Celebrating the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity and the recent resumption of public Masses at St. Peter’s Church in Waldorf, Maryland, Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory joined the parish at Mass on June 7. This was the second weekend that parishes in Southern Maryland opened their doors for public Masses as local jurisdictions began to ease restrictions on gatherings.
“On the solemn Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, I visit and rejoice with the parish family of St. Peter’s for the first time,” Archbishop Gregory said. “As your resumption of worship continues to move forward… and attempts to restore an ordinary way of life, I feel particularly blessed to help you inaugurate this time of transition.”
In his homily, the archbishop described the perfect love of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
“God’s love is so absolute that it seeks nothing for itself,” Archbishop Gregory said. “The Father loves His Son and is loved in return by the Son so perfectly and completely that this love itself becomes another person, the Holy Spirit.”
There is nothing in the human experience, however, that can prepare man to understand this “mystery of life of the Trinity, apart from Jesus’ revelation,” he explained.
“This solemn feast of God’s inner life is but another celebration of just how much God wants us to know about Him,” Archbishop Gregory said.
The archbishop said the Feast of the Holy Trinity, in particular, invites people into deeper communion and friendship with God, and just as when people begin to make friends with one another they reveal things about themselves to others, so Christ reveals more about the Trinity with those who follow Him.
“The feast of God’s inner life, the Most Holy Trinity, is a celebration of how much God wants to be friends with us,” Archbishop Gregory said. “He reveals to us His inner life and God so much more than merely reveals how He lives, He wants us to live within that life with Him. The Trinity is not merely a mystery; it is an invitation for us to enter even more deeply into God’s life itself.”
Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the faithful are invited to “enter that great circle of love” that exists between the Holy Trinity, the archbishop said.
“The Father creates, the Son redeems and the Holy Spirit unites us to God’s very self,” he added. “We are God’s friends, made so by Christ Jesus and His revelation of God’s inner life as an indication of how much God both trusts and loves us – telling us about Himself and asking us to come close and share in His very life.”
Archbishop Gregory thanked Father Keith Woods, the pastor of St. Peter’s, for the invitation to join the parish as they gathered for Mass for the second weekend since March, when public Masses in the Archdiocese of Washington were suspended in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Parishes in Washington, D.C., and in Maryland’s surrounding Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties hope to see restrictions lifted in their local areas in the coming weeks so that public Masses can resume throughout the entire archdiocese.
People attending the Mass at St. Peter’s followed safety guidelines, including wearing facemasks and sitting at social distances. Family groups sat together. After Mass, the church was sanitized.
