A few months ago discerner Jon Perrotti wrote VISION to say that at the time he was "taking part in an 'observership,' a noncommittal residential experience of monastic life, at Mount Saviour Monastery in Pine City, New York." And so," he said, "if sharing my experience can ever be of any help to other men or women considering a monastic vocation, this is the time to capture it with words. . . ." Here’s some of what he said.

"My life has afforded me a great deal of travel and adventure, and I have had much contact and rich encounters with people of other faiths, and indeed even religious experience outside of Christian tradition. I first meditated in a Zen Buddhist temple when I was a 17-year-old exchange student in Japan and practiced meditation off and on into my adulthood. I have done Hindu kirtan chanting and took part in a sweat lodge ceremony on an American Indian reservation. I have had conversations with and been impressed by the intellectual honesty and integrity of atheists, taken part in interfaith dialogue and prayer with Muslims, and danced and drummed with pagans. Yet, for me, [my] vocation would not be remotely possible if I could not bring my heart and mind into exclusive loyalty to one faith.

"I happen to have been born and raised Catholic, and something consistently drew me back to a Catholic expression of Christian faith, but the major turning point of my life that brought me to where I am today happened at the ecumenical monastic community of Taizé. There, the fragmented church, the broken Body of Christ, comes together to declare that Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. I learned there that the monastic life is not lived just for the sake of the life itself and its consequences to the monk. It is a radical life of following Christ courageously focused on powerful prayer and powerful witness.

"What a gamble it is to act on the hope that I can make . . . a difference in the world with prayer . . . . Do I really believe in God enough to take such a risk with my life? I don't want to be wasted! Can I trust God to hear my prayers? Where do you start? The problems of the world are so great. Am I running away from the challenge by going off to pray? Not if I believe the words of our Lord. He promised us that we would move mountains with our prayer. By the grace of God, that is what monks are doing and are called to do—move mountains."

He has some important questions. "How about proclaiming the gospel? The Lord told us: ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house’ (Matthew 5:15). . . . The risk of failing to proclaim the gospel is the same for monks as it is for any other Christian. But the monastery has a unique and powerful opportunity for witness in the modem world, perhaps more than it has in any time in the history of Christendom, because as the world becomes more outrageous in its injustice, depravity, greed, and insane pace, the anomaly of the monastery stands out in stark relief for simply not following suit. More importantly, something happens when believers come together and dedicate their full lives to prayer and praising God. The Holy Spirit makes its presence known. An encounter with real holiness has got to be the most powerful witness to the existence of God that anyone, believer or nonbeliever, will find.

"Is all this vow-taking biblical? I was always particularly impressed with Jesus' admonishment about making oaths: ‘Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black’ (Matthew 5:36). This always rang true for me—live in the now, man! I didn't even like to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag because I thought, why should I pledge allegiance to my country? Who knows what our government will do tomorrow! Someone pointed out to me that vows are really statements of hope. A couple who make vows of marriage join in a common statement of hope that, with God's grace, their love will survive. I can conceive of taking vows because I have hope in Christ . . . and if I believe he is calling me to a particular life, I can make a vow as a statement of hope that I may be able to answer that call to the end.

"The more daunting fears are the fears of one who has made his bet with Christ. . . . If my choice to follow the Lord puts a wedge, or even a world of distance, between me and others, be they strangers whom I would have befriended or members of my own dear family, will that sacrifice have been for nothing? Would God let me make such a mistake? What if there's not a God, and my choice to live a life of prayer is a choice to waste my life? The greater fears about a monastic vocation are human ones. Surely there will be days when God seems to be absent. I think that is true for any pope or street-corner preacher, as it is for all who seek him through their lives. . . . So I will do my best on those days to sing with the psalmist, ‘O Lord . . . . why do you hide your face from me?’ (Psalm 88:14). I pray such days will be few. I believe they will be few, because so far God keeps showing up, amazingly."

Sister Joellen Tumas runs Casa Catalina, a food pantry in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood. It serves more 350 households a week, but "when you minister to the hungry, it's not just about food," Tumas, a pastoral associate at Holy Cross/Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church who has led Casa Catalina since 1990, told Dawn Turner Trice in the Chicago Tribune. "Children lose their parents. People get evicted. Families get their gas cut off. We just try to help as best we can to make sure basic needs are met."

Every 15 days people come for food—the bulk of which is provided by the Greater Chicago Food Depository—as well as donated clothes, toiletries and supplies for babies and children, and help with government forms.

Tumas, 67, grew up in Back of the Yards when the stench from the Chicago Stockyards inundated the neighborhood, which was then made up of Eastern European immigrants. "We grew accustomed to pulling together," said Tumas, who has spent much of her career as a teacher, child-care worker, and school spiritual director in the neighborhood. "So this is nothing new."

While the Archdiocese of Chicago was closing parishes the descendants of European immigrants had left, the community's Mexican-American congregations were outgrowing their churches. Tumas learned Spanish and began teaching the new residents English. In 2005 Casa Catalina partnered with Catholic Charities to provide more services, including counseling, rental assistance, legal clinics, blood drives, and health fairs. "Many of our brothers and sisters are diabetic, so we've assembled special diabetic bags with high-fiber spaghetti, brown rice, and sugar-free Jell-O," Tumas said. "It's important to not just feed, but teach about nutrition and living a healthier lifestyle."

Sister Joellen Tumas, Casa Catalina from Meg Handley on Vimeo.

Many religious communities are embracing a "green" lifestyle (see the posts on the Sisters of Providence, a group of English Benedictine sisters, and an Austrian monastery and an article in the upcoming 2011 issue of VISION Magazine). We can add another to the list: the sisters of Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisconsin, an ecumenical community in the Benedictine tradition, which received the highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum rating ever: 63 out of 69 points for sustainability, energy efficiency, and choice of materials. The building has bamboo flooring, solar panels, and windows oriented to maximize sunlight and prairie views.

