Archbishop William E. Lori took the occasion of Ash Wednesday, March 5, to release an update to his original 2015 pastoral letter, “A Light Brightly Visible,” to focus on the pastoral implications of implementing the archdiocese’s Seek the City to Come planning that was announced a year ago.
“A Light Brightly Visible 3.0” follows an update in 2021.
The archbishop’s first pastoral letter laid out the initial thrust for the archbishop’s call for the faithful to undergo missionary conversion, he told the Catholic Review. “‘A Light Brightly Visible 2.0’ was a reboot of that coming out of COVID, but also providing new resources for doing the work of missionary conversion and evangelization such as the creation of the Institute for Evangelization, which includes the Office of Parish Renewal.”
The latest version, “A Light Brightly Visible 3.0,” comes out of the Seek the City to Come process, he said, with the goal of ensuring that parishes are “real centers of missionary activity, that we are never again content with the status quo.”
In the pastoral, the archbishop said, “It is not that missionary activity isn’t already going on in those parishes. Yet, if Seek the City taught us anything, it’s that we can never rest content. We must pay attention to what we have learned, even as we strive to catch hold of Pope Francis’ vision of parish renewal in our City and beyond.”
Echoing Pope Francis, Archbishop Lori says in LBV 3.0 that we need to peer into our own hearts and into the heart of our parishes.
“Let us heed a fundamental lesson flowing from Seek the City. The decisions to merge and close parishes were a painful but necessary step. However, the most important step we must continually take is to renew the missionary thrust of our parishes. Pope Francis urgently and continually calls every parish and ministry to undergo what he calls ‘missionary conversion,’” the pastoral said.
Archbishop Lori called for missionary creativity and adaptability in examining the customary way of exercising everything in parish life from things as basic as Mass and confession schedules to preparation for sacraments. “In other words, a parish that wishes to become a center of missionary activity must be willing to look at every facet of its life to determine if it provides an interior space for growth in holiness while adapting and shaping its ministries to pastoral need and actively reaching out beyond itself.”
As an example of missionary creativity, he cited Blessed Father Stanley Rother, who attended Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg in the 1980s before being ordained for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and then being sent as a missionary to Central America.
The archbishop noted that Father Rother struggled to learn Latin in the seminary, but when he went to a remote part of Guatemala where the people spoke a particular and difficult dialect, he learned it “so that he can translate the faith into a language they can understand. He learn(ed) what will help the people he wants to serve to meet the Lord and to hear the Gospel. And this required on his part more than zeal – which is important – but it was quite immense creativity.”
He said that this need is not limited to those serving in foreign countries. “Well, we’re in missionary territory too. … This is a moment for us to say doing the same thing over and over again might not be the right thing.” Some things can be continued, he said, if that remains the best way to accomplish the goal of lifting up people and bringing them to Christ. He noted that author Mary Healey said that when we encounter people, other people should look at us and think “those people had breakfast with Jesus Christ this morning.”
He told the Catholic Review that his recent decision to lower confirmation to the age of 9 in the archdiocese is an example of missionary creativity as it will help parishes focus on accompanying the newly confirmed and their families after the sacrament.
Although “A Light Brightly Visible 3.0” focuses especially on the parishes affected directly by Seek the City, Archbishop Lori said every parish in the archdiocese needs to become a center for missionary discipleship and creativity.
“Within living memory, many of the city parishes that have been closed and merged were thriving way back in the day. The people attending those parishes, some of whom are still living, would have said such a thing can’t happen to us,” he said.
But every parish has a “mission field” to serve the people within its boundaries and engage the community.
The pastoral said, “While it focused on parishes in Baltimore and its environs, in reality, it pertains to the whole archdiocese. It is a clarion call for every parish in the archdiocese to embrace its evangelizing mission with renewed vigor. It would be a mistake for any parish to assume that it is immune from the decline seen elsewhere.
“This is also a moment for parishes around the archdiocese to renew and strengthen their ties with parishes in the City. Some have ‘sister-parish’ relationships which entail more than financial support but also a true ‘exchange of gifts’ – pastoral, spiritual, and cultural,” LBV 3.0 said.
The archbishop gave a nod to the parishes in Mountain Maryland that began sharing information and ideas before merging in the past decade. “They did this long before any of us did it, and they did it well. They learned a lot of painful lessons,” he said. Also, the organization of parishes throughout the archdiocese into pastorates – one or more parishes with a single pastor and leadership team – “are certainly a step in this direction.”
Read the full text of “A Light Brightly Visible 3.0” and Archbishop Lori’s earlier pastoral letters at https://www.archbalt.org/archbishop-loris-pastoral-letters-and-reflections/.
Email Christopher Gunty at editor@CatholicReview.org.
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