To host Mass again, Annunciation Church must be purified, Catholic guidelines say

Parishioners from Church of the Annunciation were busy working on the grounds of the tragic shooting site Thursday, serving up cold drinks and snacks for mourners and law enforcement, organizing tributes, making sure members of the media did not tread on the flowers.

But off limits to them right now is Mass inside the church itself.

Before the parishioners can worship inside their south Minneapolis church again, a formal purification ceremony should take place.

Catholic Church canon law dictates that a purification ceremony formally known as De Reconciliatione Ecclesiae Violatae — or “On the Reconciliation of a Violated Church” — should be held inside Church of the Annunciation in order for Mass to be held there again. The church is currently closed and was being treated as a crime scene through Thursday. Plans are for Mass to be held instead in the adjoining Annunciation School Auditorium this weekend.

The reconciliation process typically involves stripping the altar and removing adornments inside the church. Then a ritual with specific prayers, holy water and incense blesses the space anew.

It’s a ritual stipulated not only for killings inside a church but also other acts of violence, theft or anything else considered “crimes that are serious offenses against the dignity of the person and of society,” according to church instructions.

“In layman’s terms, it’s required any time something took place that desecrated the church or violated a sacred space,” said the Rev. John Ubel, pastor and superintendent at the Church of St. Agnes in St. Paul and a longtime rector at the Cathedral of St. Paul. “It’s essentially a ceremony of purification.”

Those decisions are up to the archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Rev. Bernard Hebda, who likely would lead the ceremony.

A representative for the Twin Cities archdiocese said Thursday it’s too soon to discuss the reconciliation process for Annunciation. In the meantime, though, liturgies and prayer services can be held in other spaces on the property besides the main church where the tragedy took place.

Mass is now scheduled for Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 9:30 a.m. in the school auditorium.

Ubel could not remember a reconciliation ceremony taking place in recent decades at a church in the Twin Cities. However, he said, such ceremonies are not extremely rare. A more common instance is when a church is broken into, and its holy tabernacle is stolen or damaged.

“Any action that is greatly injurious to a church is fodder for this ceremony,” Ubel said.

“It was a crime scene first, but then it was important for us to reclaim it right away after that because we had two funerals to host,” remembered Abbot Primate Gregory Polan of Conception Abbey in Conception, Mo.

Polan said the reconciliation ritual was an important step, ”a rededication for the people that have suffered this loss to be able to once again feel that the church is a place for all of them to worship.”

Of course, there’s more to a church’s reconciliation after such tragedies than the formal ceremony, he added. He said another vital step toward returning to worship services at Conception Abbey was a group session with a friar who was also a trained psychologist, in which members of the abbey discussed the tragedy.

“It was a powerful experience, because everyone who spoke saw it from a different perspective,” Polan remembered. “And yet there was the singular idea that everyone was trying to move forward, but we were in different places. It really unified us in trying to move forward from the pain.”

St. Agnes’ pastor Ubel also did not underplay the significance of the religious aspect of the ceremony, but he, too, said there’s important work to be done on the human side of Wednesday’s tragedy.