I ask your prayers this week for the members of our parish community who will receive the Sacrament of Confirmation from Bishop David O’Connell on Thursday. Eighty-seven students from our religious education program and thirty-five students from the school have prepared over the past eight years of faith formation and are now deemed ready to take this important step in their lives of faith. Unfortunately this means that many of them will now be checked-out and inactive in their lives of faith. Let our prayers then be that they and their families will grow in the life of faith. Confirmation is not a graduation from religious education but rather a step forward into full and active participation in the life of faith.
To enable this to be more realized in the future, we have decided to move the time for Confirmation from the spring of the eighth grade year to the fall of the ninth grade year. Many parishes in our area have already made this move. This gives us more time for formation, allows for some further personal maturity, and takes the sacrament away from all of the activities that surround the end of the eighth grade year. Therefore, the students currently in the seventh grade will not be confirmed until the fall of 2023.
After the bishop celebrates Confirmation here on Thursday he will move over to Our Lady of Fatima Parish at St. Joseph’s Church in Keyport for a diocesan-wide Mass asking Our Lady of Fatima to pray for peace in the world and especially in Ukraine. This past Friday, the Solemnity of the Annunciation, Pope Francis dedicated Russia and Ukraine to the intentions of The Immaculate Heart of Mary. In accord with the Holy Father’s intention, we said the prayer of consecration here at the 9:00 a.m. Mass and Bishop O’Connell celebrated a Mass at the Cathedral at 12:10 p.m.
As we have now seen the release of the pandemic restrictions in the school, and parish life has been in a more normal mode now for almost a year, we will be returning to the school students attending their monthly First Friday Mass at 9:00 a.m. instead of a separate 1:00 p.m. Mass. This allows the students to feel more a part of the parish celebrations, and it also allows the regular attendees at 9:00 a.m. to share Mass with the students. This begins this coming Friday, April 1st.
You may also be hearing about a permanent change in our diocese, actually throughout New Jersey, on the day for celebrating the Solemnity of the Ascension (a.k.a. Ascension Thursday). We held out as one of only a handful of states where the solemnity was celebrated as a Holy Day of Obligation on Thursday. The past two years, due to the pandemic restrictions, the bishops of our state transferred the celebration to the following Sunday, thereby replacing the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Now, after a poll of the priests and at a meeting of the New Jersey bishops last week, this now becomes a permanent transfer. Therefore, this year on May 26th we will celebrate Thursday the Sixth Week of Easter or the optional memorial of St. Philip Neri instead of the Ascension of Our Lord.
On Sunday May 29th we will celebrate the Ascension instead of the Seventh Sunday of Easter.
Spring is quickly advancing and we are yet a few weeks from Easter (April 17th). There is still time to focus on our Lenten commitment and journey.