This is an account of how I, just one Catholic out of more than a billion, prepare to worship God at Mass every day of the year.  While the Mass in the Catholic Church, commanded by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, is a liturgy prescribed by the highest authority in Rome and may not be changed in essence by the individual Catholic, including the priest, preparation for Mass, the pre-liturgical time of prayer, may and probably will vary.  In fact, there could be millions of different ways of praying in the church before Mass begins; such is the Catholic Church’s respect for private prayer.  This is one of them.

My way of preparing for Mass evolved over a lifetime, especially over 40 years of assisting at the Divine Liturgy in my parish, St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, in New Paltz, New York.  And because my pre-liturgical prayer, meditation, and contemplation are so closely incorporated into the physical character of the Church itself, its characteristic statues and stained glass windows of the saints, I must say a word or two about New Paltz’s one Catholic Church and Our Father’s House.

New Paltz, New York in the mid-Hudson Valley was founded by the Huguenots in 1677.  Escaping from religious and political persecution by the French Catholic monarchy, what came to be 12 Huguenot families – with distinguished names like Hasbrouck, Elting, Lefebre, Dubois, to name a few – settled along the banks of the Wallkill River.  They were granted a patent of 40,000 acres of land by the English Catholic proprietor, the Duke of York, later King James II, whose governor was another English Catholic, Col. Thomas Dongan.  Today New Paltz is recognized by the United States Government as having the oldest street with the oldest original houses in the country.

An isolated farming community about 12 miles from Poughkeepsie, after the War for American Independence, New Paltz was ruled by representatives of the original families, the Duzine.  The first Catholic parish, St. Joseph’s, was not founded until 1894, with followers of the ancient Faith being served until that time by a mission from nearby Gardiner.  Meanwhile, relations between the growing number of Roman Catholics and members of the Reformed Church in New Paltz reflected all the tensions and conflicts in France and elsewhere in Europe. 

There was, though, an outstanding example of Reformed and Catholic friendship and cooperation in the year 1643 when Dominie Johannes Megapolensis, a Reformed minister in what is now the Albany area, helped the French Catholic, St. Isaac Jogues, S.J., escape from the Iroquois and had the mutilated priest carried to safety in New Amsterdam aboard a Dutch sloop.  Legend says that the Dutch Protestant sailors celebrated saintly Fr. Jogues’ birthday on an island not far from New Paltz, and that many years later, a Jesuit seminary was built in the vicinity.  Fr. Jogues, after a short period of recovery in France and Rome, heroically returned to his ministry in North America, only to be martyred at the Iroquois castle at Auriesville, New York. 

Another saint’s many visits to New Paltz and nearby Highland, where she and her Cabrini Sisters taught children in the parochial school of St. Augustine, are well-documented.  Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini also often made the short trip from her orphanage for New York City girls and the mother house of her Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in West Park along the Hudson, to old St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and the campus of the State Normal School at New Paltz, just up the hill.

Perhaps what is most significant for what follows is that the two saints, Isaac Jogues and Mother Cabrini, came to the Hudson Valley to evangelize.  Jogues came to convert Native Americans and Mother Cabrini to re-evangelize (to use the current expression) and strengthen the embattled Italians and other immigrants in their Catholic faith.  Challenged by Modernism, as Christians still are, central to both the saints was the defense of the orthodox Catholic teaching of the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, “the source and summit of Christian life”.

This, then, is a sketch of the historical and theological setting of St. Joseph’s Church, today a worshipping community of over 2,000 families, including descendants of the original founders of New Paltz.  And it is the perspective of one Catholic worshipper at St. Joseph’s, who is also an historian, as he proposes to visit Our Father’s House.

