A STREET FAIR IN KAISERTOWN ?

Full Faith & Health Experience: Our Lady’s Street Fair

St Casimir’s 1^st for Buffalo

Saturday, August 14, 2021 from 4-9pm

 

Catholic means universal.  Universal catholic means more than global.  Catholics are on every continent.  Rome’s Bishop personally assigns and monitors bishops in every single diocese.  Our universality, however, is more than geography.

 

At the Holy Eucharist, God’s Body and Blood we meet and consume Jesus.  For the next four weeks John’s Gospel reminds us: Jesus is the living Bread from heaven.  He commanded us to eat his Body and drink his Blood weekly.  This is how Catholics believe.

 

Jesus’ Blessed Sacrament is more than receiving Holy Communion.  A first transformation of the bread and wine (transubstantiation) leads to a second.  Mass is destined to change believers across the world into a comm-union so great St Paul calls us, “Christ’s Mystical Body”.  The Sacrament is global “super glue,” holding people together, and the action of Jesus saving the world.

 

What does this have to do with Our Lady’s Street Fair?  Pope Benedict taught that if God can make bread into His body, he can also sanctify and change all creation into reflections of His presence.

Creation’s spiritual transformation is celebrated in St Casimir’s South transept, stained glass (see above).  The grand window shows the 12 astonished Apostles kneeling at Mary’s open grave.  Her body is gone.  Above them, the Holy Spirit with angels raise or assume his Mama, body and soul, into heaven.  The window wondrously depicts Our Lady’s Street Fair Feast Day – the Assumption of Mary.

 

This spectacular window portrays the ancient belief, of the Apostles returning to Mary’s tomb.  They find it filled with fragrant lilies, depicting her noble strength and eternal beauty.  This is why, during her August festival, we bless flowers and blooms, healing herbs and all types of grain.  St Casimir’s stained glass vividly  proclaims the role of Mama Mary, Queen of the Harvest of Souls (heaven’s first, full-time human resident) and First Lady of heaven’s household.

Polish spirituality sees the bounty and beauty of the summer harvest: flowers, herbs, and veggies as images of the eternal harvest of souls at the end of time.  We ask Mama Mary to take the good we do which is symbolized in special herbal, flowered, and grain bouquets (available at the Fair).  Through the priest’s blessing, extending the miraculous transfiguration of the Bread and Wine, we re-present an offering to the Creator.  For this small tithe of symbolic beauty, God bestows on us endless blessing of health and hope, as proclaimed in the newly translated Polish Marian hymn, Throughout all Ages (“Ciebie na Wieki”), yet another special feature of this year’s festival.

 

Being Catholic, means more than showing up at church on Sunday.  Sunday’s Bread of Angels extends blessing on all “the fruits of the earth and work of human hands.”  In profound gratitude we celebrate a feast for our eyes: vibrant color weavings, flowers, red and white pennants, cookie Rosaries for kids, pinwheels, music, knights, ladies in brilliant Polish garb.  Taste and smell quality herbs, food imports, roasted steer and swine, local beet smoothies and citrus coolers.  Madrigal music will captivate all the ears, creating new memories for all ages of Polonia, Catholics, and people of good will.

After months of lockdowns and too much bad news, celebrate restorative, faith fun. On the hour tour a unique Buffalo landmark or on the half-hour have a quiet conversation with the sainted Polish Pope who overnighted here.  Our Lady’s Street Fair is on Saturday, August 14, 2021 from 4-9pm, with a 7-8pm break for Mass, herb, essential oil, and flower blessing with rose anointing of all ladies/girls.  Then sip a herbal smoothie or cooler and bite into one of the roasts.

Rev Czesław M Krysa, Rector

Church of St Casimir, Buffalo, NY