image credit: The Ascension, unknown English illustrator, shamelessly pinched from here
I think it's a pastoral mistake to transfer the Ascension to Sunday, but Covid has taught me to just roll with it. Instead of Ascension Thursday maybe we can re-christen it DangleFoot Sunday, since so much of the sacred art for the day features Christ's feet as all that's left visible
Bishop Barron's homily for the Ascension is worthwhile.
This past Wednesday, together with a few other parishioners, Mr. W. & I participated in my first ever Rogation Day procession. (There seems to be an informal move, even among non- "Trads," to re-introduce rogation days. There are three leading up to Ascension Thursday, and according to our neighborhood organizer, there was once a tradition in England of "beating the bounds" -- walking the boundaries of the parish in procession, both to remember those boundaries in the absence of maps, and to ask for protection against plague, famine, and natural disaster. We were a homely little band what w/ social distancing and all, but I am pretty much always game for a procession.
On another note: earlier in the week -- the 18th-- it would have been Pope St. John Paul the Great's 100th birthday. Pope Francis noted it in a special Mass and a very nice, simple homily. And Papa Benedict wrote a letter for the occasion -- I wish I could see the original as the translations seems a bit awkward, but it's still encouraging and instructive.
