St. Meinrad Assembly

Monday

The first official act of the assembly was the group photo, always taken on the front steps of the seminary building.

Before supper there was a social gathering where the guys could reunite with friends and meet the new clergy in the diocese.
A special part of the social was the introduction of the seminarians of the diocese, those who are studying to replace us older priests.
I ate dinner with Thomas, one of the seminarians I had not met before. He is studying at St. Meinrad.
The first business session of the assembly was an update on the diocesan reorganization by Mr. Brian Reynolds, the chancellor of the archdiocese.

St. Meinrad Assembly

Monday

Every year the priests of Louisville have an assembly at St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana, 90 miles from Louisville. Today Fr. Roy Stiles and I drove there after lunch, with our bicycles in the back of his truck.

The last half of the trip is through the Hoosier National Forest and it was a special delight for me to experience the woodlands again. I missed the forests when I was in Cambodia.

The first task on arrival was to register and get our room keys.

Mass of the Air

The sign language interpreting
The sign language interpreters are set up in the rear of the chapel where they can see the ministers and the flow of the liturgy.
The interpreters work in pairs. Nancy (L) is the actual interpreter and Peg (R) is the prompter. Peg supplies words or phrases that may be difficult to hear and also especially feeds the lines of a hymn to Nancy in advance to give her an extra second or two to determine how to sign poetic phrasing.
Out of sight, a taping crew from a local TV station operate a control room to select cameras, change angles, and mix the feeds, producing a very professional product.

Mass of the Air

50 years ago the Archdiocese of Louisville began broadcasting a televised mass each Sunday for people who could not travel to their parish church. I was part of that early initiative, helping to provide sign language interpretation for the televised masses and also occasionally being the priest presider. Last night I went to the taping of two masses to be shown in June, to see how the project has developed in the four decades I was out of Louisville.

Before the taping, Fr. Joe Graffis met with the lector while the musicians got ready.
The masses are taped in the chapel of what was the mother house of the Ursuline Sisters of Louisville. The mother house and chapel have now been turned over to the schools that the sisters started on the campus, but the agreement allows for Mass of the Air to continue to use the chapel.

Fr. Graffis is a veteran with Mass of the Air and knows how to follow the signals of the producer and especially to keep the mass to its 28.5 minutes limit.
A core of dedicated volunteers has stayed with Mass of the Air over its 50-year run. Mass of the Air is professionally produced and other dioceses use the Louisville tape each week because they don’t have the expertise or resources to do their own televised mass.

Early Mission

This week I was at the pastoral center of the Archdiocese of Louisville and saw this map of the diocese of Bardstown (Kentucky), the first diocese established west of the Appalachian Mountains. It extended from the present Georgia border to Canada and from the Pennsylvania border to the Oklahoma border. Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, a missionary from France, was the first bishop and moved the diocese from Bardstown to Louisville in 1841. Coming from France to the American mid West was a daunting mission assignment!

Memorial Day

I try to ride my bike as much as I can and when I had a holiday today, I took advantage of it and took off through our famous Cherokee Park’s 400 acres. Hogan’s Fountain is a Louisville fixture that everyone knows and Beargrass Creek is a safe place for families to explore and then there are the miles of roads and bike paths to traverse.

Fratelli Tutti

Pope Francis’ Encyclical

Human rights need to be in our awareness these days as the president and congress work at voter suppression and encourage state and local authorities to do the same.

22. It frequently becomes clear that, in practice, human rights are not equal for all. Respect for those rights “is the preliminary condition for a country’s social and economic development. When the dignity of the human person is respected, and his or her rights recognized and guaranteed, creativity and interdependence thrive, and the creativity of the human personality is released through actions that further the common good”. Yet, “by closely observing our contemporary societies, we see numerous contradictions that lead us to wonder whether the equal dignity of all human beings, solemnly proclaimed seventy years ago, is truly recognized, respected, protected and promoted in every situation. In today’s world, many forms of injustice persist, fed by …. a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings. While one part of humanity lives in opulence, another part sees its own dignity denied, scorned or trampled upon, and its fundamental rights discarded or violated”. What does this tell us about the equality of rights grounded in innate human dignity?

Church Priorities

The Catholic Church has been active for 2000+ years and has initiated and developed many valuable programs and services. Based on the vision and teaching of Jesus, though, probably the two most important responsibilities of the church are not building schools and hospitals—valuable, even necessary as that is–but [1] providing the eucharist in which the people of God are united with Jesus their head and [2] serving the poor which Jesus constantly spoke about. Today I was at St. Frances of Rome Church, one of the oldest parishes in Louisville.

The small neighborhood church, simply but tastefully appointed, provides a warm and welcoming space for the community to gather in.
The church also each weekend puts out baskets (under the table above) to collect non-perishable foods for community food pantries. Today I dropped off a couple boxes of cereal we had to donate.