Bishop Wester visits Rome

Intermountain Catholic

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IC Photo/Marie Mischel

The Most Rev. John C. Wester, Bishop of Salt Lake City, celebrates Mass April 15 in the Martyrs’ Chapel at the Pontifical North American College. The Mass was concelebrated by a number of his brother bishops who are in Rome for their "ad limina" visit with Pope Benedict XVI. Bishops are required to make an ad limina (to the threshold) visit about every five years. In his homily on Divine Mercy Sunday, Bishop Wester reflected on the emphasis that the Gospel places on the wounds of the resurrected Jesus. Society tends to "want to forget about the messiness" that led to a victor’s success, but in Jesus’ appearances after the Resurrection, his suffering "is sometimes very evident," Bishop Wester said. "It’s interesting to me that we would have these very real signs of the Passion right smack dab in the middle of the resurrection." The wounds are symbolic of Jesus’s surrender to the Father’s will, and "lead us to peace... something that comes when I surrender to the Lord, and the very things that I thought were marks of defeat and ignominity and aprobriem are actually the things that are really my gifts, my blessings, my graces in life." A complete story about Bishop Wester’s ad limina visit will appear in the April 27 issue of the Intermountain Catholic.

Joe Delka, a Diocese of Salt Lake City seminarian, serves as lector during a private Mass with the bishops at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.