The monastery and part of its prairie

Sister Carol Ann Nawracaj, O.S.F. and her sister Terri Macor at a Giants game

Building on a childhood interest in sleight of hand, Nawracaj is a professional magician and a member of the Society of American Magicians. Besides doing magic for her students, faculty, family, friends, and other sisters, she has performed for David Copperfield and Paul Newman and appeared on Entertainment Tonight. She also used her magic to entertain the audience of Nunsense at the Connecticut Broadway Theater.

But that’s not all. During the summer of 1974, when she was studying at Fairfield University where the New York Giants football team was training, she slowly became "first a friend, and then a fan" of the team. She baked cookies for the coaches and players and even made Christmas stockings for their kids, according to an article in the New York Times.

Her developing relationship with the team led to then-head coach Ray Perkins naming her an honorary assistant coach, and subsequent head coaches have renewed her contract. In this capacity she gives “spirit” talks at team meetings, sends congratulatory messages and birthday and holiday remembrances, and collects news clippings of the team that she artistically displays for the players at the end of each season. She accompanied the Giants to all of their Super Bowls and shared in their victory celebrations. Her role as coach has been featured in many newspaper articles, and she has appeared on CBS, FOX, WOR, NFL Today, Sports Channel, and Sports Update.

Mother Alfred Moes

Last July I blogged about the Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America exhibit, which is making its way through various venues in the United States (see schedule below). If you attend the exhibit you will find out (among many other things) that the foundress of the Rochester, Minnesota community of the Sisters of Saint Francis, Maria Catherine Moes, later known as Mother Alfred Moes, also had a role in the founding of the Mayo Clinic.

The “Mayo” in the clinic’s name comes from Dr. William Worrall Mayo. After witnessing the destruction of Rochester by a tornado in 1883, Mother Moes proposed to Dr. Mayo that she would build and staff a hospital if he and his sons would agree to provide the medical care. This hospital was the beginning of what would become the Mayo Clinic.

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America Touring Schedule
May 9, 2010-August 28, 2010: Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Cleveland, Ohio
September 24, 2010-January 22, 2011: Statue of Liberty National Monument/Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Liberty Island, New York
February 2011-April 2011: The National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium, Dubuque, Iowa
June 17, 2011-August 14, 2011: Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, California
September 2, 2011-December 31, 2011: Center for History in association with the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College, South Bend, Indiana

Father Pius Pietrzk, O.P.

The Legal Services Corporation was established in 1974 and operates as an independent nonprofit corporation to promote equal access to justice and provide grants for high-quality civil legal assistance to low-income Americans. It is the single largest provider of civil legal aid for the poor in the nation. The corporation is headed by a bipartisan board of directors whose 11 members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Before becoming a Dominicans, Pietrzyk attended the University of Chicago law school and after graduation worked in corporate and securities law for the Chicago-based law firm of Sidley & Austin. In that time he discerned a vocation to the priesthood and left the practice of law to enter religious life. He entered the Province of St. Joseph as a novice in 2002 and was ordained to the priesthood in 2008. He currently serves as parochial vicar in St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Zanesville, Ohio.

In April of 2008 I posted a blog item about the Monastery of the Holy Cross, an urban Benedictine monastic community on Chicago’s South Side. Specifically I talked about the award-winning bed-and-breakfast they operate out of one of the monastery buildings.

The community has an interesting history, tracing its roots to three founding brothers who had done mission work and felt called to form a community of prayer. In 1991 they were invited to Chicago in order to establish a contemplative presence in the city and were given a parish church that had been closed. They began renovations of the church and over the next few years were able to purchase several adjacent properties, allowing them to welcome more guests and accommodate more monks. In the mid-1990s the community sought to affiliate itself with the Subiaco Congregation of the Order of Saint Benedict, and in May of 2000 the founding members made their solemn professions as Benedictine monks. On the same day the first new member made his first vows.

The story of the current prior of the community, Father Peter Funk, O.S.B., is as interesting as that of the community itself. Coming from a musical family, Funk studied music theory at the University of Chicago and was getting hired as a cantor at Chicago parishes and leader of music at the university’s Catholic campus ministry. With his childhood friend Jon Elfner, Funk formed a jazz-rock fusion band called Om in 1994, which also included bassist Aaron Kohen and a rotating group of other local musicians. They played their last gig at the Taste of Chicago in 1997. “I wasn’t surprised at all,” Elfner said of his friend’s decision to enter monastic life. “Knowing him as long as I did, he always vested a lot into his religious life.” Funk was prepared to give up music to focus on his monastic formation but got lessons with a voice coach instead.

These days, besides the community’s liturgical music (they devote three and a half to four hours a day to communal sung prayer), Funk also plays in a trio with fellow Benedictines Brother Brendan Creeden, Funk’s former novice master, and novice Ezekiel Brennan. The group performs at social functions the monastery hosts. While he doesn’t listen to much modern music anymore, Funk is still a fan of Steve Reich and Steve Coleman.

Source: ChicagoCatholicNews.com and the Chicago Sun-Times

But, besides providing the reason for the wild road trip the brothers make—to raise money for the church-run orphanage where they grew up—there isn’t that much church in the movie. In fact, the scene where Sister Mary Stigmata—also known as “The Penguin”—sends them on their “mission from God” is dotted with obscenities, and beatings from Sister.

Nonetheless, the editor of L’Osservatore, Gian Maria Van, said the film’s “Catholic and spiritual heft were not lacking” and was “rich with ideas.” Heck, one scene even had a photo of the young Pope John Paul II hanging on a wall. Of the brothers’ effort to save the orphanage, Van wrote: “For them, this Catholic institution is their only family—and they decide to save it at any cost.” The movie is a “memorable film and, judging by the facts, a Catholic one” (emphasis added).

Official church opinion of the film, however, was not always so positive. When The Blues Brothers first appeared, the Office for Film and Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops offered this review: “The plot is interspersed with scenes of wholesale destruction and frenzied chases which are spectacularly unfunny and uninvolving . . . . Some good musical portions from Cab Calloway and Ray Charles, but not enough depth from director John Landis to save this zany comedy from milking cheap laughs from rough language and crude situations.” The bishops’ gave office the movie an A-III rating: “For Adults Only.”

