TLDR: During the consecration prayer at Sunday’s liturgy, the priest mentions a list of saints which includes the Virgin Mary and other saints. This blog explains the reasoning behind the list I use. Enjoy it.

 The consecration prayer in Eucharistic Prayer B (which we use at 9:00am on Sundays) reads as follows, “We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant… In the fullness of time, put all things in subjection under your Christ, and bring us to that heavenly country where, with [     and] all your saints, we may enter the everlasting heritage of your sons and daughters...” The same prayer in Eucharistic Prayer D (which we use at 11:15) includes the following statement, “And grant that we may find our inheritance with [the Blessed Virgin Mary, with patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, (with      ) and] all the saints who have found favor with you in ages past.. " The blank space is filled with the names of different saints, depending on the church you attend any given Sunday.

It is customary to include the Virgin Mary as one of the saints with whom we expect to unite in the everlasting heritage of a “heavenly country.” After Mary, many churches include their own particular patron saint (namesake for the church). In our case, we always pray to be united with Saint Dunstan, the English monk and Archbishop of Canterbury (909-988) after whom our church was named by our founders in 1968-1969. After Dunstan, we mention Saint Francis and Saint Benedict, and then “all your saints”. Other churches list other saints, but for us these particular two saints take precedence among the thousands of prophets, apostles, martyrs, and other holy men and women.

The reason I choose these two saints will surprise you. It all comes to “dealer’s choice”. It is the prerogative of the celebrant to include whatever saints are important to them. I choose these two in gratitude for the ministry of our Franciscan brothers Allen and Ross and our Benedictine sisters Veronica Noel and Mary Constance. I love when they are able to serve at the Altar because it gives a visual image of the wide breath of ministries in our Church. When you look up at the altar and see men and women in religious attire, priests dressed in liturgical vestments, acolytes in white albs, eucharistic ministers and choir members in black cassocks and white surplices, and readers dressed in civilian clothes, you see the full variety of lay and ordained ministries involved in our liturgy. The word liturgy comes from the Greek “leitourgia”, meaning public service. Liturgy is the work of the people, and this is very much the truth in our church. In fact, when you include the altar guild, ushers, vestry of the day, acolyte masters, musicians, and sexton, there are dozens of people who make our liturgy possible.

Both of these saints gave the Church an alternative way of being the Church in their own generation, and by doing so, they transformed it forever. Saint Benedict (480-547 CE) responded to the fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of the Church’s power by founding a monastic order, becoming the father of Western monasticism. His influential “Rule of Saint Benedict” was fundamentally important in the preservation of Christian culture throughout the post Roman-Empire period known as “The Dark Ages.” At a time of great confusion and violence, Benedict advocated for the creation of small communities in which the Gospel could be lived out to the fullest and men (and later, women) could be trained to be servants of Christ in their local communities. This retreat from the universal concerns of a fallen empire led to a local alternative in which small groups became truly focused on loving their neighbors and enacting social change from within. The following quote from social commentator Rod Dreher (who was once my neighbor in Louisiana) gives us an idea of the chaos produced by the fall of the Roman Empire:

“When he left fallen Rome for the wilderness, Benedict had no idea that his founding of his schools for the Lord’s service (monasteries) would over time have such dramatic impact on Western civilization. Europe in the early Middle Ages was reeling from the calamitous end of the empire, which left in its wake countless local wars as barbarian tribes fought for dominance. Rome’s fall left behind a staggering degree of material poverty, the result of both the disintegration of Rome’s complex trade network and the loss of intellectual and technical sophistication.” (Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option. New York: Sentinel, 2017, 15).

Like Benedict, Francis of Assisi (1226 CE) was the son of an aristocratic family who gave up privilege and wealth to follow Christ in absolute poverty. The institutional Church in the early thirteenth century inherited the painful legacy of the crusades, a number of wars initiated by the Pope in 1095 to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim control and to reassert the papacy’s power in Europe. Stories of pillaging, plunder, rape, and murder perpetrated by Christian crusaders during these campaigns were widely told as Francis was growing up in Cicily. For almost 150 years the Church had been more concerned with the takeover of the Holy Land, the expansion of papal authority and power, and the spread of Christianity through violence and bloodshed than with the care of her people. Francis saw a different way. He endeavored to rebuild the Church by embracing the poor, inspiring young men and women to live out their faith through example, by focusing on Christ’s ministry to the outcast and leading others to do so as well, and by adopting a radically different lifestyle than many of his contemporaries.

Francis’ way of love became very attractive to many young men and within a few years there were monasteries around Italy where young monks sought to live a life of prayer and service to the poor. Soon this movement became an international phenomenon which revitalized monasticism and led to the planting of hundreds of monasteries and convents around the known world of the day. Like Benedict, Francis adopted a local solution to a universal problem, calling on small groups of men (and later, women) to live the Gospel of Jesus at the village level. As a result, his movement led to renewal from within the Church itself.

There are times when I add other saints to these prayers, but both Benedict and Francis occupy a very special place in my spirituality, and by mentioning their names, I pray that I may be less preoccupied by global issues affecting the Church and more focused on ministry at the local level of Saint Dunstan’s.

May our Lord continue to bless you,

Fr. Roman+