During his homily at Mass this past Monday, Pope Francis said that the Holy Spirit seems to be a “luxury prisoner” in many Christians’ hearts: someone who is welcomed to stay, but not allowed to act or move us forward,

“We keep the Holy Spirit as a ‘luxury prisoner’ in our hearts: we do not allow the Spirit to push us forward, to move us. The Spirit does everything, knows everything, reminds us what Jesus said, can explain all about Jesus,” he said during his Mass at the chapel of Casa Santa Marta in the Vatican. “While Christians today have a knowledge of the Holy Spirit as part of the Holy Trinity, they do not know what the Spirit’s role is in the Church. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves the Church, the one who works in the Church and in our hearts.”

The Holy Spirit “frees us from the ‘orphan-like’ condition which the spirit of the world wants to put us in. The Holy Spirit is the one who “moves us to praise God, to pray to the Lord” and who “teaches us to see the Father and call him ‘Father.’”

There is one thing the Holy Spirit cannot do. “The Holy Spirit cannot make us ‘virtual’ Christians who are not virtuous. Instead “the Holy Spirit makes real Christians. The Spirit takes life and prophetically reads the signs of the times pushing us forward.”

Ahead of Pentecost Sunday the Holy Father invited Christians to prepare by opening up our hearts to the Holy Spirit. “This is what we must do this week: think of the Spirit and talk to him.”

Catholic News Agency ed. Fr Matthew

In the week when our children receive their first Holy Communion, please read this account of the Mass, and try to guess when it was written….

“And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has finished, the overseer (episkopos=bishop) verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.

Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the overseer in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.

And they who are well-to-do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the overseer, who provides for the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need.

But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.”

Does this description of the Mass sound familiar? Yet this is taken from the “First Apology” of St Justin Martyr who lived from A.D. 110 to 165, and it is one of the oldest such descriptions in existence. We give thanks for and through the Eucharist.

Fr Matthew