Sister Cristina Marie Trudeau, S.N.D.

In a 60-plus-year career she has been instrumental in starting Montessori teacher education programs and Montessori schools for young children in California, Washington State, Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines.

Her interest in children and serving the poor led Trudeau to emphasize the Montessori Cosmic Plan of Education in the teacher education programs with which she has been associated. This approach uses the cullture of the place where the program is located as well as its natural environment as the basis for integrating curriculum and creating materials, rather than relying on European materials and organizing curriculum according to disciplines.

There are around 24,000 priests in France today, down from 42,000 in 1975. But vocation ministers are responding by launching a campaign to reach out to the public with newspaper inserts and brochures that showcase real priests and their passion for people and humanity, says a National Public Radio story. The campaign is also distributing 50,000 postcards aimed at 16- to 22-year-olds—depicting a Catholic priest's garb with a button reading "Jesus is my Boss" pinned to the lapel and the slogan "Why not?"—in cafes, bars, and cinemas and on college campuses.

“Priests suffer from a low social status, so we're trying to change that by showing what being a priest really means,” says Frederic Fonfroide de Lafon, the head of the firm the church has hired to run the campaign. “A priest has extensive training in philosophy and the humanities. He is not someone who lives apart from society in his own world, but someone who participates. A priest accompanies people in the most important moments of their lives." Church officials say they are pleased with the campaign's reception; its Facebook page has had 40,000 visitors already, and vocation ministers say they are receiving more than 100 emails a day since the campaign began in April.

Listen to the full National Public Radio story.

When Sister Lynn Rettinger, S.C., a Sister of Charity of Seton Hill in Pittsburgh, saw a man reach into an open car window and take a wallet a couple of weeks ago, she spoke to him as she would have any erring student in her 50 years of teaching, telling him, “You need to give me what you have.”

The man, whom police were still looking for, handed over the wallet, apologized, and walked away.

Sister Rettinger, by the way, just celebrated her jubilee anniversary as a Sister of Charity and has this to say about her vocation: “Striving to live always in the presence of God and practicing that charism in my daily routine has had a centering effect on my ministry. Through the years the virtues of humility, simplicity, and charity have become part of the fabric of living to the point where we ourselves don’t recognize how integral they are to us. It is always an awakening when a lay person comments on how those virtues are lived. It is often someone from outside oneself who points out what we take for granted.”

St. Scholastica Chapel at Mount St. Scholastica

That’s the question that spoke to journalist and poet Judith Valente from the Rule of St. Benedict, which has guided Benedictine monastic life for about 1,500 years. The 17th-century bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet called the Rule “an epitome of Christianity, a learned and mysterious abridgement of all the doctrines of the gospel, all the institutions of the Fathers, and all the counsels of perfection"—or, as Valente reported in an October 30, 2009 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly story, “It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book.”

Starting in June of 2008 the Rule had become Valente’s constant companion. She had been invited to share as a layperson in the life of Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas (and a VISION Vocation Network advertising-community), for a book she’d been asked to write. “I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me,” Valente said. “It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

“I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era,” Valente said. “But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing; where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.”

Valente found another countercultural example in the monastic idea of stability. “At Mount St. Scholastica there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted.

“I suppose,” she said, “I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. ‘Run, then,’ Benedict reminds me and all of us, ‘while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.’ ”

Lisa Smith Batchen and Sister Mary Elizabth Lloyd

Lloyd first met Smith Batchen, now a leading endurance runner, when Lloyd was a teacher and track coach at Villa Walsh Academy Catholic high school in Morristown, New Jersey and Smith Batchen was a cross-country running coach there.

When Smith Batchen was trying to come up with a way to celebrate her 50th birthday, Lloyd suggested the run/walk event. The 50 miles-50 states idea stands for the Filippini community’s 100th anniversary in the U.S. this year, while the 62 days comes from the 62 miles in ultramarathons which equal 100 kilometers, a race standard.

Lloyd has elected to walk and jog the her part of the trek, called “Running Hope Through America,” because she is still recovering from losing her toenails at a Labor Day marathon. “My goal is to stay out six hours each day,” she said. The two began their effort on April 20 in a Morris Township, New Jersey park where Smith Batchen ran a loop all day until completing 50 miles.

Lloyd, who has a doctorate in nutrition and public health from Columbia University, received the 2008 Servitor Pacis (Path to Peace) Award from the Vatican’s Mission to the United Nations for her work with AIDS orphans.

On Holy Thursday the practice of the washing of feet is part of the liturgy. But what happens when a government official brings it into the workplace?

Craig Taffaro, president of St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, didn’t see a problem with his going through his office washing the feet of employees who wished it, reports an April 7, 2010 Religion News Service story. Far from it, actually:

“As the chief executive officer of St. Bernard Parish Government, I thought it was an appropriate gesture to show that I am as humbled as any other sinner in the world, so much so that I would offer to wash the feet of the employees,” Taffaro said.

He also said employees were not pressured to take part and that most did. “If they wanted to participate, they could. If they didn’t, no problem,” said Taffaro, who is Catholic. “I didn’t keep a list or anything like that.”

His blurring of the line between religion and state, however, did not escape the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose executive director, Marjorie R. Esman, wrote Taffaro a letter reminding him that the U.S. Constitution prohibits government officials from imposing religious practices on employees at the workplace. Esman said the ACLU trusts he will refrain from further religious practices in the workplace.

St. Bernard Parish Councilman Wayne Landry heard about Taffaro’s action from employees when he came to work Thursday afternoon. He said a few employees told him they felt uncomfortable with the way it was done.

“Perhaps had it been an invited thing for whoever wanted to come, maybe those types of comments I received would have been avoided,” Landry said. “On the other side, I certainly wouldn’t want to diminish the good will that was exhibited by the president in the spirit of Easter. I believe his intentions were good.”

