August 23, 2021 – On Saturday, August 21, the Jesuit Province of Canada celebrated the priestly ordination of Adam Lalonde, SJ (Canada) at St. Patrick Parish in Ottawa, Ontario, by the Most Reverend Terrence Prendergast, SJ, Archbishop Emeritus of Ottawa-Cornwall.
Friends and relatives came from all over to celebrate this great moment with the universal Church and especially with the Jesuit Province of Canada. The ordination of Fr. Lalonde is a sign of joy and hope in the midst of difficult times and the constraints imposed for more than a year by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his comments to those gathered, Archbishop Prendergast made reference to the Gospel reading of the day, which describes Jesus going through the cities and villages of his time to proclaim the Good News of God’s Kingdom of justice, love, and peace (Matthew 9:35–38), “which He would inaugurate by his ministry, and especially by his passion, death on the cross, and resurrection to new life.”
Archbishop Prendergast also alluded to the wider work towards reconciliation, justice, and peace undertaken by Jesuits in Canada as a journey of conversion that is “summoning everyone in our country to a profound conversion with regard to our relationship with the Indigenous people of this land… We enter upon this difficult and necessary process of conversion in the spirit of the Scriptural readings we have heard this morning.”
He continued, “Jesuits are to carry on Jesus’s mission of healing the many people who go about not knowing where to turn for solace. They were in his time and are in our time ‘like sheep without a shepherd’… He showed them the compassion of his Sacred Heart… Above all, our world here in Canada desires to establish, or re-establish right relationships with one another and, in God’s time, reconciliation.”
Quoting the Book of Isaiah, he underlined Fr. Lalonde’s generosity in also embarking on a mission for the Kingdom, “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted… to comfort all who mourn… to give people the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit” (Isaiah 61:1–3).
“Within this company of disciples, a priest finds his role and the service he is called to render: to be a shepherd, to watch over, to keep together the holy people of God. As God’s anointed people, we receive and welcome today a newly anointed priest,” he added.
The ordination ceremony was followed by an intimate celebration attended by friends, Jesuits, family, and others close to Fr. Lalonde.
To learn more about Fr. Adam Lalonde’s journey, click here.
And click here to read in its entirety the text of the homily of the ordination mass.