St. Joseph’s Church is just across the street from my home of the last 40 years, and  I often reflect on the infinite kindness of Our Lord in making sure, so to speak, that He got my attention by putting me so close to Him.  My life over the decades has been “lived out” literally a stone’s throw from the court of the great King of Kings in His holy tabernacle.  In all that time, I seldom missed the daily Sacrifice of the Mass in St. Joseph’s, except for my two or three years abroad on sabbatical in France and Italy, where I also had the daily privilege of assisting at the Divine Liturgy (perhaps most memorably in Vatican City on January 7, 1986 in Pope John Paul II’s private chapel in his private apartment).  But as Catholics will know already, the fact is that whether the faithful assist at Mass in the Pope’s private chapel or in a plain rural church in the Ozarks, whether in a great European cathedral or a Sahara desert hut, they are privileged to share in the passion, death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Most Holy Eucharist.  Truly, where the Lord Jesus Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament – the greatest “present” to humankind – wherever that may be, the Eucharist is the miraculous Center of the Universal Church, her “source and summit”.

Pope John Paul II has written of the ancient Truth of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in every Catholic church:

“The Church and the world have a great need for Eucharistic worship.  Jesus awaits us in this Sacrament of Love.  Let us not refuse the time to go meet Him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith, and open to making amends for the serious offenses and crimes of the world.  Let our adoration never cease.”[i]

There is an outside statue of St. Joseph just above the doorway to my church.  He clutches a church in his calloused hands.  Our Lord “in the clouds of Heaven, surrounded by angels and saints…comes in prayer.  And just as there is a Church that descends together with the Word, so there is a Church that ascends to meet Him.”[ii], and both together make up the one CATHOLICA (Hans Urs von Balthasar).  As I cross the street to the church for my daily pre-liturgical prayer and meditation, St. Joseph seems to be summoning me to join him and untold millions over the ages in adoring the Christ-Child, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”[iii] Who lies within.  I picture in my mind’s eye the three life-size Wise Men of our church’s Christmas manger following their Star and ours to the birthplace of the true God, with the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph in profound adoration.  With them, true kings in submission to the King of Kings and with the Queen of Queens, we are summoned not to wonder with Plato and the philosophers, but to adore the Living God with the saints.

I pass through the “Doors of Transcendence”, the “Gates of Eternity”, leaving behind time and circumstance, and finding myself in the Presence of the Living Absolute.  “I will make the victor a pillar in the temple of my God and he shall never leave it.”[iv]  The statue of St. Joseph in the foyer with the Child Jesus in his arms welcomes me.  The Eternal Sabbath begins.

Saints Simeon and Anna come to greet me.  With countless others over the ages, hermits and saints like St. Dominic and St. Wulfric, they have been waiting for me in what at times seemed to be the ever-deepening shadows of the temple.  They cannot contain their joy.  Somehow in my eyes they see a reflection of what Giotto saw in the mysterious eyes of the Baby Jesus and St. Simeon at the Presentation, the “proto-type of the Church” (Von Balthasar).  Unlike St. Simeon, I am not dismissed; for my work – as St. Francis said – has just begun.

I cross myself in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, enclosing within my heart each of our children; and praying that the Good Spirit – the Infinite Prayer – will direct them this day to Christ’s love, wherever their paths take them.  I have each of us say with the Psalmist the prayer, “Give me life, O Lord, that I may do your commands”.[v]  Give us, all of humankind, “Our Daily Bread”, life, natural and supernatural, so that we may do Your commands.

There is a statue of Our Lady over to the left.  “Do whatever He tells you”, she told the waiters, when the wine ran out.[vi]  This woman, our “solitary boast”, made the Lord our Brother!  What miracle could be greater!  “Do whatever He tells you.”  Like the waiters at the wedding feast at Cana, we must have the humility to trust in Jesus, and He will turn our emptiness into fullness and joy!  Lord, give me the grace to do the Father’s will, my peace (Dante) today!  Mother Mary, help me to bring Christ to birth in myself and others.

The statue of St. Francis of Assisi symbolizes for me the knight-errant saint’s nuptial union with Lady Poverty, the Franciscan ideal of radical, total dependence upon God and His Providence.  The saint’s goal is not just material poverty, but the deeper “poverty of spirit” which Our Lord spoke about in the First Beatitude.[vii]  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, in his little masterpiece on St. Francis, says that the Poor Man of Assisi has such a vision of radical, total contingency, that he saw the whole world and everything in it hanging, as it were, upside-down by a string.