In the 2004 issue of VISION magazine we ran an item about the Visitation Sisters of Minneapolis, who for 20 years have opened the doors of their Old Highland area homes to neighbors in need of food, shelter, other physical necessities, or just someone to talk with. They reach out especially to children and families, offering toys, crafts, games, snacks, and activities such as baking and trips to karate lessons. If friends and neighbors arrive during prayer time, they are invited to join the sisters in their chapel, which is consciously located next to the front door.

Baking party at the sisters' house

Their effort began last January with the launch of a new website. With a group of supporters they call Vocation Partners the sisters are also developing a strategic plan to attract women between 20 and 45 years old. Outreach will include “live in” experiences and “nonthreatening” ways to attract people, like hosting dinners and information sessions, says Sister Joanna O'Meara, V.H.M.

"The effort is really to shout out with a loud voice, 'We're here, we're here!' " O'Meara said. "We want to be able to continue here. Certainly there are many things we could be about, but we need more members to do it, for kind of practical reasons."

Their community, says Sister Suzanne Homeyer, V.H.M., offers young women an opportunity "to combine their spirituality, religion, and life in the real world."

Father Augustus Tolton

The Chicago Sun-Times story on the move had an interesting quote from Tolton: "It was said that I would be the only priest of race in America and would not likely succeed," he wrote. But an Italian cardinal told him, "'America has been called the most enlightened nation; we'll see if it deserves that honor. If America has never seen a black priest, it has to see one now.' "

Last January Sister Jane Meyer, principal of St. Agnes Academy in Houston, told her students that if they raised $25,000 in earthquake relief for Haiti by Ash Wednesday, she would jump out of a plane (with a parachute, of course). Several bakes sales, raffles, and talent shows later, the students had blown by their goal and come up with $88,000.

Meyer kept her promise: The 71-year-old Dominican sister took a 14,000-foot skydive. “I always tell our students they have to take good risks and stretch themselves,” she said. Here’s a news report about her dive:

In February 2009 we ran a blog item (see under "General" at upper right) about Father Greg Boyle, S.J. and his Homeboy Industries, which helps ex-convicts in East Los Angeles rehabilitate their lives and find jobs.

Now, Jesuit Father Greg has a new book out, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (Free Press, 2010). There’s also a book about Father Greg, G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles by Celeste Fremon (University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

Hannah Corbin (left) gets a hug from Sister Denise Wilkinson, general superior, during her entrance into the postulancy Sept. 14 under the watchful eye of Saint Mother Theodore Guerin.

“Hannah’s ‘call’ to religious life,” says a story on the Sisters of Providence website, “was a gradual process. . . . She began to research other religious communities to see what choices were possible. She went online to the VISION website and read flyers on bulletin boards at college. She remembers seeing the Providence Volunteer Ministry (PVM) opportunity [on the VISION site] with the Sisters of Providence.”

Read Hannah’s full story here. And check out the Opportunities section on the VISION site to find a large number of discernment and service events available with Catholic communities of consecrated life.

by Father Paul Weberg, O.S.B.

If someone would’ve told me when I was in high school that I would end up being a Benedictine monk, a priest, a high school teacher and chaplain, and an Army chaplain, I’m not sure if I would’ve laughed or cried, but I’m sure I would’ve been surprised! Somewhere in Saint Augustine’s Confessions he prays to God, saying something like: “When I was young, I wanted marriage, money, and prestige, and You laughed at me.” I think we have two lives: the one we plan for and the one we get, and if we’re in touch and in tune with the Lord, the one we get is always better for our eternal happiness and holiness. That has definitely been the case for me.

Father Paul Weberg, O.S.B. in Iraq

All of these “parts” or “layers” make up my vocation. Some have said: If you’ve met one Benedictine, you’ve met one Benedictine! There are truly no two monks alike, and rarely do monks live out their call to seek God in exactly the same way. Saint Benedict doesn’t even expect that—and with the chapters in his Rule on diet and artisans in the monastery, maybe he even discourages it. Being a monk and priest has opened so many doors for me. For me, the Lord has called me to seek him and to glorify him in the monastery, high school ministry, and the military. If you’re following the Lord, be ready for an adventure!

“Perhaps the one that sets the tone for many of us is what we might call the penitential tradition. During the first centuries of the church, people who were aware of having committed serious sin would do public penance during Lent. They were obliged to stand outside the church and ask the members of the community for food and prayer. At the end of Lent they would be given reconciliation and allowed to rejoin the community in the celebration of the Eucharist. Even after the public celebration of the sacrament of Penance had ceased, the penitential character of Lent continued, with a focus on sinfulness and doing penance. The ashes on Ash Wednesday come from this tradition.

“The other tradition is even older and has a more positive emphasis. This is the tradition of Lent that developed around those who were preparing for the sacraments of Christian initiation—Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. The 40 days before Easter were the time of their final preparation, just as we see today for those in the RCIA program. It was a time of anticipation and hope. The emphasis was on the great themes of the gospel in which Christ is seen as the source of Living Water and eternal life, the Light taking away spiritual blindness, and raising the dead to life. Lent is the time for conversion as the preparation to experience death to sin in Christ and resurrection to new life, as we experienced in Baptism. Lent looks directly to Easter.

“In solidarity with the catechumens, the members of the community are invited to recall their own initiation and reflect on these themes in their own lives. This call to ongoing conversion sets the tone for Lent. We remember that repentance calls us to more than sorrow for particular faults or failings; we are challenged to conversion, that is, to embrace a new fundamental attitude or change of heart. This change of heart begins with our realization of Christ’s love, as shown in the gospel images mentioned above (from the Cycle A readings for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays of Lent), and creates a vision of our life in Christ consistent with our Baptism. That is reflected nicely in the words we hear when receiving ashes at the beginning of Lent: 'Repent and believe in the gospel.'

“Our Catholic tradition of Lent is formed from both the baptismal and penitential traditions. . . . Let it be a time of renewal looking toward the meaning of Easter in your life.”

Many of you may know that the Oprah Winfrey Show ran a segment on the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sisters' website has a photo gallery of the event. Also, Oprah's site has the story and some video.

