February 26, 2023
First Sunday of Lent
by Fr. Boniface Endorf, O.P
Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,
This year our annual St. Joseph parish dinner will be on Saturday, March 25th. It’s always on a Saturday near the Solemnity of St. Joseph (March 20th) after the vigil Mass. Tickets will go on sale next Sunday and will be sold thereafter in the parish office (during office hours, 8am-4pm) and at the Sunday Masses until we sell out. Monte’s will be providing the meal again so the food will be great! I hope to see everyone there.
Next weekend will also be the Cardinal’s Appeal in-pew pitch. Please consider making a donation to the Cardinal’s Appeal and make sure to mark St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village as your parish.
Mass Tidbit:
After the prayers over the bread and wine, the priest bows profoundly and prays quietly:
“With humble spirit and contrite heart may we be accepted by you, O Lord, and may our sacrifice in your sight this day be pleasing to you, Lord God.”
Here the priest is praying on behalf of the whole congregation, which is the role of the priest in the liturgy. We humble ourselves, seeing our need for God, and our hearts are contrite, sorrowful for sin and aware of our need for repentance. Yet there is hope here because the sacrament of the Eucharist is what helps us align ourselves to God, and the priest asks that we be accepted by God.
The priest then asks that our sacrifice be pleasing in God’s sight. The sacrifice is the bread and wine that were just offered to God, that will become the Body and Blood of Christ, joining it to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. But it is also us giving, or sacrificing, ourselves to God—just as Jesus offered himself wholly to the Father, so we in Christ offer ourselves to God in the Mass. We ask that our sacrifice be ‘pleasing’ to God, meaning accepted by God. When accepted by God, we become His, meaning adopted children of God, sharing in his divine life. Thus the point of the sacrifice of the Mass is for us to become like God by giving ourselves to the Father through Jesus in the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus gives Himself to us in the Eucharist. The purpose of the Mass is to make us saints through the dynamic of divine, sacrificial, love.
God Bless,
Fr. Boniface
