Planning groups tackle sacraments

BY KAREN DIETLEIN OSBORNE
STAFF WRITER

Like other planning groups for "Called to be Church" around the Albany Diocese, Catholics in Saratoga County are in the midst of focusing on the importance of liturgy and the sacraments.

Throughout the Diocese this fall, planning groups are tackling the theme of "the Sacramental Life of the Church, including Prayer and Worship."

Barbara Garro from St. Clement's parish in Saratoga Springs said that their planning team has talked about the Mass: what the challenges and obstacles are to good worship, what parishioners get out of worship, and how important the Eucharist is to the experience of the Mass.

In focus

Since St. Clement's is one of the parishes in the Diocese cared for by a religious order, "our challenges are going to be different," Ms. Garro said. "The availability of sacraments is greater than any church I've ever gone to. We have four Masses on Sunday."

Parishes should be focusing on the sacraments because of the primacy of the Eucharist to Catholic life and because of the evangelizing opportunity sacraments provide to reach Catholics who no longer go to church, she said.

"Part of all this dialogue is [dealing with] reality," Ms. Garro explained. "Younger people are busy; so when they start thinking about the Church, it's Baptism, it's marriage, it's death."

Leadership

Another issue to be tackled is lay leadership, Ms. Garro said.

Catholics concerned with access to the sacraments should "volunteer to be lay ministers," she explained. "The sacraments need to get to the people who may not be able to come to church. So many people have an idea that you have to be [a saint] in order to contribute, that you have to know as much as the priest," but that's not true, she said.

"The sacraments are Catholic life," she concluded. "We're trying to make it so good that you wouldn't want to miss it."

Why worship?

At one meeting, Rev. Neil Draves-Arpaia, St. Clement's director of whole community catechesis, said that the planning group brought a variety of ideas about the purpose of worship to the table.

There was "a wide range of responses," he said, "from those who saw the purpose of liturgy and worship as where the community praises God and offers sacrifice to those who see it as an opportunity to be replenished and renewed -- a more community-building experience. They ran the gamut from the transcendent to the communitarian."

Either way, everyone wants a meaningful liturgy, he noted, and everyone wants to plan for liturgies that will serve the needs of parishioners.

"There seems to be a need to educate more as to the nature of liturgy," he said. "Each of the five worship sites [in the cluster] is very unique and different. One of the things that we all bring is a very unique experience in terms of our respect of parish families in regard to worship."

(10/11/07)