In a recent holiday message from Moscow, Sister Roberta Christine, F.S.P., a Daughter of St. Paul from Virginia, wished everyone a blessed Christmas and happy new year—or, more precisely, С Рождеством и новым годом!—and described some of her activities in the Russian capital.

Moscow's Catholic Cathedral

Sister Roberta’s efforts led to an invitation from the Salesian Oratory Youth Group at the cathedral to give a talk on Pauline life and mission, which she did with the help of two other sisters, a PowerPoint presentation in Russian, and youth translators when necessary. “We started the evening with ‘tea’ and ended the evening with the ‘tea’—a very Russian thing to do,” she said. Some of the young people have even started stopping by the Pauline book center.

As for the weather: “We have had -23 C, -20, -16 so that 0 C feels like summer,” Sister Roberta reported. “But at -15C’’—that’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit—“your nose hairs and eyelashes actually freeze. The trick seems to be dressing like an onion.”

The book and film Dead Man Walking did a lot to get the word out about Sister of St. Joseph Helen Prejean's efforts against the death penalty. But did you know the book was also made into an opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrance McNally? Heggie has also set to music Prejean's poems The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love called The Deepest Desire: Four Dramatic Songs of Praise, which talk about the vocation of love and her own vocation.

The texts of the songs are below. Here's a performance:

Prelude: The Call

More is required
More is required than being swept along—
All the currents pulling me
Easy and wide in a long, slow drift—
Without rudder, floating backwards, now to the side.
What can one person do against a sucking tide?

I coil like a bow;
I gather like a fist;
I forge like a rudder
And I lean into the wide, slow drift.

I tack and veer by God's own will.
I raise my voice against the silence.
My voice alone until a chorus joins.

Love

Love is the pure energy of God: pray for it ardently.
Be grateful when it comes into your life: give of it generously.
Lavish it on others: even the undeserving ones.
Cultivate friendship with care: it is the best love of all.

I catch on fire
Long black dress to my toes—Flowing black sleeves and veil.
A walking bolt of black material.
Fourth grade religion class-Teaching full force:
The gospel according to . . .
Lit candle.

Fifty little eyes wide. Twenty-five voices shout:
"Sister! Sister! You're on fire!"

Flames shooting. Hands beating.
Silence. Breathing.

Children, this teaches us always to be careful with fire.

Now, years later, when I pray
I catch on fire.
Amen.

The deepest desire

What if God had texted the Ten Commandments? Jamie Quatro on the literary ezine McSweeney's has some suggestions:

1. no1 b4 me. srsly.

2. dnt wrshp pix/idols

3. no omg's

4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)

5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool

6. dnt kill ppl

7. :-X only w/ m8

8. dnt steal

9. dnt lie re: bf

10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

Traditionally many religious communities devote time almost every day to what is known as "recreation," and Tyburn Convent, a cloistered monastery of Benedictine women in the heart of London, is no different. What is a bit unique is one of the sisters' recreational activities: snooker-which they also hope to leverage into some much-needed fundraising.

After a television documentary about their lives—and snooker-playing—brought international attention, the sisters decided to ask local businessmen to drop by the convent and ''put a shot in the pot''—that is, make a contribution each time they pocket a ball on the community's undersized snooker table. The donation goes to a restoration fund for their building. Constructed in the Victorian era, it was damaged by a bomb in World War II and the repairs have started to deteriorate.

''Snooker is a popular game and I think that it will appeal to a lot of people,'' Sister Simeon told the New York Times. ''I thought fundraising was a dreary business. I never knew it could be like this. This is a lot better than addressing envelopes. . . . Recreation is an important part of our day and I'm not keen on sitting down and knitting; not yet, anyway."

''Our skipping has aroused interest, too,'' added Mother Mary Xavier in reference to another of the sisters' recreations: jump-roping. ''We like to skip but it's the snooker that has taken off. If our skipping gets more popular, then we will have sponsored skipping. But right now, we must concentrate on snooker.''

Originally a home for unwed mothers, Chicago's Misericordia/Heart of Mercy today supports over 500 children and adults with mild to profound developmental disabilities. For 40 of those years the director of Misericordia has been Mercy Sister Rosemary Connelly, R.S.M.:

When most people think of the Vatican and astronomy, they usually remember Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist condemned for suspected heresy in 1633 for maintaining that the earth revolved around the sun (and who was "rehabilitated" in 1992 by a special Vatican commission established by Pope John Paul II).

Less well-known are the centuries-old contributions of Italy and the Vatican to astronomy. This history is the subject of a new exhibition, "Astrum 2009," running at the Vatican Museums from October 15, 2009 to January 15, 2010, said a Catholic News Service article by Carol Glatz.

The Vatican Observatory, the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, and the Vatican Museums have pooled their collections of antique telescopes, astrolabes, celestial globes, and manuscripts. Many of the 130 items in the exhibit have never been displayed publicly.

Some of the exhibit is dedicated to the Vatican's history of astronomical research, including its participation in the 19th-century international "Carte du Ciel" ("Map of Heaven") project to catalog and map the stars. Between 1910 and 1921 the Vatican Observatory assigned three nuns to help with the map project. These Sisters of the Child Mary measured the coordinates of tens of thousands of stars reproduced on photographic glass plates.

Also on display for the first time are photographs of a papal expedition to Russia in 1887 to witness and document a total solar eclipse. Three Italian priests made the trip, which proved unsuccessful due to poor weather and viewing conditions.

There are even some Galileo-related artifacts, like his original handwritten notes detailing his observations of the moon and his publication Starry Messenger from 1610, which detailed how he perfected the telescope to magnify distant objects 30 times their appearance to the naked eye.

Galileo opened up a brand new way of doing science, which wasn't accepted immediately, said Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, president of the commission governing Vatican City, in a written introduction to the exhibit's catalog. These groundbreaking scientific discoveries help people better understand God's creation, he wrote, and the exhibit shows how science "is an inescapable part" of the human spirit and the whole human experience.

A video about the exhibit:

Student with Fr. Stan Bosch, S.T.

