Sunday 22 March 2020

LAETARE SUNDAY

4th In Lent-All Public celebrations of the Mass-suspended due to the outbreak of Covid19

Please Like St Peter's Roman Catholic Church Eastwood Facebook page for daily updates

 Please be assured -Fr Jeff offers Private Masses daily for your intentions at St Peter's 11.30am

God love and bless us all at this time of great distress:

Our Lady of Walsingham 

pray for us!

 Published below is what we, under 'normal circumstances' 

would be celebrating this Sunday and why... 

Our Lenten pilgrimage is already half over or, to express it more positively, we are already halfway to Easter. On this Sunday, the Church lightens the liturgical atmosphere, replacing somber violet vestments with bright rose, putting flowers on the altar, and allowing greater use of the organ. These are external symbols of the joy that we are meant to feel as we prepare for the Easter feast – whether we are new Catholics preparing to receive the sacraments of initiation at Easter or life-long Catholics called to a life of ongoing conversion.

Laetare Sunday gets its name from the opening words of the day’s traditional Introit: Laetare, Jerusalem (“Rejoice, Jerusalem”). Accordingly, today’s Roman stational church is the Basilica of Santa Croce, “the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, a basilica built about 325 around part of the Empress Saint Helena’s imperial palace in order to enshrine the relics (above all that of the True Cross) she had brought back to Rome from Jerusalem. Originally, the floor of the basilica was covered with earth from Jerusalem. Thus, the church’s unique title, “the Holy Cross in Jerusalem.” The Jerusalem theme associated with this Sunday also accounts for another very venerable custom connected with this day, that of people returning home to visit (and bring flowers to) their “mother church” on this day.

For those preparing for baptism, the Church celebrates the second scrutiny of the elect on this day. “The entire Lenten Lectionary is a lesson book that prepares the elect among the catechumens to receive the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter Vigil, just as it prepares all the faithful to renew themselves in the new life into which they have beenreborn” (Congregation for DivineWorship, Homiletic Directory, 67). The theme of today’s scrutiny associates baptism with light. “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” (Ephesians 5:14).

For the rest of us, on this mid-Lent Sunday, the liturgy is a joyful celebration of God’s mercy. God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when wewere dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (Ephesians 2:4). God’s mercy was already experienced in the Old Testament, for example, in the story we hear today of King Cyrus ending Israel’s exile in Babylon:

“Whoever, therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people, let him go up, and may his God be with him” (2 Chronicles 36:23). This culminates in Jesus’ familiar words in the Gospel: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16).