September 20, 2009

Through the Cycle

In a few weeks, I will have preached through the three years of the Sunday lectionary cycle. I started preaching on Sundays a week after I was ordained deacon three years ago this feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

Lest this induce in me any vanity, this morning in the sacristy one of our best lectors shared that as of today she is beginning her twelfth journey through the cycle, having just completed her thirty-third year as a lector for Sunday Mass. I thanked her for her good example, to which she replied,

"It's nothing special, I just stuck with it."

"That's exactly what I meant," I said.

4 comments:

Victor S E Moubarak said...

Congratulations and many happy returns.

God bless you.

Adoro said...

Great that she's put in that much time, am sure she learned a lot and proclaimed a lot! Awesome!

But...she's not a "Lector." She's a Reader. "Lector" is an installed position belonging to men ONLY according to the 1983 Code of Canon Law. But we (women) CAN claim the great privilege of being READERS, and this is something that we all have to clarify for people.

No one intends to be disobedient to this; it's only that the words haven't been clarified at the parish level.

Now that I've been through Canon law it drives me crazy, sorry for that. :-(

People think that because the Minor Orders were suppressed that the titles are now a free for all. They aren't.

An aside...those "Minor Orders" (Lector and Acolyte) are still installed positions in seminaries, but there is NOTHING in Canon Law that dispenses them from those positions, even if they leave the seminary and aren't ordained. Therefore they are obligated, those who have been installed, to ALWAYS be Lector or Acolyte at ANY Mass they attend, according to Canon Law.

Seriously, look it up. I doubt it happens much because it's a part of the Law that is often ignored under the false premise that it "doesn't apply anymore."

Scary. Our Church needs a LOT of catechesis, and even when we think we've been catechized, a bunch of stuff like THIS shows up!

Now, all that geekiness in terms aside, please encourage her to keep reading, for her own holiness and for ours!

Brother Charles said...

It's true indeed. When I was in studies, we told our director that we needed to be installed as lectors and then acolytes in advance of ordination to the diaconate. Our director didn't believe us, and told us that all of that didn't exist anymore. We had to produce photocopies of Ministeria quaedam to get him to believe us, and to assure our licit ordination as deacons.

ben in denver said...

I wonder, do you have a favorite year in the cycle? Is one easier to preach on than another? or do you think one year convey's the mysteries better than another?