Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
The second week in October, I was the guest of Jim and Roberta McLaughlin in Berkeley, California. I didn’t knowingly make any changes to my phone, but now three weeks after my return, I’m getting notices of the weather in the Bay Area.
In the first years I was a priest, before I worked with deaf people in Asia, I was a teacher-chaplain-counselor at Angela Merici High School which was on the same property as my first parish assignment. For four years of my time at A.M.H.S., Sr. Paula Klein-Kracht, OSU, was the principal. She was a well-educated and very competent woman. Paula died last week and today we had her funeral at the Ursuline Sisters motherhouse. There were so many people there who recognized and greeted me from 40 or 50 years ago!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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