Here are five of my family at the St. Joseph Picnic for Kids (previously known as the St. Joe Orphans Picnic) last Saturday. The picnic has been a Louisville tradition for about 100 years. Our grandmother told us about taking her ten children there, all of them in suits and dresses. And when I was a college seminarian, I ran the seminary cookie booth at the picnic for two years.
Yesterday and the day before I had some major computer problems as I tried to set up a new configuration with a new desktop. Some hardware just wouldn’t work and that problem was made worse by a refusal to connect to the wi-fi. The result: I couldn’t post anything the last two days.
Once or twice each month I am asked to preside at masses at St. Boniface Church, the oldest Catholic Church (1836) in Louisville. Here are a couple photos from this morning.
One of the sacristans was taking home for repairs an old-style vestment called a chasuble that was in use in the 1950s. Some of the more conservative younger priests prefer this style even though it went out of use before they were born!
When it was time to go, I went over to reclaim my bicycle for the ride home. It’s not safe to leave it outside so the Sacred Heart watches it for me during mass.
188. These considerations help us recognize the urgent need to combat all that threatens or violates fundamental human rights. Politicians are called to “tend to the needs of individuals and peoples. To tend those in need takes strength and tenderness, effort and generosity in the midst of a functionalistic and privatized mindset that inexorably leads to a ‘throwaway culture’… It involves taking responsibility for the present with its situations of utter marginalization and anguish, and being capable of bestowing dignity upon it”. It will likewise inspire intense efforts to ensure that “everything be done to protect the status and dignity of the human person”. Politicians are doers, builders with ambitious goals, possessed of a broad, realistic and pragmatic gaze that looks beyond their own borders. Their biggest concern should not be about a drop in the polls, but about finding effective solutions to “the phenomenon of social and economic exclusion, with its baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism and international organized crime. Such is the magnitude of these situations, and their toll in innocent lives, that we must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism that would assuage our consciences. We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges”. This includes taking intelligent advantage of the immense resources offered by technological development.
Every two months I post an article in The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville. Here is a link to the latest article which was published today.
This morning I presided at mass at St. Augustine parish, a predominantly black church in Louisville. 45+ years ago, we had our Catholic Deaf Office located in the school (closed) building there and on Sunday afternoons had our deaf mass in sign language when the masses for the hearing community were finished. It was great to be back at St. Augustine. It is a warm and welcoming community!
After 42 years in Asia, I returned home to Kentucky. But it isn’t the home I left. Things I saw THEN are different NOW. Life HERE is different from life THERE. Here is another sample of the differences.
THEN
When I left the US in the early 1980s, everyone on the TV commercials spoke “Murican”.
NOW
Now it seems it’s almost the norm to have an accented English for the voices.
