It has truly been a joy to be able to provide a recorded celebration of the Mass for the past two Sundays for our parishes. We hope that seeing and hearing familiar faces and voices helped as we transitioned into this new reality. As we began to think about and plan for Palm Sunday and Holy Week, it became clear very quickly that we would not be able to gather together to provide these services while keeping everyone safe and complying with social distancing directives. Further, our limited technical resources would prevent us from being able to provide these services to you with the quality they deserve. For these reasons, we made the difficult decision to suspend the recording of live Masses at the Collaborative for now, and to encourage everyone to participate in Masses and Holy Week services with the Cardinal Seán O’Malley and the Archdiocese of Boston through CatholicTV and other media. (The complete Holy Week schedule, along with where and how you can watch, will be featured prominently here on our website.)
While we are stepping away from gathering to record live Masses, we are not stepping away from engaging with you and our faith. We will continue to post homilies and reflections from Fr. Jim, Fr. Robert, Fr. Hehir, Msgr. Lind and Fr. Connelly on our Pastoral Blog, available on our website at www.sjspwellesley.org.
We are also launching a new weekly feature called “Together in Prayer: Our Weekly Celebration of the Word with our Faith Community“. Beginning today, Saturday, April 4, we will be providing a weekly recorded “Celebration of the Word” for Sunday, with readings from our lectors, homilies from our priests, and music from familiar voices. These celebrations are not meant to replace watching the live Mass on Sunday, but to enhance your engagement with it, while allowing us to connect and to continue to minister to you in a personal way.
“Our Weekly Celebration of the Word with our Faith Community” will be posted on the website and sent out to the email list each week on Saturday afternoon – our first edition is below: