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Tenth Sunday of the Year
8 June 2008
Dear Friends in Christ,
I was born in Elkin, North Carolina, a small mill town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains located in Surry County close to the Virginia state line. The small hospital in which I was born, located providentially across the street from the very small Catholic church in town, later became a nursing home, and it was there that my mother’s father died on 5 November 1982. The date is doubly important to me because on that same day I was in New Jersey being received into full communion with the Catholic Church. I flew home the next day and joined my family in Elkin, and then we traveled higher up into the mountains to bury my grandfather, Robert Jones, in the cemetery of the small church he helped to build years before: the Mt. Carmel Church of the Brethren in Scottville, North Carolina.
Those memories come back to me now because on Saturday 7 June 2008 my cousin, Brandon Jones, will be ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Charlotte. Brandon and his twin brother Chandler are the sons of my mother’s older brother, also named Robert Jones (Yes, I’m the grandson and nephew of Bob Jones!), and on the day we buried our grandfather, Brad and Chad (as we call them in the family) and I rode back together from the family church in Alleghany County to their home in Surry County. During that journey my cousins, who were then 11 years old, were filled with questions about the thing I had done the day before: joined the Catholic Church. And in the years that followed the burial of our grandfather, Brandon and Chandler undertook their own search for (in Father Longenecker’s memorable phrase) More Christianity.
At length, Chandler was ordained an Anglican priest and now serves a congregation of the Anglican Province of America in Atlanta, and his twin brother Brandon became a Catholic. Brad studied classical languages at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, philosophy at the Catholic University of America, and sacred theology at the Angelicum in Rome and the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. He tried his vocation for several years in the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) but returned for his ordination to the secular priesthood in the Diocese of Charlotte. Father Brandon Jones will celebrate his first Mass of Thanksgiving on Sunday 8 June 2008 at St. Vincent’s Church in Charlotte, and I will be in Charlotte this weekend for his ordination and first Mass. Next weekend, however, I will be back at St. Mary’s with my newly ordained cousin for his second Sunday Mass.
On Sunday 15 June 2008, Father Brandon Jones will be the principal celebrant of our Solemn Mass at 11 am, and the guest preacher will be Father Allen Moran, O.P., a Dominican confrere of the newly ordained. In keeping with Father Jones’s background as a Latin scholar and Roman-trained theologian, our Solemn Mass on the 15th will be celebrated in Latin according to the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite (Missal of 1970) and special music will be provided. All are invited to join us at 11 am on 15 June 2008 as my cousin, Father Brandon Holder Jones, celebrates with great joy his ordination to the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Father Newman