Bosch, a Missionary Servant of the Holy Trinity, works at a Soledad Enrichment Action charter school in South Los Angeles, where those who aren't making it in the regular school system get another chance.

A motorcyclist and former college football player, Bosch had been a pastor at a nearby parish where, said a latimes.com story by Scott Gold, "it seemed the entirety of his ministry was trudging from one hospital to the next in the middle of the night, tending to the grieving relatives of dead gangbangers." "I had developed a deep inner sadness," he said. "I just couldn't do it anymore."

If he couldn't do it anymore, he could do something about it. He got a doctorate in psychology, moved into the rectory of a church next to the school, and started working with the students, some of whom use drugs, have committed crimes, are homeless, or come from dysfunctional homes, among other problems. He was convinced many of these kids needed to be able talk about their pain with their peers.

"It's bringing kids together to put words to feelings," he said in an article for The Tidings, the weekly newspaper of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. "It's dealing with what's called 'alexithymia,' in psychodynamic terms, the incapacity to put words to feelings. Many of our kids don't know what they feel, and nobody asks them." No one except Bosch, that is.

Brother John Paul Russo

"I see music as a form of spiritual nourishment," he said. "If it connects people to God, then I'm willing to try anything. Doors are opening, and I'm going through."

More on Brother John, including a biography and program notes and a Tampa Tribune story about the Mass for a New Dawn as well as links to a musical clip.

Sister Pat Murphy prays with an immigration detainee

"The immigrant detainees are different from the criminal detainees," said Persch. They most likely are never going to see their families [in the U.S.] again. . . . They're afraid. They're very sad for their family, very worried about their family. It's like in an emergency room when they bring a chaplain in. . . . your presence, your compassion, your prayer . . . that brings comfort to them."

In addition to their direct ministry, Persch and Murphy have fought for the right of detainees to pastoral care. They have also advocated in support of immigration reform and have become so well known in immigrant and Catholic circles, said a Chicago Tribune story by Margaret Ramirez, "that they are often just called 'The Sisters.' "

Murphy gets frustrated with Catholics who oppose her ministry with immigrants in this country illegally. "The church has lost it," she said. "Jesus didn't just say feed the people in your country, clothe the people in your city or whatever. It's open to every human being."

Two and a half years ago the sisters expanded their ministry when they started traveling to a federal detention center which is the last stop for detainees before deportation. There they prayed the rosary and boarded buses to bless the deportees. Since then they have been joined by almost two dozen clergy and activists.

The sisters have a long history of service to the vulnerable. Before their prison work they had run an outreach ministry for seniors at a Sisters of Mercy hospital; taught at an alternative school for high school dropouts; started Su Casa Catholic Worker House, a home for Central American survivors of torture; and worked at a shelter for African American women recovering from domestic violence and drug addiction. Later they started helping a mentally challenged single mother raise her daughter, becoming foster moms to the 13-year-old, picking her up from school, paying for singing and dance lessons, and helping with admission to high school.

"You see, I believe that the divine and the sacred are the ordinary things of life," Murphy said. "And I believe the moments in that jail are sacred moments with those people. We give them life, and they give us life. . . . It's a mutual thing. It's a human exchange, but I believe that God is present in that."

See more photos of the sisters at work.

Jill Kress, a novice of the Monroe, Michigan Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is taking questions. In an interview with the Michigan Catholic she talked about her vocation, snd in a video (see below) she answered the question, “What special advice would you have for someone who is an only child and wants to become a Sister?"

The newspaper asked her a series of good questions, and she had equally good responses. “What,” she was asked, “would you suggest to someone now discerning the call?” “Listen. Notice. Pray,” she said. “Listen to yourself, and that sometimes means having another, such as a spiritual director to reflect back at you what they’re hearing. Notice what feelings, ideas emerge from this. Does a certain theme keep coming back? And pray—in solitude, in community, in whatever ways work for you, hold your desires in prayer and see what happens. It’s a pretty simple formula, I didn’t invent it, [and] it’s helpful to have some way to track inner feelings.”

Why did she think God called her? “How does God call each of us to our true vocation, to what Thomas Merton calls our true selves? We all have a calling, and to figure out what we are called to has to do with living in such a way that we can hear that message in our lives.”

The paper then asked her about the role her own desire plays when it comes to discerning her vocation. “This might not make much sense,” she said, “but I would say that my own desire has everything and nothing to do with my vocation. I say it has everything to do with it because I can’t imagine wanting anything else . . . and yet, it’s not really my desire. I believe it comes from God.

“And yes, I do think that God calls us to a life we’re not necessarily comfortable with. It’s not about suffering for the sake of suffering, I am not at all advocating that. I think of this more as a ‘holy longing,’ or like the Jesuit principle of magis, always seeking the more. The cofounders of the IHM community, Louis Florent Gillet and Theresa Maxis, were always seeking out how to better serve God. As Louis Gillet once wrote, ‘I desire to be everywhere when I see so many needs.’ To IHMs today that speaks of a sense of dis-comfort with the way things are in the world—dissatisfaction with injustice, violence, and poverty in the world, and acting out of that holy longing for peace, wholeness, reconciliation. There is a certain amount of unsettledness with being a seeker, and to the extent that God calls us to see with new eyes the injustices, but also the beauty of the world and to continual conversion.”

Did anyone try to discourage her from pursuing religious life? “I’ve . . . had people in my life who have tried to dissuade me. This has been difficult because my tendency is to want to please others, and knowing that people who are close to me were unsupportive of my call to the IHMs was hard to take. But ultimately it’s between me and God and no one else.”

Read more about Sr. Jill. And here’s the video:

The St. Joseph Worker Program (SJW), sponsored by the Congregation of St. Joseph, has announced the first class of St. Joseph Workers for their new year-long volunteer program in New Orleans, Louisiana. Four young women, who have a blog, joined recently-named program director Jackie Schmitz, C.S.J. on July 31, 2009. Their volunteer year will end June 30, 2010.

SJW is a year-long volunteer program for single women between 21 and 35 who are committed to social change. This program is based on the St. Joseph Worker program the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet began seven years ago in St. Paul, Minnesota that has since grown to two houses in the Twin Cities as well as an alumni house.

