Dear Brothers and Lasallian Partners,

The heart of the Church’s liturgical year is upon us again with its preparatory phase in Lent, its climax in the Paschal Triduum, and its extended fifty-day celebration in the Easter Season. Surely, this year as in every year, there is much to ponder and assimilate regarding our participation in Christ’s Paschal Mystery, the focus of this season. Again, I would like to offer a few thoughts about our participation in this Mystery, the core of our Christian life.

Last year I dwelt on the reality of communion or association seen as an effect of baptism, our initial incorporation into the Paschal Mystery, a reality that unites us with Christ and, in him, with one another. This communion is symbolized and strengthened in every Eucharist we celebrate, for there we enter into the very dynamics of Jesus’ self-giving that culminated in his saving death and resurrection which unites us to God and to one another.

Traditionally and fittingly, many people participate more frequently and/or more fervently in Mass throughout this extended season, especially during Lent. This more frequent, more fervent participation is in itself commendable, but participation in the Eucharist is supposed to lead to a more profound living of Christian life. Celebration of Eucharist without living what it symbolizes is empty ritualism. The Lenten season, especially, presents us with three major ways in which we can live the Mystery we celebrate in the Eucharist: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving or, to put it in perhaps more contemporary terms, prayer, self-sacrifice, and loving deeds.

At the close of the recent International Assembly, Associated for the Lasallian Educational Mission, Brother Á lvaro Echeverr í a, Superior General, offered a challenge, the response to which could well be a way of living out what we celebrate in the Eucharist and engage us significantly in the three major, traditional activities of the Lenten season. He said:

In the past few days, the meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations concluded in Rome and issued its final report on October 30 th concerning hunger in the world. It noted that we have lost 10 years and that the current situation is actually much worse. The document deals with the bitter failure of the plan proposed in 1996 that has put 854 million people at risk of malnutrition. The Director of FAO, Jacques Diof, acknowledged that far from reducing the number of people who go hungry in the world, the number is increasing at the rate of 4 million a year. This is an unacceptable and intolerable situation. Ten years later, there has been no improvement. However, today’s world is much richer than it was 10 years ago and the food supply is even more abundant (Corriere della Sera, October 31, 2006). Already in 2004, Jean Ziegler, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Food, affirmed: “Hunger is a daily silent massacre that constitutes a crime.” It is a human tragedy that targets, above all, infants and children. The annual report of the FAO indicates that 17,000 children, under the age of 5, died daily of hunger in 2004.

If children are the very heart of our Lasallian mission, what is the “sign of the times” telling us? What can we do? What should we be doing when we claim that the defense of their rights is a distinctive concern of our Lasallian Family, as was asked of us in the last General Chapter and that we recalled in this Assembly?

I suggest that in our communities, our families, our schools and other apostolates, we take up this challenge, as many of us have in the past, but with renewed awareness and vigor and with the motive of realizing in our lives and in the lives of others something of the Mystery we celebrate symbolically in our Eucharists and throughout this season. There are, undoubtedly, many ways to do this. One that has received wide acceptance in the past is to forego or minimize a meal or two a week and donate the money saved to some organization that provides for the alleviation of hunger such as Bread for the World (www.bread.org) or Catholic Relief Services’ Operation Rice Bowl (www.crs.org).

May God give us the grace to participate more fully in the Mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising throughout the Lenten Season, the Triduum, and the ensuing Easter Season not only through the liturgies of these days but especially in actions prompted by our prayerful participation in liturgy that engage us in self-sacrifice and loving deeds especially on behalf of starving children.

Fraternally,

Brother Stanislaus Campbell, FSC
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