![]() In this time of pandemic we come to you, our sign of sure hope and comfort. You sing of the Father’s mercy and accompany us with a mother’s love. M ost Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, you are the fairest fruit of God’s redeeming love and the text of the Prayer of Consecration itself: With many, if not most diocesan bishops set to replicate the act from their respective quarantines, the brief liturgy in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels begins at Noon Pacific (3pm Eastern) as ever, here's the livefeed: Yet even for reflecting that vaunted heritage, today's rite likewise underscores a markedly different era: far from the hierarchy's Anglo cradle, the consecration will be led on the opposite coast, in Los Angeles – another place named for the Madonna, whose 5 million faithful (their number doubled in three decades) now comprise the largest US diocese of all time – due to last year's ascent of the first Latino ever to lead the national bench, the Mexican-born Archbishop José Gomez. The distinct linkage of the Stateside fold to the Mother of God dates to the settlement of Maryland (the lone Catholic colony) on Annunciation Day 1634, a tie bolstered nearly two centuries later under the nation's founding bishop, John Carroll of Baltimore, who dedicated the new people's first Cathedral to Mary Assumed into Heaven, the venue in which Immaculate Conception would be declared the national patroness in 1846. Fifty days into a Stateside Church in lockdown, this first of May brings the latest edition of a ritual as old as American Catholicism itself.Ī practice employed both in hours of celebration and crisis over the last four centuries, the throes of a pandemic that’s now claimed 65,000 lives across the US will see the nation’s bishops re-consecrate these shores to Our Lady, this time as "Mother of the Church" – a title declared by now-St Paul VI at the close of Vatican II and re-emphasized by the reigning Pope, who gave Mater Ecclesiae a universal feast on the Monday after Pentecost. ![]()
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