Brown Scapular
I will regularly have people come up to me after Mass and ask me to bless a scapular for them. Most of the time, however, I refuse. Why?
Historically, scapulars are mini religious habits. They are a joining to and participation in the spirituality of a specific religious order. They are not merely devotional objects, like a crucifix necklace or a Rosary bracelet. In fact, the first time someone puts on a scapular I am required to enroll them in the scapular – I cannot merely bless it – and up until the last century it was required that a priest of that specific religious community be the one to enroll a person.
I will also push people to tell me a little bit about the spirituality of the religious order to which they are uniting themselves. (The brown scapular, the most common one, is a Carmelite scapular.) If they cannot, I ask them to go home and read up on that order before I am willing to enroll them.
If you are considering donning the brown scapular, or even if you have already been enrolled, I strongly encourage you to purchase this book written by the Carmelites that explains in great detail the history and spirituality of the brown scapular. https://www.icspublications.org/products/catechesis-and-ritual-for-the-scapular-of-our-lady-of-mount-carmel
Musings on Partners in the Gospel
First, thank you to everyone who has assisted with all of our Listening Sessions! Our PFAC members especially have attended 3 – 5 listening sessions each over the last two weeks, which is a huge time commitment. I am deeply grateful!
Now, last week a parishioner asked me a very insightful question, namely, how can we claim that the Listening Sessions are helping us develop a 25 to 50-year plan when all of us have experienced a new Pastor coming in and reprioritizing everything that the previous Pastor had prioritized?
In a very real sense, he is correct. If the only thing that comes out of the Listening Sessions is, for example, a desire to hire a North County youth minister and a push for more small faith sharing groups, then we are really only talking about a 5- maybe 10-year plan. Questions about staffing and programming are necessarily short-term questions, since society and pastoral leadership often change quickly. And, unfortunately, the questions in the Archdiocesan process up until now have had a tendency to feel like short-term questions.
The 25- to 50-year plan comes with execution. Let’s say the overall impact of the Listening Sessions is that we need more youth-focused staff. Well, if you read the viability report, you’ll see that more staff is not an option because our county is $2 million behind in our rainy-day funds and needs to spend $90,000 more each year to keep up with our buildings. If we want more staff, that means reducing maintenance costs which means reducing the number of churches and campuses. This is ultimately the 25- to 50-year choice: do we maintain seven churches at the expense of minimal programming, or do we greatly expand programming by trying to consolidate into fewer churches?
The point of the Listening Sessions is to help us determine what kind of community we want to be and what our deepest values are. Once these are established, we can then ask the hard questions of what sacrifices need to be made to get there.
Finally, as a side note, I just mentioned church closures, so I can already hear some of our parishioners saying, “See! He finally admitted it. That’s what this whole thing is about, the Archbishop has already told him what to do, and none of this process matters.” No. Stop. I have no hidden agenda and no decisions have been made. Church closures are a real possibility, but the point of the Partners in the Gospel process is to make the choice crystal clear and to give our community the ability to discern that choice together. We may very well conclude that we need to maintain all seven of our churches or we may make a different decision. It is my job to lay out for our community all of the possibilities, what the pros and cons are of each possibility, and to lead them in the process of discerning a final choice. These Listening Sessions help us determine what possibilities to analyze and present for the final discernment.
Fr. Moore 