This is real church.
Fr. Gene Walsh, a prof at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, told us that if a priest goes around his parish neighborhood knocking on every door, and if the people don’t know his church, he’s not doing his job.
The real church
Author: Charles Dittmeier
Indivisible Food Drive
Airport Plane Crash
While we were eating dinner tonight, a UPS cargo plane crashed at the Louisville airport which is the world headquarters for the UPS air services. A UPS MD-11 took off for Hawaii and then immediately went down, impacting three miles from the end of the runway. It is still continuous coverage on all the local TV stations and very little is known except the plane had a full load of fuel for the 8+ hour flight to Honolulu and created a huge fireball when it came down in a little populated industrial neighborhood. The emergency alert system contacted all the mobile phones in the area. 4 people are known dead and 11 injured and those numbers are expected to rise. The Louisville airport is in the middle of the city and fears of toxic chemicals and a spectacular smoke plume moving across the city caused officials to establish a shelter-in-place order that included the Nazareth Home where we live, but just now the air monitoring agency has determined there is nothing to fear so that area has been reduced.
Too Much Food
Life at Nazareth Home Clifton is good. The rooms are simple but nice, the staff are friendly and helpful, and the food is really good. And REALLY plentiful! We keep asking the kitchen crew to lessen the amount of food they put on the plates when serving us. Here is a photo of my choice for dinner tonight: taco salad, dirty rice, and refried beans–and way too much of it!
All Saints Weekend
Cousins Gathering
Our large extended family has a long tradition, started by the Dittmeier grandparents, of getting together. My visits to the United States were often occasions for such gatherings, and my recent return to the U.S. became an opportunity for the cousins to come together.
Autumn
Fratelli Tutti: Our Human Family
For a healthy relationship between love of one’s native land and a sound sense of belonging to our larger human family, it is helpful to keep in mind that global society is not the sum total of different countries, but rather the communion that exists among them. The mutual sense of belonging is prior to the emergence of individual groups. Each particular group becomes part of the fabric of universal communion and there discovers its own beauty. All individuals, whatever their origin, know that they are part of the greater human family, without which they will not be able to understand themselves fully.
Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti
Diocesan convocation
Room in the Inn
This morning I was bicycling from Nazareth Home to a mass at St. William Church. It was in the low 40ºs and when I passed the old chancery office, there were 20-25 men and women, a couple in wheelchairs, sitting on the curb wrapped in whatever clothes and blankets they have. They had spent the night outside on the street because there were no shelters spaces open. They had to be really cold and hungry and it made me think what the church, what I should be doing to help them.
Then when I saw the bulletin of St. Frances of Rome church, where I ended up attending mass, I was pleased to see a notice about RITI, Room In The Inn, a program started in Nashville by a Catholic priest who let street people sleep in his church building on really cold nights. The program has now spread to other cities, including Bardstown, Lexington, and Bowling Green in Kentucky. St. Frances of Rome is going to meet this week to discuss expanding a trial program started in January this year in Louisville. Go, St. Frances of Rome!