The program trains and supports women to be agents of change as they provide direct services to the communities they serve. The core of the program includes development in leadership, community, justice, and spirituality, which participants work toward through training programs, retreat days, living together in community, ministry experiences, and interaction among themselves, the sisters and associates of the Congregation, and others they meet.

An exceptional teaching staff, a social worker, and volunteers work to ensure that the women receive not only a diploma but also the skills and confidence they will need throughout life.

Women who have completed their stay at Kenmare come back to say that the lessons in discipline and self-respect at the school have enabled them to begin new lives, which may include technical training or earning their GED and going to college.

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America is a traveling exhibit sponsored by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in association with the Cincinnati Museum Center. It offers history museums across the country an opportunity to display artifacts and images the general public has rarely seen.

Opening last May in Cincinnati, the exhibit is scheduled for various locations in the next three years and is accepting new bookings. It allows exhibit-goers, its website says, to “meet women who corresponded with President Thomas Jefferson, talked down bandits and roughnecks, lugged pianos into the wilderness, and provided the nation’s first health insurance to Midwestern loggers.” Hey, even Maria Shriver and Cokie Roberts endorsed the show.

For more information, go to www.womenandspirit.org.

“Monastery Mustard,” report the Benedictine Sisters of Queen of Angels Monastery in Mt. Angel, Oregon of their community’s product, “again won silver in the prestigious Worldwide Mustard Competition with our superb Glorious Garlic flavor. This is the second time in three years that Glorious Garlic was awarded the Silver Medal in the Garlic Mustard category at the competition, which is a part of the 15th Annual Napa Valley Mustard Festival. Over 400 mustards from seven countries entered the competition.”

While Sister Terry Hall, O.S.B., mustard chef and coordinator, has been making the mustard for years, the product was just introduced to the public in the summer of 2005. “Two new mustard flavors have been added in the past year. Orange Cranberry is going to be a seasonal product that will be available during the late fall and winter. . . . Jubilant Blueberry, which was introduced in 2006 for the Sisters' 125th anniversary celebration, will also become a seasonal mustard, available during the late summer and early fall.

“The standard flavors—Divinely Original (horseradish), Glorious Garlic, Heavenly Honey, Angelic Honey Garlic, Hallelujah Jalapeno, and Devoutly Dill—remain available year-round online.”

Begun by the Franciscans when Boston’s Prudential Mall first opened, and staffed by the Oblates of the Virgin Mary since 1982, the recently renovated Saint Francis Chapel is located in the Hynes Court of the mall at the base of the Prudential building, one of the tallest buildings in Boston. M.I.T., Boston University, Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Berklee College of Music, Symphony Hall, Fenway Park, and the Boston Conservatory of Music are all located within a few blocks of the mall.

People from all over the world come through the chapel, where Mass is celebrated four times every weekday and ten times (in two languages) every weekend. Priests are available for the sacrament of Confession every day, and eucharistic adoration is also a part of the daily chapel schedule. The chapel hosts devotions such as the rosary, prayer to St. Jude, the Divine Mercy novena, and the Way of the Cross as well as a Fall speaker series and an Ignatian spirituality program.

But what people value most about the chapel, say the Oblates, is that it is a quiet and prayerful space in the midst of a busy and noisy city. More than one person has called the chapel an “oasis of silence” and an “oasis of prayer.”

Here’s a video introducing the chapel:

Sister Elizabeth Liebert blazed an ecumenical trail when she became the first Catholic sister to be named dean of a Presbyterian seminary in the United States. Said Liebert, a Sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary who was tapped to become dean of San Francisco Theological Seminary earlier this month, “Behind me is my whole religious community. I know they all stand behind me. They function as my family. We’re always talking and praying.”

San Francisco Theological Seminary is a school of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Father Jeremy Tobin, O. Praem. writes of the involvement of his community, the Norbertine Fathers and Brothers, with Catholic social justice.

I was at a national convention of human rights activists. Many were young people fired up about doing something to improve the quality of human life on the planet. They represented numerous causes, issues, and every group imaginable. People spoke from firsthand experience with candor and fervor. Every religion as well as no religion was represented. To see 500-plus young people animated about doing something to alleviate the immense gap between rich and poor, workers and managers, made me come alive with our own Catholic tradition of social justice. I see hope for the future. This goes way back beyond Vatican II, but the Council brought it together and gave it new life. So many other groups, religious and secular, freely acknowledge the influence Catholic social teaching has on their particular issues.

This is partly why I get up in the morning. Another piece is Mississippi. We chose Mississippi precisely because it is the poorest state in the union. It has a hoary history of oppression. It has a sparse population of Catholics (2 percent). At the same time it has a Christian culture. The Catholic population has been here from the beginning. The people are friendly and very appreciative of whatever talents we bring. The needs are huge. The enthusiasm is strong.

Katrina brought young volunteers from all over the country, and they still come. Many groups share our hospitality and encouragement at our priory-in-the-woods. I dream of some of them staying longer to do more to help us raise the quality of life and the spiritual energy of all our people.

For those who want to work with immigrants, there are plenty of opportunities: Spanish, Filipino, Vietnamese—all with long Catholic histories. African Americans, Catholic and Protestant, offer a wide range of opportunities to serve from our religious tradition. Catholicism among people of African descent goes back to the very beginning of this region. For those interested in Native Americans, the Choctaw Nation, now with its resorts and enterprises, has been here before anybody else. Many are Catholic, but we can serve all. Everybody is called to be God’s child.

All these groups offer a wide range of social justice, human rights, and religious formation areas to energize those dedicated people who pass through here. There is a strong social justice community, Catholic, Protestant, and other, working in harmony to make this new century one of rebirth and hope.

Norbertines are social workers and teachers, parish priests and chaplains in hospitals and prisons. Opportunities are limitless and the support is strong.

It all comes from Jesus, “When I was hungry, you fed me, thirsty you gave me a drink, naked you clothed me, homeless you gave me shelter, in prison you visited me, sick you healed me.” This is the core of Catholic social justice. Join us!

