Parish priests "utterly useless" without public sacraments
Transcription of a portion of homily given by Fr. Eric Fedewa - March 30, 2020
“You know, in this time, and I thank the Lord, we are still able hear confessions and absolve. If we weren’t able to do that, since we are not able to distribute the Eucharist unless someone is dying, we would be utterly useless as priests! Yes, we celebrate Mass privately, by live-streaming a Mass, which is a good thing to do, doesn’t come close to people being able to go to Mass and to receive the Holy Eucharist. We should never become satisfied, yes, I appreciate you are grateful I do this and all these other priests do it, but don’t allow that to make you satisfied.
We need to pray. We need to pray we have access to all the sacraments, because that is the purpose of the Church. The whole purpose of the Church is to bring souls to heaven and if the Church isn’t doing that by withholding certain sacraments, then that is not what we need to be doing. So, we need to pray that this situation changes, that this virus goes away, so that the Church can fully function, fulfill her task. Because there are some dioceses, where Bishops are telling, and they don’t have a right to do this, they are telling the priests to stay isolated, to not be publicly available to anyone! Probably out of fear of those priests getting sick themselves.
As we have seen in the past, there are various saints who are emulated because of their self-sacrifice during the various plagues that have happened, The plague, there wasn’t just one plague, in history, there were multiple ones. And some of those saints got it themselves, many of them didn’t, though. The point is our eternal life is the most important of all. Yes, we take precautions. Yes, we take value and we do what we can to support our physical life, but at the expense of our spiritual life that is not what we are called to do.
That’s why if a government (which they are not telling us) even if a government were to tell us not to have Mass or hear confessions, we would have to disobey that. Because the Church’s whole purpose would be completely removed if we weren’t able to bring the sacraments to the people. So please pray so (although thank God for technology) and thankfully we can have these live-streaming Masses, pray that is not a long term solution, no matter how long this situation lasts and that we have inventive ways that we are able to bring all the sacraments to the people.”
“You know, in this time, and I thank the Lord, we are still able hear confessions and absolve. If we weren’t able to do that, since we are not able to distribute the Eucharist unless someone is dying, we would be utterly useless as priests! Yes, we celebrate Mass privately, by live-streaming a Mass, which is a good thing to do, doesn’t come close to people being able to go to Mass and to receive the Holy Eucharist. We should never become satisfied, yes, I appreciate you are grateful I do this and all these other priests do it, but don’t allow that to make you satisfied.
We need to pray. We need to pray we have access to all the sacraments, because that is the purpose of the Church. The whole purpose of the Church is to bring souls to heaven and if the Church isn’t doing that by withholding certain sacraments, then that is not what we need to be doing. So, we need to pray that this situation changes, that this virus goes away, so that the Church can fully function, fulfill her task. Because there are some dioceses, where Bishops are telling, and they don’t have a right to do this, they are telling the priests to stay isolated, to not be publicly available to anyone! Probably out of fear of those priests getting sick themselves.
As we have seen in the past, there are various saints who are emulated because of their self-sacrifice during the various plagues that have happened, The plague, there wasn’t just one plague, in history, there were multiple ones. And some of those saints got it themselves, many of them didn’t, though. The point is our eternal life is the most important of all. Yes, we take precautions. Yes, we take value and we do what we can to support our physical life, but at the expense of our spiritual life that is not what we are called to do.
That’s why if a government (which they are not telling us) even if a government were to tell us not to have Mass or hear confessions, we would have to disobey that. Because the Church’s whole purpose would be completely removed if we weren’t able to bring the sacraments to the people. So please pray so (although thank God for technology) and thankfully we can have these live-streaming Masses, pray that is not a long term solution, no matter how long this situation lasts and that we have inventive ways that we are able to bring all the sacraments to the people.”