Cormac – Bishop-elect Father Michael Brehl had an unofficial warm welcome to the Diocese of Pembroke on Sunday when he was greeted by about 2,000 people attending the 11 a.m. outdoor mass at the Shrine of St. Ann.

The newly-named bishop, who will be formally installed during a ceremony at St. Columbkille’s Cathedral in Pembroke in mid-August, was the principal celebrant and guest homilist at the morning mass and his message was focused on grandparents, not only because St. Ann was the grandmother of Jesus, but the day was also designated as World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly.

Cormac native Father Ryan Holly, who has been filling the role of Diocesan Administrator since the departure of Bishop Guy des Rochers almost one year ago, celebrated the 2 p.m. healing mass and also preached the sermon.

Wearing a beige straw hat as the hot sun of July beat down on the grounds, Fr. Brehl was introduced and assisted by Fr. Real Oullette who has been administrator at St. James, Eganville, St. Ann’s, Cormac and Nativity of Our Lady Mission, Pikwakanagan, since last fall. His appointment here ended on the weekend and he is now at St. Jean Baptiste Parish in Pembroke.

Fr. Oullette and parishioners at Cormac estimated about 2,000 attended the morning mass and about 1,400 the afternoon mass. The numbers were down from last year, he said, but he couldn’t pinpoint a reason why.

“I was told by some organizers that it fluctuates every year,” he said. “It was very hot, but the people who came seemed to be very happy with the event and had positive comments.”

Fr. Brehl, who walked on the third day of the annual pilgrimage from Renfrew to Cormac, via Mt. St. Patrick and along the Opeongo Road, spent some time in Cormac Saturday afternoon and evening and returned again Sunday morning. He only arrived in the diocese last week.

Following the morning mass, he met many people on the church grounds before returning to Pembroke.

Fr. Brehl said people gathered as a diocesan pilgrimage in gratitude and hope to celebrate good St. Ann who always points people to her grandson, Jesus.

“Perhaps this is especially important at this moment in human history when we seem to be at a kind of threshold in our world, with hostilities growing all over the world and on almost every continent, with a society that often treats human life as disposable,” he said. “And St. Ann stands before us as a witness to the value of human life, to the way in which God so cherishes every human being, that through her, through her daughter, the Blessed Virgin Mary, God actually sends His son to become human like everyone of us gathered here.”

Quoting Pope St. John Paul, he said, “For Jesus worked with human hands; He thought with a human mind; He acted with a human will and with a human heart He loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things, except sin.

“He is the redeemer of humanity.”

Fr. Brehl said he has always found those words beautiful and powerful, especially today when one looks at the world we are living in, “where those words are not truly valued, where we seem sometimes to lose something of our humanity in the way we can discount others, or in the way we can fail to appreciate what a gift it is that each one of us has been called to life, to work like Jesus with human hands, to think like Jesus with a human mind, to choose and to act like Jesus with a human will, and to love with a human heart.”

He said faith teaches us that Jesus learned what it means to be human and grew in “age and wisdom and grace” living in a human family.

“No one of us is born knowing fully what it means to be a human person born in the image and likeness of God,” Fr. Brehl said. “We learn what that means in our homes.”

This is something people learn from both grandparents and parents and if lucky, great-grandparents, he said.

“This was the role entrusted to Ann and her husband Joachim, to teach the Redeemer, the son of God by the example of their lives and their love for each other and His mother the blessed Virgin Mary, what it means to be truly human,” he said.

They had a special place to create the human environment in which Jesus could learn and experience love with a human heart, what it means to forgive, he said. He also learned to work with His hands and think with a human mind, he said. This process is all shaped in the home, he stressed.

This learning and nurturing also occurs in the home today, Fr. Brehl said.

“To know God, to know their faith, to know what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and to know him as our Redeemer,” he said.

The impact of passing on faith was seen for him in the example 20 years ago in Toronto when a large group of Chinese adults came to be baptized. They had been nurtured in their faith in China by their grandparents but were unable to be baptized there because in this culture it was impossible to live their faith openly, he said.

“Those grandparents, like St. Ann, taught them what it means to be truly human and free and faithful in the image and likeness of God,” he said.

Fr. Brehl encouraged those present to reflect on the importance of being a grandparent or remembering their grandparents and the role their faith plays in their life.

“I was always taught when you go to a pilgrimage you have to have a bit of homework to take with you,” he noted.

“This year, I ask you to do something which I think might be fairly simple. Every grandchild who has a grandparent living, contact them in the next week. It might be an email or a phone call. Tell them one reason you are grateful they are your grandparent,” he said.

If grandparents are in heaven, they can be contacted through prayer, he added, noting St. Ann will make sure they get the message.

“Tell them you are grateful you come from the family you do. You have been formed and shaped, just as Jesus was in the family of Ann and Joachim and Mary and Joseph,” he said. “May God bless us all as we try to follow Jesus, fully human and fully divine, our Redeemer and our Lord.”

Fr. Oullette expressed his thanks to the many volunteers who assisted with organizing the pilgrimage, and those who helped set up and dismantle after the celebration.

“It could not happen without them,” he said