Installation of Acolyte of Diocesan Seminarians Mass

Published: May 16, 2026

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily May 16, 2026, at the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock, installing seminarians Phil Necessary and Sam Stengel as acolytes.

Bishop Taylor

“God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.”  The responsorial psalm that you just heard is one of the great liturgical psalms of praise, and so quite appropriate for this Ascension Sunday ceremony in which we will be installing Phil Necessary and Sam Stengel formally as acolytes for the service of the Lord in our liturgy.  

Sam and Phil, as installed acolytes, you will have a permanent role in the Church’s Eucharistic ministry.  The summit and source of the Church’s life is the Eucharist, which builds up the community and makes it grow.  You will now have the special responsibility of assisting the priests and deacons in their ministry at Mass and as a special minister to give holy Communion to the faithful at the liturgy and bringing it to the sick in their homes and the hospital. 

Because you will now be assuming this sacred ministry, which is one more important step in your path to the priesthood, you should seek all the more to live in a way that corresponds fully to this high calling. You should strive to live more fully by the Lord’s sacrifice and to be molded more perfectly in its likeness, thereby offering yourself daily to God in union with our offering of Jesus to the Father from this altar, you yourself becoming also a spiritual sacrifice offered to God in union with the body and blood of Jesus our Savior, who though ascending to heaven in today’s Gospel promises to be with us always, until the end of the age.

Meantime, in carrying out your ministry in the Lord’s service as an acolyte, bear in mind that as you share the one bread and the one cup with your brothers and sisters, you also become one body with them.  So be sure to show a sincere love for Christ’s mystical body, God’s holy people, and especially for the weak, the sick and the troublesome.  

This will come easy to you if just take to heart the Lord’s great commandment, which he gave to his apostles at the Last Supper: “Love one another as I have loved you.”