Cardinal Wilton Gregory, at a Dec. 3 Mass at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Washington, D.C., marking the First Sunday of Advent that also kicked off the parish’s centennial celebration, suggested that many people are looking for a substitute for Advent.

“The shopping season drives people to do some bizarre things,” he said in his homily at the Southeast Washington parish. “Great crowds of people waited early in the morning to be first in line for the opening of a Wal-Mart, or Target, or Costco on Black Friday,” the cardinal added.

“In our post-Covid world, folks will log onto webpages throughout the day and night just to have a chance to claim a limited bargain. Our youngsters will go through all types of machinations to get a ticket for a concert seat for a famous entertainer. If our Washington sports teams somehow look like they might have a winning season,” he said to some knowing chuckles from the pews, “lots of folks will go to great lengths for playoff tickets – because hope springs eternal.”

And that, the cardinal noted, is “the meaning of this entire Advent season that we begin today.”

“You’re a devoted shopper if you will wait in the early dawn hours to get to the sales first,” he said. “What about waiting for the Messiah?”

Cardinal Gregory noted that some might think, “We know that He has come, and we know where He was born. We know about His family background. And we know what happened to him.”

The cardinal added, “So, the suspense is gone!”, but he noted that Advent is not merely about what has happened, “but what and who is to come!”

St. Francis Xavier’s 100th anniversary is a milestone, “a time to remember some of the great moments of the past, but also to anticipate what might happen tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow,” he said.

The Mass was celebrated on Dec. 3, which is ordinarily the feast of St. Francis Xavier, the parish’s patron saint.

In terms of preparation, Father Tony D’Souza, the pastor, said the parish has been working two years on ways to observe the anniversary.

In the earlier chapters of its history, St. Francis Xavier had a convent, which now houses the Southeast Family Center for Catholic Charities of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. The parish school, St. Francis Xavier Catholic Academy, is now part of the archdiocese’s Consortium of Catholic Academies. “The school is doing very well. They come and participate in our liturgies at least twice a month,” Father D’Souza said.

As the pastor there for two years, Father D’Souza said he has found St. Francis Xavier to be “a beautiful faith-centered community. It is a very small parish, but it is a God-fearing community, and I thought very welcoming as well -- a very welcoming parish.”

St. Francis Xavier Parish has begun raising funds to install a lift chair for the church to ease the physical burden on older parishioners who have to rely on a cane to negotiate steps about inside and outside the church.

The pastor said other centennial plans include a prayer breakfast in May, a big gala dinner in early December of 2024, and a New Year’s celebration to help ring in 2025.

Joyce H. Smith is not the parish historian, but she is one of a small number of parishioners whose tenure at St. Francis Xavier began during the parish’s first half-century.

A member since 1970, Smith said, “When I moved in I had two children and I wanted them to go to Catholic school. ... Msgr. (John) Bailey interviewed me and allowed them to go to St. Francis. Then he said, ‘If you’re going to join, you’ll have to sign up for the envelopes.’ So I’ve been a member ever since.”

The parish back then was “very much different,” she recalled. “Very, very white. There was some welcoming, but not a lot, so you had to make yourself known if you were African American. The parish started out as an Italian parish that people thought it was their parish,” she added, noting that it was the Italian women from St. Francis Xavier who taught her how to cook spaghetti at the parish’s spaghetti dinners.

At the parish’s creation in in 1924, “the streets were dirt roads,” Smith said. She remembered that when she visited her grandparents in Southern Maryland, Blacks would have to sit in the back of the church for Mass. But at St. Francis Xavier, as well as St. Dominic and St. Vincent de Paul parishes in the District, that tradition was gone by the mid-century, she said.

Smith recalled one milestone in parish history: “We used to have a child development center that was really, really wonderful. The children from the child development center would go right on to the (parish) school, which is now called the (St. Francis Xavier) Academy,” she said. “It was really, really good for young people that had children.”

Those who were assigned to St. Francis Xavier also left a positive mark, she said. “Sister Bridget (Monahan), that woman was an absolute jewel,” Smith said. “We had Mass for the seniors. At any one time, we would have 40 seniors at Mass, and we would do a really nice lunch for them” afterward with Sister Bridget’s help and encouragement.

“I had tragedy in my family in 1988,” Smith said. “ I can remember how the church supported me and protected me. One of the priests was Father (Peter) Daly, who was a lawyer (before becoming a priest). We had back then what was called a Lazarus Committee, which was for bereavement.”

The members of St. Francis Xavier didn’t keep the parish centennial to themselves. Knights of Columbus members assembled an honor guard for the Mass, and neighboring Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish lent its choir and musicians to the festivities.

Cardinal Gregory also had a guest to introduce at the end of Mass: Regina Crook, who was confirmed by the cardinal in 1997 at St. Patrick Church in Tipton, Illinois, when the cardinal was the bishop of Belleville in southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from the St. Louis area.

Crook, who is now a member of Christ, Prince of Peace Parish in Manchester, Missouri, had reason to be in Washington: Her young son, Ethan, was having his artwork displayed in the lower level of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, as one of the student winners in the National Christmas Artwork Contest sponsored by the Missionary Childhood Association. 

Crook remembered that Cardinal Gregory had been assigned to the Archdiocese of Washington, “so I called up his offices” to see where he would be that Sunday. That call led the Crook family to St. Francis Xavier and a reunion after 26 years.