This past Sunday took me to St. Leo the Great, a church in downtown Cincinnati that a ministry at my church often partners with. I was delighted by what awaited.
St. Leo is the epitome of part of what I was trying to capture on my journey, the living embodiment of the vitality and diversity of the universal church. The congregation is made up of Whites and Blacks, Asians, Africans and Central and South Americans. Father Jim delivered his homily in both English and Spanish, while the second reading and first Communion song were in Kirundi, a language spoken by the good people of Burundi.
These were devout people, with many of them stopping to engage in silent adoration before Mass began.
But perhaps most notable, which I hope is obvious in this video, was how overflowing the parish was with families. There were young people everywhere you looked — two altar servers, a handful of greeters, ushers, and the person handling the video monitor were all well below voting age.
When Sister Thea Bowman spoke before the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Reporter’s Tom Roberts described the experience by saying, “I said to myself then – and have said since to anyone who would listen to the story – that I thought I saw a glimpse of the Church’s best future that day.”
I felt a little bit of that last week.
52 Masses 