Many Catholics in virtually every liturgical context prefer to sit in the back of the church. People have many reasons for doing so. Some are devotional: it can be a sign of humility, or sometimes people sit near an image or statue to which they are particularly devoted. Sometimes its practical – people who have mobility issues, or who want to avoid the direct air conditioning, or think it’s too loud in front or simply arrive late to Mass.

Communal prayer is one of the hallmarks of the Catholic Church. We don’t just pray as individuals, we consciously elect to gather together for prayer. And we not only gather together on Sunday for the celebration of the Eucharist, but many people gather together to pray the Rosary, or the Divine Mercy chaplet, or the Stations of the Cross.

This letter is to let you know that I have received permission from my Jesuit provincial to retire in the next couple of months. The majority of my priestly ministry has been here in Phoenix, either at Brophy College Prep for nine years in the 1970s or Saint Francis Xavier Parish for 18 years, and 12th of those years I served as pastor. So I have deep roots here.

In the Ten Commandments, it says “You shall not make for yourself an idol” (Ex 20:2) and the battle against idolatry was one of the central issues in Hebrew history. In Jewish theology, God is beyond all human comprehension and can not and should not be confined or limited by worshiping an idol, in the way that the Egyptians worshiped a golden calf, or the Philistines or Baby- lonians worshiped images of clay. Therefore, the use of images is strictly forbidden in the Jewish faith, and likewise in the Muslim faith as well.

Since our very beginnings, the Eucharist has been an essential part of what it means to be Church. After all, at the Last Supper, Jesus gave us his body and blood and said “Do this in remembrance of me.” But almost from the very beginning, there have questions about what “this” exactly is. As the Church grew and expanded, different local churches, in Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, Constantinople, Rome, and elsewhere had different variations on how to memorialize the Eucharist. These local practices evolved into rites, which most often took on the name of their geographic origin – the Byzantine Rite, the Antiochene Rite, the Roman Rite. For the first eight centuries of the Church, there was no perceived need to create a single, uniform rite.