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News & Features

Aspiring deacons ‘rescue’ damaged monstrance
archived from: 2007-04-16
by: John Franko

Jack Miller could hardly believe his eyes when he saw a monstrance at a local auction house.

“You can’t auction a monstrance,” he thought.

But when he discovered there was nothing to prevent it from happening, Miller decided to take matters into his own hands.

He got his fellow classmates in the diocesan permanent diaconate program to pitch in to buy the vessel used for exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.

The class raised $800 to buy the damaged Spanish-style monstrance, which is believed to be between 100 and 125 years old.

“It speaks to their faith and to their great re-spect for tradition,” said Father John Bachkay, pastor of Miller’s home parish of Incarnation of the Lord on Pitts-burgh’s North Side.

“It’s not just a piece of metal, but the connection to the Eucharist.”

But the purchase of the monstrance was just the beginning of the story.

The class decided to donate it to a needy mission. Through his affiliation with St. Paul of the Cross Monastery on Pittsburgh’s South Side, Miller has come into contact with Charity Sister Mary Clark, a staff member at the facility.

Sister Mary’s brother, Father Lucian Clark, is a Passionist missionary in Jamaica.

As with many missions in Third World countries, a monstrance is a luxury that his mission could not afford. He gladly accepted it as a gift.

“It’s great that a piece of precious metal is not in a pawn shop,” said Mark Bibro of St. Pius X in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood, a member of the diaconate class. “It’s in a place where it will be valued and used.”

Sister Mary plans to present it to Father Lucian when she meets him in New York on April 19.

“I’m very moved by Jack’s sense of the sacred,” she said. “That he wouldn’t pass that monstrance up, so it would be treated carelessly.”

Father James Wehner, director of the Office for the Diaconate, was pleased that the members of the class have come to understand the sacredness of ministry. “The ordained are the custodians of the sacred vessels of the church,” he said. “This is a practical experience of it.”

The monstrance was missing a luna, the chamber in which the consecrated host is placed, and so Miller contacted the A.T. Merhaut Co. in Gibsonia. The company is a religious goods retailer.

In an ironic twist, it was discovered that founder Al Merhaut was once in the seminary with Father Lucian.

The class then decided to refurbish the monstrance, and it was shipped to Oklahoma for the work. The cost for the luna and refurbishing will come to some $1,700.

Miller said he isn’t sure where the funding will come from, but he isn’t worried. “The Holy Spirit has been involved in this rescue from the outset,” he said. “I have faith that he’ll see it through to the end.”

Miller expressed hope that parishes with unused monstrances will consider sending them to needy missions.

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