Friedrich Nietsche, the man who famously declared that God is dead, also said he might have become a good Christian, as was the case with that other former pagan, renegade, and convert St. Augustine, had Jesus’ disciples only been better examples of human beings.
Was this too much to ask?
That unusual and attention-getting gambit was the way Father Robert Roy of St. Michael Catholic Church in Wooster Square began his reflections on Easter in this year of our coronavirus pandemic.
Because of the pandemic there were no services at the venerable and historic church on the east side of Wooster Square, where Roy has been pastor for the last two years.
Father Roy’s Nietschean ruminations were part of his printed reflections on Holy Week included in the bulletin of the church’s home page.
Still, last Sunday, Roy stood on the steps of St. Michael’s and handed out palm fronds, the symbolic marking of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion.
“One of problems with us,” Roy said in a telephone interview, “is that we’re not on a main drag.” And that was why he didn’t get as many folks coming by as he had thought.
“Most of our parishoners don’t live around here,” he said, although many grew up in the neighborhood and worship there out of both devotion and a deep sentimental attachment to local history.
“They come from West Haven, North Haven, Hamden, all over the place,” Father Roy added. St. Bernadettes, on Townsend Avenue in Morris Cove and Our lady of Pompeii on Foxon, were handing them out too, he said. “I wasn’t the only one.”
Many people have told him how much they love Holy Week, Roy said, but that love this year is going to have to be experienced and expressed in a different way.
For there were no in-person Good Friday (or Easter) services scheduled anywhere in the diocese, from Hartford to New Haven, as church leaders heeded the health advsories of the governor and all Holy Week services are being conducted on TV, online, and on radio by the Archdiocese of Hartford.
Click here for the complete schedule for the week.
And click here for Father Roy’s Palm Sunday sermon.
One Wooster Square old timer active in the church, Frank Gargano, wrote this response to Father Roy’s words: “Thank You Father Roy; it seems strange to hear the echo of an empty St. Michael Church on Palm Sunday; in childhood our Church was full — including the balcony benches! I hope to live long enough to see those days return by inviting all who have their roots & their heritage especially the Saint Michael Grammar School Alumni to come back home when this pandemic is defeated.”
Parishoners who wanted to be near a mass could find one on diocesan TV — where Roy himself over the years while shepherding churches in the Hartford area, has conducted many masses with only a camera looking on.
Father Roy’s reflections on St. Augustine and Nietzsche, which you can read in full here, niftily bring together the thinking of a father of the church and, as Roy puts it a “father of existentialism.”
Here’s how he summarized it:
“We are Easter Christians, and ALLELUIA is our song!” So would claim St. Augustine in the 4th century when he, himself, realized the power of Easter. St. Augustine had come to faith late in life, and for him the Easter message was one of power and unlimited possibility. Once he realized the power of the Easter message, that Jesus had suffered, died and rose from the dead for him personally, his life was changed dramatically. He went on to become one of the great doctors of the early church. In the late 1800’s, a German philosopher by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the fathers of existentialism, would state: “I could believe in Christianity if Christ’s disciples looked more redeemed!”
The challenge for all of us latter day Christians is to let the message of Easter permeate our entire beings as did St. Augustine so long ago.
Friday afternoon, when a reporter called and interrupted his viewing of the Easter service on diocesan TV — at an important time, 3:00 p.m., by tradition the hour Jesus died on the cross — - Father Roy said he would be recording a homily on these same themes of the power of hope, survival, and transformation most appropriate for corona virus times — -for posting on the church’s website or Facebook page on Friday evening.