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Saturday 6 October 2007

Do you have a sacristan?

Does your parish have a sacristan?
Full or part-time or ad hoc?
Religious or lay?
Paid or volunteer?

I believe that until shortly before I became MD here, we had a sacristan, a woman who did the job on a volunteer basis
(We also had a volunteer lay person who did the altar server scheduling and training and calling to remind before every and I mean every Mass, who has since moved away, though he still drives to our town for weekend Mass.
Both of these jobs now fall to a priest, (still active in ministry but past retirement age, and increasingly vocal about the fact that he feels over-worked.)
Yesterday before Mass a chorister was telling me (in the side choir room, I am trying to discourage conversation in the loft, and incrementally it seem to be having an effect,) about a family wedding being held somewhere else, and the unreasonable twenty dollars they were expected to pay the sacristan.
Does the sacristan live in the church building?
Well, no, of course not, and anyway, it's a lay person, he wouldn't live at the rectory.
Oh, then he has to come in specially on Saturday afternoon?
To lay out one vestment!
(I chose not to ask about the prie-dieu, the altar cloths, the fans, the purificators, the hosts, the water, the wine, vessels, the aspergillium, [sp?] the incense, the windows, the fans or air conditioning or heat, the lights, the locks, the liturgical books, the quick clean up before the anticipated Mass.... all of which can and in my experience are dumped on a sacristan, or whoever is functioning as one.)
Mass began.
Deacon is not there, having been pressed into 1st Friday Communion Calls.
He usually sets out the pall, etc., (which I have seen priest had to bustle around doing before this Mass as soon as he returned from the funeral home,) as well as "stage managing" the grade-school servers, some of whom can't remember to stand up, or to face the altar if he doesn't flick a finger and raise an eyebrow in their direction. (Need I mention that they don't need to remember to kneel, as our servers do not kneel?)
After Prayer of the Faithful, priest announces that the grandchildren will bring up the gifts.
I figure without a deacon, priest and people will of course not be incensed, so music will need to be shorter than usual.
At least a dozen young people, ages maybe 6 to 17 get up and straggle down the the cross aisle, as I notice from the loft, with concern, that the table that holds the gifts for the offertory procession is empty. (I guess the deacon usually does that as well?)
However, the priest, from his vantage point in the sanctuary cannot actually see the table.
Kids mill around.
I try to wave to get the priest's attention, and slooooowly with other hand and both feet begin a looooong intro.
I psssst... to a chorister that she will have to go down and tell priest.
She looks at me as if I am speaking Swahili.
Servers, (Koreography by Keystone, by the way, preparing the altar, and again later, incensing, final procession and retrieving the processional Crucifix from the sacristy similarly... creative, without the guiding hand of the deacon, and with their own newness to it all,) arrive at table and join grandchildren in aimless milling around.
Finally one shrugs toward priest.
Pirest kindly waves them all up to sanctuary, blesses children and sends servers into sacristy to fetch the wafers and wine and water, sends them back to credence table to fetch accoutrements for lavabo, and I wind up my endless improv on the Arcadelt Ave Maria (it was a woman's funeral, and since people often forget to tell me, I just go on the assumption that she might have been a Rosary Society member, and hope no only asks for HMGW.)

Then I walk over to chorister and break my own rule about conversation in the loft during Mass, saying simply, "And that's why you pay the sacristan twenty dollars...."

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