-
March 4, 2016This week we continue our series of reflections on the Building Prayer; we have now reached the heart of our prayer, which describes our mission as a parish and the purpose for which we are building a new church.
"Give us generous hearts and renew our souls,
so that our new Church as well as our lives
may reflect the doctrine,
life and worship of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
and that we may transmit to every generation
all that the Catholic Church is and believes."
The mission of our parish is to save souls, beginning with our own. And so we cannot only renew our church building in order to accomplish the mission of our parish; we must be renewed ourselves. Our lives must primarily reflect “all that the Catholic Church is and believes” in order to transmit it to others, which is the next part of our prayer: having encountered Jesus Christ ourselves, we are called to bring others to that same encounter. But our call to evangelization is firmly rooted in the foundation of what we received from the magisterial tradition of the Church, all the way back to the Apostles and Christ Himself. We have drawn again from the documents of the Second Vatican Council for the most complete expression of this vocation within our prayer:
“Therefore the Apostles, handing on what they themselves had received, warn the faithful to hold fast to the traditions which they have learned either by word of mouth or by letter (see 2 Thess. 2:15), and to fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all (see Jude 1:3). Now what was handed on by the Apostles includes everything which contributes toward the holiness of life and increase in faith of the peoples of God; and so the Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes” (Dei Verbum, 8).
The Council Fathers have effectively given us a "road map" of evangelization, the way in which we are to fulfill our mission: 1) By teaching the authentic truths of our Faith, 2) By living out the moral and sacramental life of the Church, 3) By worshiping God in the liturgy, the "source and summit of the Christian life" (cf. Lumen Gentium, 11). We pray that we may faithfully follow this road map, and that our new church, which participates in our mission, may similarly reflect "all that the Catholic church is and believes" for our salvation and that of others.
