Twins fans can speak about the summer as baseball season. Lakeside cabin aficionados can refer to these months as boating season. For me as a bishop, however, the season is surely characterized by the installation of pastors. Just about every weekend, I am presiding at installations where I have the privilege of celebrating God’s goodness as he works to bring new gifts to our parishes and new opportunities to our priests. I have been especially edified this year by the openness of our priests to accepting new — and usually more challenging — assignments and to our faithful who are so eager to open their hearts and homes to their pastors even when there’s some lingering sadness about bidding farewell to their predecessors.
The rite for the installation, drawn from the Book of Blessings, highlights the collaboration that the Church has rightly expected from its priests and laity since the time of the Second Vatican Council. The new pastor is encouraged to share his ministry with his staff “in a spirit of mutual trust, common prayer and genuine concern.” He is to recognize his parish pastoral council as the “voice” of his people and to “always be attentive to the needs they express.”
The rite calls the pastor to be a “loving father, a gentle shepherd and wise teacher” of his people, guiding them to Christ. It’s in that context that the rite calls upon the pastor to lead his people in professing their faith by reciting the Creed. He’s obligated as well to take an oath, so that the bishop and the faithful can count on him to “preserve communion in the Church” and to hold fast to the deposit of faith in its entirety, to hand it on faithfully and to make it shine forth, shunning any teachings that are contrary to it. Every pastor in this archdiocese has taken that oath.
It’s essentially the same oath that I took at the vigil on the evening before my ordination as a bishop. At the ordination itself, moreover, I had to express my resolve to “proclaim the Gospel of Christ faithfully and unfailingly,” to “guard the deposit of faith, pure and entire according to the tradition preserved always and everywhere in the Church from the time of the Apostles,” and to “remain in the (Church’s unity, with the Order of Bishops under the authority of the successor of the blessed Apostle Peter.” Not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself in the course of my examination of conscience if I’m faithfully passing on our faith and acting in communion with the pope. I count on your prayers that I may exercise this duty well.
While there are particular responsibilities in this area for the pope, bishops and priests, the task of passing on the faith falls to all who are baptized. As was stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “Lumen Gentium”: “The obligation of spreading the faith is imposed on every disciple of Christ, according to his state” (LG 12). That responsibility is particularly clear in the case of parents, “who have the first responsibility for the education of their children” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2223), passing on to them what we believe. In the Document on Christian Education, “Gravissimum Educationis,” the fathers of the Second Vatican Council noted that “it is particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him and to love their neighbor” (GE 3).
I always feel privileged when parents turn to our parishes and to our Catholic schools to assist them in fulfilling their sacred duty to educate their children in the faith. We have such a strong tradition in this archdiocese of a fruitful collaboration with parents, going all the way back to the arrival of the first Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 1851, who traveled up the Mississippi at the invitation of our first bishop, Bishop Joseph Cretin, to assist in the work of Catholic education. I feel grateful for the generosity of those sisters, and the thousands of priests, women and men religious and lay faithful, who like them have dedicated themselves over the decades to the work of parish catechesis and Catholic education.
I feel blessed to be reminded each day of their phenomenal contribution. Living on the grounds of Visitation School, which this year is celebrating its 150th anniversary, I can’t help but recall the contribution of the Visitation Sisters and all who have collaborated with them in the work of passing on the faith. As we prepare in these days throughout the archdiocese for yet another school year and catechetical year, may our hearts be filled with gratitude for the opportunities that God gives to each of us to pass on the treasure that is our faith.
