vatican II).

“Pope Benedict saw these forms as different ways of celebrating the same faith,” said Fr. Schrader.

Pope Benedict, who resigned from the papacy in 2013, wrote in his letter accompanying “Summorum Pontificum”: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

“It behooves all of us,” he continued, “to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

Today, many of the faithful, including a significant number of young people, are interested in experiencing traditional elements of the Roman Rite, such as those highlighted in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

Fr. Schrader said that it is not a desire for division, nor is it a rejection of legitimate developments “but is instead an appreciation of our Roman liturgical heritage.”

He pointed to Pope Emeritus Benedict’s statement: “There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the Liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture.”

Fr. Schrader believes the celebration on June 28 will be an opportunity for old and young, for those who are familiar with the Extraordinary Form and for those who are taking part in it for the first time, to pray the Mass together and draw from the vast Catholic treasury “what is old and what is new” (Matthew 13:52).

A path to purification

Fr. Schrader said he is grateful to Father Anthony Viviano, pastor of St. Joseph parish in Westphalia and St. Anthony of Padua parish in Folk, for allowing the Mass to be offered in the Westphalia Church.

He’s also thankful to the volunteers who will sing in the choir and serve at the altar.

He noted that there is a plenary indulgence attached to praying the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart.

A plenary indulgence is a full remission of the temporal chastisement due to sin that has already been forgiven by God.

While all people on earth, in heaven and in purgatory owe their salvation to the saving grace of Jesus, and He alone has the power to forgive sins, the consequences of sin remain.

The Church recognizes that sin has two distinct consequences: destruction of a person’s communion with God, and an unhealthy attachment to things of this earth.

The relationship with God is made new by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and His loving, merciful grace given through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

But the unhealthy attachment to earthly things must be purified in this life or after death.

“This purification frees one from what is called the ‘temporal punishment’ of sin,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states in paragraph 1473. “... A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.”

That weekend following the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, all parishes in the diocese will offer Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, patroness of the diocese.

“Her Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus go right together,” Fr. Schrader noted.

Some of the information in this article came from Catholic News Service and the “In defense of the Roman Catholic Church” website.

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