From the Friars: Pater Noster

On Ash Wednesday we entered the desert with Jesus for 40 days, and now Holy Week is upon us. A central moment of Our Lord’s Passion is during His agony in the garden when He fully accepts the Cross, “Abba, Father, …not my will but yours be done.” (Mk 14:36) Here our redemption is accomplished and here is the heart of perfect worship of God Our Father.

The eternal plan of God is to unite all things in Christ. (Eph 1:10) Our union with Him consists of joining our own complete surrender of will, our lives, everything we have and are, with that of Jesus to the Father. When Our Lord taught us how to pray, He was giving us words to express what is hopefully the interior reality of our soul. “Our Father, …hallowed be the Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” The grace of these most holy of days is the deepening of our transformation in Christ.

Only in Jesus, and by the power of His Spirit, will the bitter divisions and hatreds we see all around us be overcome. To express this oneness that we are striving for, and to help make it more authentic, I have asked our choirs to sing the Our Father in Latin at the Sunday Masses during the Easter Season. Latin is the common language of worship in the Roman Rite and was specifically required by the Second Vatican Council to be retained in the liturgy.

How beautiful when all the various shrine communities are together that we can pray this most important pray using the same words. The traditional Gregorian Chant that we will use has been sung for over a thousand years in the Church. Hence, we will unite our voices with our ancestors who came from so many different places and spoke many different languages, but all sang this same prayer together in the Heart of Christ.

If the thought of more Latin is not appealing to you, I only ask that you be open to the possibility that you will come to appreciate it as so many have. Come Pentecost please let me know if you still feel the same way.

Let us strive to pray, and live, from the heart these sacred words: Pater Noster…

–Fr. Peter