Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Today we celebrated a memorial service for one of our Louisville priests who died. Archbishop Shelton Fabre presided. Next to him (on the left) was Deacon Dennis Nash whom I worked with in the 1970s when he was a high school student and I was running a youth group. We’ve been in contact over the years and it was great to see him now ministering to the People of God here.
This morning I spoke to the fourth-grade class at John Paul Academy. The teacher, Isaac Larrison, taught in another school in northern Kentucky with my sister, and when he heard I was back in Louisville, he invited me to his classroom where I talked about Cambodia.
Part of my transition back to Louisville is getting acclimated to Cherokee Park. Through extremely visionary planning on the part of Louisville’s early leaders, a series of large urban parks was created here by Frederick Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. One of these is the 400-acre Cherokee Park on the east side of downtown. All of my early years were in the West End of Louisville and my years as a priest in the South End so I’m very unfamiliar with the maze of trails and paths in Cherokee Park which is near my home now. Today I took an exploratory bike ride to the park and ended up at the Daniel Boone statue, one of the park’s landmarks.
Tuesday, 17 February 2026, is the first day of the Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year or Tet [Vietnam]) so today is New Year’s Eve. May the Year of the Horse be a good year for you!
Yesterday and today made me dramatically aware of the maze of relationships across many countries that are part of my life. That realization started yesterday with my meeting with Julia whom I first met in Cambodia. More on this in the next few days.
Love springs from new life, love springs from death. Love acts like Gandhi and our pets and Jesus and Mr. Bean and Mr. Rogers and Bette Midler. Love won’t be pinned down.
Love is often hard, ignored, or hilarious. But one thing is certain: Love is our only hope.
I had a meeting at Nazareth Home Highlands today (the sister home to Nazareth Home Clifton where I live) and arrived early so I explored their chapel. It is quite nice for a space for liturgy–well lit, spacious, flexible, and well appointed. It would be great for liturgies with deaf people because of its good, unobstructed sight lines.
In May, 1958 the eighth-grade class of St. Columba School in Louisville’s West End graduated and we all moved on to high school and the rest of our lives. That didn’t end all contact, though, and some of those classmates have continued to meet through the ensuing 68 years. Today 12 classmates and their spouses got together at an Italian restaurant, continuing bi-monthly lunches together. Because I just came back from Cambodia, it was the first time I had seen some of them since graduation. It was great! [Notice the restaurant ambiance! It is quite exotic with all sorts of Italian memorabilia and photos. Of special notice: a bust of Pope John XXIII on the table and his picture on the wall.]
