The pews at St. Aloysius Catholic Church were filled as Cardinal Wilton Gregory offered a Lenten Mass with students at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. on March 16.
Gonzaga is an all-boys preparatory high school with a student body of just under 1,000 students. It was originally established as the Washington Seminary in 1821 by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
Cardinal Gregory celebrated the Mass along with Jesuit Father Joseph Lingan, president of the school who also graduated from there in 1975.
During his homily, the cardinal referenced the reading from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus drove out an evil spirit.
“The season of Lent is filled with readings that introduce a recurrent theme, and that theme is you have to make a decision, you have to choose one or the other. From the very beginning of the season of Lent, God's word invites us to say, ‘which side are you going to be on?’” Cardinal Gregory said.
The cardinal said the students at Gonzaga had made a choice: “to be a man for others,” which paraphrases the Jesuit motto of “Men with and for Others.”
An upcoming decision, not only for the students but Catholics as a whole, is at Easter when Catholics are called to renew their Baptismal promise, the cardinal pointed out.
“There are many opportunities that you will encounter that will allow you to reaffirm that choice. But in the season of Lent, we keep hearing those words of making a decision. Whose team are you on? Who do you belong to?” Cardinal Gregory said. “The answer will come, or the final opportunity, I should say, will come at Easter when we renew our baptismal promises because there, the whole church, throughout the world is going to be invited to reject Satan, to accept Christ, to live in a new way because of Christ's triumph over death.”
He also discussed Women’s History Month with the students at the all-boys school.
“It's important that you young men recognize the significance of women in our society and what they have done, not only personally in all of our lives, but to our entire world and to the United States and to Gonzaga,” Cardinal Gregory said. “I'm sure many of you are sitting here because moms and grandmothers had suggested, maybe a little stronger than suggested, that you do well in Gonzaga.”
Colleen Karchunas, the assistant director of campus ministry at Gonzaga, discussed with the Catholic Standard how the school is observing the Lenten season.
“We've come up with some different kinds of programming for students, so that's just more of the regular opportunities like Confession and adoration (of the Most Blessed Sacrament). We also have a couple of Stations of the Cross that we've been doing with students. For example, we had Stations of the Cross for racial justice a couple of weeks ago, so a lot of students were involved with that, so it was cool,” Karchunas said.
She said she appreciated Cardinal Gregory’s homily and its focus on how Lent is a time for reflection.
“I really appreciated how he just focused the students on Lent because the more that they hear about that, hopefully, the more they're thinking about it,” Karchunas said. “The cardinal is someone who I really admire and he just has so many important parts of his ministry that are really focused on including others. I think he's a great witness for our students to see. He's not only speaking about inclusion, but he's also like really modeling it for them.”
Karchunas also pointed out that Lent is an opportunity for students to develop their relationship with God.
“I think for a lot of people, Lent can be a time where we can get caught up in doing practices, which is great, but we really hope for that inner transformation of the students. And something we've tried to emphasize too with these stations of the cross, like for racial justice, for example, is living in the right relationships with themselves, with God, and with others. Lent really helps us like to focus back on that right relationship,” she said.
In keeping with the solemnity of Lent, the students did not sing their alma mater at the end of the Mass.