Francis, help me to realize my nothingness without God – my being mere “dust and ashes” without Him.[viii]  Help me to realize that only in Christ can I help to “repair the Church”, as Jesus commanded us to do from His Crucifix.  Teach me to know more fully my nothingness and the infinite love that the Father has for me as He raises me and all my brothers and sisters to share in Christ’s divinity by making His Son, Jesus Christ, our Brother!

Closest to the blessed tabernacle – where the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity, reigns – and after the statue of what is dear to me, a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, Our Lady of Palestine, is the stained glass window of St. Patrick.  In my eyes, it is a tribute to the fervent Catholicism of so many Irish-Americans who have shaped my own understanding of the Faith.

The saint seems to be calling us, lions now transformed with the Body and Blood of Christ, to the missionary work that he was so famous for in his own lifetime.  He points to the front doors of the church, outside of which are millions who have never heard the name of Christ.  He is sending us out into the world to share Our Lord and Divine Brother’s very Triune Life with all men and women.

Next in my meditations before Mass, which St. John Eudes said requires more than an eternity of preparation, come the stained glass windows of St. Anthony of Padua and the “Angelic Doctor”, St. Thomas Aquinas.  St. Anthony, in a rare posture without the Child Jesus in his arms, points downward to earth, indicating to me that he is urging us, with the Church, to seek and find in redeemed Creation our Brother Jesus Christ, Who raises the world to Heaven.  I, like the donkey of Rimini, must kneel before Christ in the Eucharist rather than eat the hay; as we must all do.  And this includes the Gnostics and the naysayers.  “They will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

Every church, as John Cardinal Newman said, is the holiest place on earth.  “A little corner of Heaven”, others have called it.  It is not merely a building, an assembly hall.  I think back to the young, confused man who, leaning irreverently against the altar in St. Joseph’s one morning with a can of soda in his hand, scolded me for believing that the altar and church were holy, uniquely different from the rest of the world.  St. Anthony, the patron of the “lost and neglected”, in his humble Franciscan cassock, reminds us of the transcendent and other riches of Christ and His Church right here on earth – not in some platonic realm of ideas.  “Francis, repair My Church.”  We must find with St. Francis and St. Anthony these riches again, repair the Church, recover what we have lost and are neglecting.  As the patron saint of the “lost and neglected”, St. Anthony has special appeal to me as an historian.  There are so many good things, not to mention good people of faith, we have forgotten or refuse to remember in our tradition.

Looking at the stained glass window of St. Anthony, my father’s and brother’s first name and a name that runs in mine and many other Italian families, always puts me in mind of another much-loved saint – an Italian-American – in the Santello and D’Elia families, which is Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini.  In fact, my mother was named after her.  Like St. Anthony of Padua, Mother Cabrini summons us to enjoy and profit from the rich heritage and consolations of our ancient Catholic faith – “to hold fast to what you have lest someone rob you of your crown”.[ix]

Mother Cabrini was sent to America in 1889 by Pope Leo XIII to strengthen the Catholicism of her Italian countrymen, many of whom were losing their religious identity in what was to them a strange land.  She made many visits to New Paltz from nearby West Park, New York, where she established an orphanage and the motherhouse of her new congregation, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

A Franciscan like St. Anthony, a member of the Third Order of St. Francis like the writer of this article, Mother Cabrini realized, as did Pope Leo XIII and her bishop, Blessed Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, that the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist as the “source and summit of the Church” was especially under attack in the modern world.  What Mother Cabrini was trying to affirm for Italian-American Catholics and to teach all people is symbolized for me in the next stained glass window, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who gestures toward the blessed tabernacle.  The Angelic or Common Doctor of the Church, as he has come to be known, points up to the tabernacle, where dwells Emmanuel, “God with us”, in every Catholic church.  He reminds us by pointing upwards of the transcendence of the Church; while, opposite of him, St. Anthony complements Catholic teaching by pointing downward, affirming that Creation belongs to the Father, too. 

