Ash Wednesday

Lent is upon us!  I have been here in Italy for a week and a half, and it is already time to enter into Lent.  Lent is a good, but hard and demanding, season of the Church that needs to be taken seriously   Lent calls us to deny our own desires so that we may follow Christ on His road to Calvary.  And as Christians, and more broadly as human beings, we need to learn how to die.  Death calls us out of our own little worlds to realize that there is more to life than fulfilling our own desires.  It makes us put aside our plans so as to follow the Lord and His plans for us.  And it prepares our hearts to celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord.  Because if there is no death, there is no new life.  If we don't know our sinfulness, then there is no need for God's mercy.  If we aren't broken and dependent on God, then why would we need Jesus as our Savior?  So I hope and pray that this Lent will be a fruitful one, where you can come to a deeper knowledge of your utter dependence on God and His mercy in your life.  

Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, was a whirlwind of experiences, and as does the Bible, let us start in the beginning.  I woke up Wednesday morning at 4:45 AM to get ready to go to Mass.  Now you're probably asking yourself Why would anybody ever get up that early to go to Mass?  Aren't there later Masses?  And the answer is Yes, there are later Masses, but there is a beautiful Lenten tradition in Rome called the Station Churches.  The Station Churches are churches all throughout Rome, and each day, there is Mass at a different church.  So you wake up and walk each day, sometimes 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes over an hour, to go to these Station Church Masses.  The English Mass usually starts at 7 AM, but on Ash Wednesday, Mass started at 6:45.  It was about an hour walk to Santa Sabina, which is an ancient church on top of one of the 7 historic hills of Rome.  So I left the house with my seminarian brothers at 5:45 to get to Mass on time.  The Church, which was rather simple, is home to the Dominican Order, and St. Thomas Aquinas actually said Mass there quite frequently.  Talk about praying with the saints.  At the Mass, Joliet Deacon John Lovitsch read the Gospel from the ambo where Aquinas preached, which was super cool.  We (the Joliet seminarians) chatted with John after Mass and took this awesome picture! 

After Mass, we went to class, which was good.  I will share more about school later  (yes, contrary to popular belief, there is some schooling being done here).  But right after class, (we may or may not have ditched our Conversational Italian Class) we walked to St. Peter's Basilica to get in line for Ash Wednesday Mass with the Pope.  He announced that this would be his last public Mass, so obviously, we wanted to get there.  While I was waiting in line, I recognized a seminarian who sat by me at St. Peter's Sunday for Mass.  While I never spoke to him Sunday, we both recognized each other, so he happily used me as an excuse to hop in line with us, cutting off a few thousand people.  His name was Sebastian, and he is a seminarian from Germany.  He spoke pretty good English, so we happily chatted for quite a while.  He was an interesting guy to say the least, but it was a great time to get to know to him.  And we even got a picture together!

The highlight of the day though was of course Ash Wednesday Mass with the Holy Father.  It was really cool because when a Pope dies, you never get to thank him for his service.  But at the end of Mass, there was about 5 minutes of applause after a Cardinal thanked Pope Benedict for his service.  It was just such a beautiful way to end his last public Mass, thanking him for his Yes, his generous service to the Church.  He didn't make a big deal about his resignation, but you could tell at the end of Mass that he was pretty emotional about it.  I am hoping to get to his last 2 Angelus' and possibly even his farewell audience on the 27th.  What a gift Benedict has been to the Church, and how lucky are we to have been a part of the Church that the Lord called him to guide.  He is an incredible man, and his leadership will be dearly missed.  While I did not take any pictures during the Mass, I do have this one from the processional.  At first, I didn't think that it turned out well, but when I looked at it later, it turned out super cool.  So here it is.  Have a very blessed Lent and please continue to pray for the Cardinals as they prepare to elect the next Pope!