VIEW A PHOTO ALBUM FROM THE MEMORIAL MASS

by Christopher Gaul
special to paulist.org

PHOTO ALBUM

Launch photo album from the memorial Mass

The vision and mission of Paulist founder Father Isaac Thomas Hecker and Paulist history was invoked as the Paulist family came together Friday afternoon, June 20, for a Memorial Mass in honor of deceased members of the 150-year-old order held in the Pryzbyla Center of The Catholic University of America.

At the beginning of the liturgy, the congregation was treated to an 18-minute video featuring photos and video clips of each of the 284 deceased Paulist. Created by seminarian Tom Gibbons, C.S.P., the touching video left some in awe and some in tears.

Presider and homilist Father John F. Duffy, C.S.P., president of the Paulist Fathers, drew the congregation’s attention to the pictures of approximately 30 deceased Paulists, “those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith,” attached to the walls of the room.

The deceased Paulists, he said, carried on the vision of Father Hecker, “trying their best decade after decade to read the signs of the times and meet the needs of the Church in the modern age.”

Those signs represented the importance of sharing Catholic intelligence and culture with the broader America Society, Father Duffy said and, he noted, they were directly addressed on April 1865, when The Catholic World magazine would begin.

“Where was the spirit leading”? Father Duffy asked. It was, he said, to feed the hunger for renewal in their faith by a Catholic people, the desire to share that same faith with non-Catholics,” and so the small mission band would spread by 1875 reaching as far as California.

“I saw the pictures of some in the back of a church in Virginia City, Nevada,” Father Duffy recalled. “The sign of the times, the day for a national Catholic University was arriving - the key role Paulists would play in the opening on this very site - the first board meeting would take place prior to the funeral of Father Hecker, with others besides the Paulists coming to see the importance of sharing our faith with others, with non-Catholics, and the role that the diocesan clergy and other religious could play. And to that end the Apostolic Mission House would be opened.”

In identifying these flash-backs, Father Duffy noted that in the late 1890’s Catholics in England would be permitted to attend Cambridge or Oxford universities, if they could receive ongoing formation in their Catholic faith and, he said, it was “the same across this side of the pond” as Newman ministries began in 1907 at Cal Berkeley and the following year at the University of Texas in Austin.

Father Duffy continued to trace the role of the Paulists through World War I to the present time, noting particularly the pioneering Paulist ministry in media including the establishment of Paulist Communications and then Paulist Productions. It was, he said, Catholic Paulist media “meeting the needs of the church in the modern age.”

And all along, he said, during a century and a half, the Paulist Fathers realized “that a key element of the life of the church is the parish, the permanent worshipping community, but always with a missionary thrust, and a welcoming presence, ‘a perpetual mission.’”

“Yes,” Father Duffy concluded, “150 years responding to meet the needs of the church in the present day, done,” he said, pointing to the pictures on the wall, “by these men marked with the sign of faith.”