St. Thomas’ devotion to the Eucharist is well-known.  The saint classically formulated the Church’s doctrine of Transubstantiation which was reaffirmed at the Council of Trent against the Protestant Reformers.  I have been to the church in Naples where, according to tradition, Our Lord spoke from the Crucifix to St. Thomas, who had left his great work on the Eucharist on the altar overnight before having it published.  “Thou hast written well of Me, Thomas; what reward would thou have?”  “Nothing but Thyself, Lord,” was the saint’s reply.

“Nothing but Thyself, Lord.”  The infinite reward is Jesus Christ; and by our Divine Brother’s life, passion, death and Resurrection, we may all receive Him.  And what is this reward?  The “Way, the Truth, and the Life”,[x] - all leading with Jesus Christ Our Lord back to the Father.  “He who feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood has life eternal, and I will raise him up on the last day.”[xi]  The nourishment of eternal life, in Christ we achieve ourselves, our fullness, our oneness with Christ and the Father.  In the Eucharist, St. Thomas teaches the ancient doctrine of the Church, we are transformed into God.  “For He was made man, so that we might be made God.” (St. Athanasius)

His is what the Church promises every one of us as a gift, not as a reward.  And the Eucharist and all the Sacraments are ours, unmerited by us as they are, when we submit to the Church, which is a “real community of life with Christ…His perpetual presence, and all this now living in her and for her.” (Louis Bouyer)

Near the inside entrance to the Church, there is a beautiful statue of Our Lord exposing His Sacred Heart.  We remember the words of St. John of the Cross, that as with any statue, our devotion should always be “spiritually toward the invisible saint in immediate forgetfulness of the statue.”  The statue is beautiful, but the message for our prayer and meditation is more so: Christ loved the Father with “all His heart, mind, soul, and strength”, and calls us to do the same.  His is the Sacred Heart, the fullness of love for the Father – His Father and ours – and all our brothers and sisters.  As we strive to obey the Lord’s Commandments, to love God and neighbor, with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, our hearts become one, annealed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Before the stained glass window of St. Fortunata who, condemned to death by the pagan Roman judge, warned him that he could take away biological life, but only God would bestow it, I pause to consider the higher life to which we are called to live and to adore Life Himself in the Eucharist, Jesus Christ.  I pray for the men and women of the New Paltz Rescue Squad, who saved my life after a major heart attack, and all the physicians, nurses and health care workers.

At the eighth Station of the Cross, where Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, I remember all those who shared their intense Catholic faith with me in so many Apostolates, especially laymen and women like L. Brent Bozell, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Ann and Warren H. Carroll, Robert Herrera, and Eloise and William Koneazny.

St. Benedict of Nursia, staff in hand, is next.  Ora et labora, with penance, is our way to our Divine Brother and home to the Father.  How fitting that our Pope, Benedict XVI, chose this name, and that the “Father of Western Monasticism” calls us back to the Divine Liturgy after centuries of privacy in our prayer lives.  St. Benedict’s devotion to liturgical worship reminds us that the infinite treasure of the Mass must always be the focus of our solitary, pre-liturgical prayers, as it was with him.

Next comes the stained glass window of St. Jude the Apostle, patron saint of impossible causes, to whom I make my prayer.  “Without Me, you can do nothing.”[xii]  “…with God, all things are possible.”[xiii]  St. Jude urges me, all of us, to strive manfully for the authentic Faith of the saints, the Faith that believes this and lives by this.

And, finally, as I approach the altar, there is the window dedicated to St. Anne, mother of the Mother of God, to whom all of us brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, by grace of the Holy Spirit, look for hope and strength.  You gave to us the Virgin Mary, who made Jesus Christ our very brother, and we are co-heirs with Him – not slaves, not servants, not only friends and brothers, but blood of the same Heavenly Father, co-heirs of the Kingdom.

Our prayer and meditation before the altar and soon the Mass, the re-presentation of Our Savior’s passion, death, and Resurrection, ends with St. Thomas Aquinas’ answer to Our Eucharistic Lord’s question: “Thou hast written well of Me, Thomas; what reward would thou have?”  “Nothing but Thyself, Lord.”

Donald D’Elia is one of the founders of Italian Catholic Media Group.  His biography can be found on one of our pages at http://www.italiancatholiconline.com/About.html.