It’s not often that an apostle sits down to enjoy a chicken Caesar wrap with parish priests. Yet that’s what Father David Thurber, pastor of St. Barnabas Church in Portsmouth, felt was happening at the luncheon for the diocese’s Deanery 2 parishes on June 30, where Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, C.Ss.R., was present.
“The bishops are successors to the apostles, and I really felt like I was with an apostle,” Father Thurber told Rhode Island Catholic. “He’s got a gentle spirit and a listening ear and an open heart.”
Between the end of June and mid-August, Bishop Lewandowski, who was installed as Bishop of Providence on May 20, has been attending the luncheon meetings held by the diocese’s eight deaneries. A deanery is a group of parish churches located within a designated geographic area of a diocese.
Father Gregory Stowe, pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in West Warwick, whose parish school hosted the Deanery 4 meeting on August 4, attended by Rhode Island Catholic, said that the bishop “was very receptive to all of the guys’ input. He was very interested in the guys’ experience, what parish life is like going on here in the Diocese of Providence.”
Bishop Lewandowski said that the meetings provided “an opportunity for me to meet the priests who are very much engaged in the pastoral care of the people here. It’s great to hear their perspectives, thoughts, and opinions.”
“I value the deanery meetings as gathering best practices,” the bishop said, valuing parish priests as “the ones with the experience. They’re closest to the people in the pews, and they know what will work and what won’t.”
“I got very good feedback and very good advice.”
“Getting to know him a little bit, he comes across as so very genuine,” said Father Stowe. “His genuine love for the Church and his love for Christ, and how he’s hoping to continue to help build things in the diocese.”
Bishop Lewandowski said that matters raised by pastors at the meetings had a broad range, including pastoral planning, engaging youth and young adults, evangelization and outreach, the possibility of parish mergers, clergy retirement, and pastoral care of those affected by current tensions surrounding immigration and job losses suffered by Rhode Island’s many federal employees.
“Given the climate that we’re in today where everything is so polarized, what’s the pastoral approach?” the bishop said. “There are a lot of possible directions we can go in.”
One of the issues that came up frequently in these discussions was the date observing the Solemnity of the Ascension. Currently, the Ecclesiastical Province of Hartford, which includes the Diocese of Providence, observes the Ascension on a Thursday, 40 days after Easter Sunday. In recent years, however, the vast majority of U.S. ecclesiastical provinces have changed the observance to the first Sunday after Ascension Thursday (the Seventh Sunday of Easter), due to low Mass attendance when a solemnity falls on a weekday—even if, like the Ascension, that solemnity is a holy day of obligation.
According to a 2022 statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, U.S. dioceses that continue to observe the Ascension on Thursday are in the minority. The only ecclesiastical provinces that currently observe the Ascension on a Thursday are those in Boston, Hartford (Conn), New York, Newark (NJ), Omaha (NE), and Philadelphia.
The matter has been cause for some controversy throughout the church in the U.S., with many laypeople, pastors, and bishops cheering the move to Sunday but others seeing the change as a compromise with a worldly culture that relegates religious observance to weekends rather than permeating the faithful’s lives beyond Sundays.
The date is about more than tradition. There’s a spiritual significance to its location on the liturgical calendar. Acts of the Apostles 1:3 attests that Christ ascended into heaven 40 days after his resurrection and Acts 2:1-4 records that the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ apostles occurred at the Jewish festival of Weeks (or Pentecost), 50 days after the Passover. This places the Ascension 40 days after Easter Sunday and 10 days before Pentecost. If the day of observing the Ascension were changed, its scriptural timing would be compromised.
“There were strong opinions about keeping it as it is” on a Thursday, said Bishop Lewandowski, with some pastors advocating the biblical timeline and taking a stand against a secular culture that edges out church attendance beyond Sundays. Some priests at the deanery meetings said that Catholics “should make the sacrifice to get to Mass” during the week, the bishop said.
“How much do we want to accommodate the culture?”
At the same time, he added other priests supported the position of observing Ascension on a Sunday as a matter of pastoral care, proclaiming Christ’s Ascension on a day when more people are already at Mass and will be more likely to hear the message.
The age of Confirmation was another matter raised in the deanery meetings. During the first centuries of the Church, Confirmation was done at the same time as Baptism; and the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches still observe this practice. In the Western churches, the age of Confirmation changed over time, until it became the practice to confirm at the age of early to mid-teens.
This practice, however, has sometimes had the unintended effect of leading people to think of Confirmation as a kind of graduation ceremony rather than a sacrament of initiation—a farewell to the Church rather than the beginning of a greater commitment.
“The age for the reception of Confirmation has been part of a national discussion in the Catholic Church for the past few years,” Bishop Lewandowski said.
“What [Confirmation] should be doing is leading you into a life of full participation in the Church,” he said, adding that a solution need not necessarily involve confirming at the same time as baptism.
He suggested that a task force could be formed to “maybe have a few options to choose from.”
“What has gotten some discussion and energy is that in our parishes we need to have sacramental preparation, but at the same time we need to have very good, effective youth ministry,” the bishop said. “If we don’t have a youth ministry, we’re just giving sacraments” without providing ways for young people to live their faith in the world.
“I’ll be hopefully working with the evangelization team here to talk about what I’ve heard in these meetings and look at some ways of furthering that conversation.”
As for parish mergers, Bishop Lewandowski said, “We need to do the pastoral planning, but we need to look at how we do it, and that’s going to take more conversations. What are we working toward? What is the parish we’re hoping to get after the merger?”
“This is not a one and done,” he said of the meetings. “I would hope that a few times a year we would do this. I value people’s opinions and thoughts, and the only way you do that is to have conversations.”
Despite the potentially sensitive nature of some of the topics discussed at the meetings, Father Thurber said that Bishop Lewandowski “put [everyone] at ease.”
“He was so humble and just willing to listen,” said Father Thurber. “He didn’t have any agenda himself. He didn’t say ‘I think this is how things should be.’ He said, ‘I want to hear from you.’ He just listened to what everybody had to say, and I think that was extremely appreciated by the priests.”
During the Deanery 4 meeting, Bishop Lewandowski “was really interested in getting the input and feedback from the parish priests,” said Father Stowe. “He opened it up for discussions. He was very engaged. He seemed very open to trying to gain the perspective of the priests in the trenches, so to speak.”
Bishop Lewandowski’s willingness to listen applied whether or not there was disagreement in the meetings, Father Thurber said.
“It was disarming,” Father Thurber said. “He set the tone so that we felt comfortable even disagreeing with each other. He gave each person his undivided attention.”
“I feel as though we’ve hit the lottery with Bishop Bruce,” he added.
