Welcoming Fr. Zidago: A "Specialist"

 

How blessed we’ve been by our assistant pastors!

The gentleness of Fr. Xavier Royappan. The reflective wisdom of Fr. Paul Goo. The youthful energy of Fr. Giovanni Schiesari. Fr. Jeff Thomson with his organizational gifts that saw us through the pandemic. And the engaging and challenging preaching of Fr. Lucio Choi.

Each one of the five priests brought what our parish needed at the time.

And now we have a new one. What has the Lord sent us in Fr. Guy Zidago, whom we welcome today?

Our new assistant pastor arrives at CTR in the midst of a crisis.

But before Fr. Zidago turns around and heads back to Chilliwack, let me explain what I mean by “crisis”.

I don’t mean a panic or a meltdown—not that kind of crisis. The word comes to us from the Greek word for decision. Its initial use was in medicine: the crisis was the turning point in an illness—the decisive moment when it came clear that the patient would live or die.

A perfect storm of changes—some related to the pandemic, others to culture, still others to housing costs and the economy—is raging all around us. Our parish is in a crisis—a moment of decision. Will we simply manage decline, or will we take a new and bold path together?

 In this crisis, we are like a patient who has been assigned a new specialist. Fr. Zidago comes to us with all the usual priestly formation, but he has had special training and experience in a particular area: reawakening faith, helping people learn to live fully the Christian life.

He is a member of the Neocatechumenal Way, founded in the 1960s by two lay people, a man and a woman, who decided to offer the weary and weakened Church in Europe a path to full-on Christian life.

This movement is the cradle in which Fr. Zidago was rocked! A community “which aims at leading people to fraternal communion and mature faith”—to wholehearted and abundant life.

He is a specialist in proclaiming the bedrock of the Gospel message—the invitation to a personal friendship with Christ, lived in community with other Christians.

To prepare to welcome Fr. Zidago, I read up on the Neocatechumenate. Among those the movement tries to reach are those who have drifted away from the Church, those who have not been sufficiently evangelized and catechized, and those who desire to deepen and mature their faith (cf. Statutes, Article 5, §1).

Aren’t these precisely the people Christ the Redeemer parish hopes to welcome and form as disciples?

In today’s second reading, St. Paul tells the only way we can respond to this crisis, to this turning point in our history. He says “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is…” Christ who “is all and in all.”

Those words remind me of a favourite verse from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.”

At this time of crisis, the way forward for our parish is not “mere” Christianity but “real” Christianity, lived through personal relationship with the Lord.

We don’t want to be an average parish but an extraordinary one, in which each member is invited to dive deeper in faith—to take the plunge.

I think we’ll find Fr. Zidago a good coach as we stand nervously at the edge of the pool.