Category: Church

The Catholic Church in Cambodia.

Liturgy Books to Cambodia

Every year I have asked the liturgy office of the Archdiocese of Louisville to get various liturgical books for the English Catholic Community in Cambodia. We had books for lectors and other ministers that were quite useful. Now that I am back in the U.S., I picked up the books in Louisville and yesterday shipped them to Phnom Penh via DHL. They have already arrived there, an amazing time since last year another service took 3+ weeks. But shipping the books cost 3 1/2 times their purchase price!

Fratelli Tutti

Pope Francis’ Encyclical: Political Charity

180. Recognizing that all people are our brothers and sisters, and seeking forms of social friendship that include everyone, is not merely utopian. It demands a decisive commitment to devising effective means to this end. Any effort along these lines becomes a noble exercise of charity. For whereas individuals can help others in need, when they join together in initiating social processes of fraternity and justice for all, they enter the “field of charity at its most vast, namely political charity”. [165] This entails working for a social and political order whose soul is social charity. [166] Once more, I appeal for a renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good”.

Candlelight Vigil

Tonight a group called Leviticus 19, mobilizing for immigrant justice, held a candlelight vigil at Our Mother of Sorrows Church in Louisville.
Fr. Pat Delahanty organized the vigil. He has been working on social justice issues for many years.
Representative Morgan McGarvey from the U.S. of Representatives spoke of the value and the rights of immigrants. He also honored his predecessor, Rep. Romano Mazzoli, who authored the last major immigration bill in Congress. Rep. Mazzoli’s son Michael also spoke.
The ever-faithful contingent from the larger Dittmeier family also made their appearance in support of immigrants and their rights.

Psalm 121:8

The Lord will guard you as you come and go, both now and forever.

The bishop’s office asked me to take masses at St. Boniface Church in Louisville for November and December, until the new pastor is in place, and I am happy to do that. I just need to limit my work mainly to places within bicycle range. St. Boniface is only three miles from where I live so that was no problem.

Where to put my bicycle during the morning masses was another question. The liturgical minister solved it by our taking the (expensive) bicycle into church to a side chapel where a trustworthy guardian could keep an eye on it.

Sr. Paul Klein-Kracht

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!