SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Over 800 people filed into St Peter\u2019s Cathedral in Scranton for the annual 4p.m. Christmas Eve mass.<\/p>\n
Whether out of faith, belief, or obligation, each person had a reason to listen to the organ and take an hour out of their day to pray.<\/p>\n
Like Margaret Barry, who came from Sayre to support their son, a first-year seminarian for the Diocese of Scranton, and who looks forward to Christmas eve mass every year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just reminds us that we are in union with all of the Catholics around the world celebrating this important day,” explained Barry, “because this is when the savior came to us to save the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The service was led by Bishop Joseph Bambera, who\u2019s homily focused on how Christmas is the holiday of the poor. Poor of material, poor of spirit, or poor of purpose and told us that he always uses Christmas mass to remind the parish what Christmas is really about.<\/p>\n
\u201cChristmas has a whole lot of commercialism wisdom to it,” said Bishop Bambera. “You know, there\u2019s a whole focus on many, many different things, of cooking, of gift giving, and so forth, but when you see the number of people who are here this evening for this mass, you also stop to realize that everyone is willing and desirous of beginning this great celebration of Christmas in the place where it all began. The heart of this celebration is that we don\u2019t go through this world alone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Over 800 people filed into St Peter\u2019s Cathedral in Scranton for the annual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-70061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-scranton","9":"tag-scranton-headlines","10":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}