7100 Midway Rd., Raymond, MS 39154, 601-857-0157

This article reprinted from www.stmosestheblackpriory.org.

In recognition of the Year for Priests, June 19, 2009 to June 2010, VocationCitings will feature stories of Catholic priests—their vocations and lives.

It is hard to believe that I am in my seventh and final year as pastor of Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon. It just seems like yesterday that I learned that the Congregation of Holy Cross accepted Archbishop Vlazny’s invitation to serve at Holy Redeemer.

These seven years have been years of growth and inspiration. I love Holy Redeemer School and look forward to bringing my passion for Catholic schools to my new assignment working with the Alliance for Catholic Education at the University of Notre Dame. I will work for the future of Catholic elementary and high schools on a broad, national level.

As I think about another change in assignment, I am reminded that God gives me exactly what I need when I need it. God has been faithful to me all my life, and I have no reason to think that will change. God will always be faithful. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. This is most true when it comes to God’s faithfulness. My entire life as a Holy Cross priest has involved accepting assignments that I wasn’t so sure about, and they all turned out to be unique opportunities for God’s grace in my life.

I have a friend who says, “The worst thing that can happen to you in your life is not that your life plan fails. Rather the worst thing that can happen to you is that your life plan works. God’s plan for your life is always bigger and better than what you could have imagined.

Read more stories of Congregation of Holy Cross priests.

Sister Madonna Bruder after winning the women’s 75-plus age division at Ironman Canada.

Bruder, of Spokane, Washington, has completed over 325 triathlons, including 35 “Ironman”-class events consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26-mile run. At the Hawaii Ironman over 10 years ago she became the oldest woman ever to complete the race, finishing in 16:59:03, an hour under the 17-hour midnight cutoff time. Her accomplishments have been featured on ABC News, complete with video, and in numerous internet stories.

"Well, you know, as long as God is giving you your health,” Bruder said, “there's no reason to stop.”

Sister Cyril Mooney, a member of the Irish-based Sisters of Loreto (Mother Teresa’s community before she founded the Missionaries of Charity), has been part of Calcutta's streets for more than 40 years, a Religion & Ethics Newsweekly story reports. Like the late Mother Teresa, Sister Cyril first came to India, in 1956, to teach in the elite English-language schools the sisters started during the colonial period in India.

Unlike Mother Teresa, however, Sister Cyril continued teaching, becoming the school principal and expanding her educational reach to underprivileged children living on the streets of Calcutta. Today, 50 percent of the students— mostly from slums—attend her community’s school for free.

"Our idea is to push them as far as they can go academically, and then if they can't go any farther they'll vet them into one of the vocational trainings and give them training whereby they can start to work," Sister Cyril said. "My hope is that every child who comes out will have a better future and I think the next generation will have a very good future.

In a new book, The Foundations of Religious Life: Revisiting the Vision (Ave Maria Press), the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR) talks about how its perspective is in keeping with the vision of religious life set forth by Vatican II, suggesting that its commitment to a more visibly countercultural life and ministry is what sustains its orders and attracts young women to CMSWR communities.

by Sister Mary Michael, O.S.F., School Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, Panhandle, Texas

July, 1993: I came to visit here in Panhandle with an agenda: I wanted to know what it was like to live in a convent.

"What is it like to get up at 5:00 in the morning? What do they do all day anyway? Can I keep up with the schedule and the demands of this life?" I was very curious, but I had no intention of joining this community. It was just a convenient place (30 miles from home) where I could get some answers.

I told the superior to be sure to tell the sisters not to pressure me into joining. As a 23-year-old that liked to go to Mass every day, I had been pressured enough. I just wanted to be able to stay for a few days—to watch, to learn, to experience. The Mother Superior answered wisely with the best answer she could have given:

"If you're supposed to be here, wild horses could not keep you away."

Wow. That was exactly what I needed to hear. To my great surprise, I loved it at the convent! I found myself really enjoying the sisters. I was touched by the way they loved each other. When it was time to leave, I felt like I was being ripped away from something, someplace, and some people that I wanted to be a part of. I now realize that the reason why I had such a connection in my heart with these people was because this was the exact place where God was calling me.

I went home and thought about the sisters a lot. I kept looking at my watch, thinking about how they were doing things without me. "It's 3:00—they're having coffee break without me! It's 6:00—they're praying without me! It's 6:30—they're eating without me!" I called the next day and asked for an application.

I needed a little extra push. It's not easy entering a convent—giving most everything away, moving, saying good-bye to everyone (at least temporarily), and going to a place that you hope is as wonderful as you had already experienced.

Here I am almost 16 years later. (I can't believe it's already been that long!) This truly is where God has called me. It has been a long trip but a good one. Hopefully I have responded to God's grace to make me more like Him every day. There is definitely a lot more for me to work on, but I'm glad that I am here to do it.

If you are considering religious life, in the words of Pope John Paul II, "Be not afraid!" Pray that God leads you to the wonderful place where He is calling you. Pray that others will find it, too.

In the midst of Hollywood a community of 20 Dominican sisters live a cloistered life. Only a few of them ever leave their Monastery of the Angels to buy necessities.

"We don't go around with the iPods, the music, we don't go around with the cell phone on constantly," Sister Mary Raphael, 65, who has lived in the community since she was 18, told National Public Radio’s Mandalit del Barco in an All Things Considered story.

"I've seen it when I go out shopping. They're constantly on their phone. I want to say, 'Hello? Did you say hello to God today? Did you call God?' "

While the 85-year-old community survived the Great Depression, they are now struggling through the current economic crisis. Last January, Sister Mary Raphael, who also handles the monastery’s finances, found out the community’s investment portfolio had dropped 70 percent. In addition, medical bills for elderly sisters have drained the community’s cash.

“That’s when we began to get really scared,” said mother superior Sister Mary Raymond.

To raise money the sisters have for 40 years been baking and selling pumpkin bread. They also sell various items in gift shop, like candies and greeting cards. But recently more misfortune struck: The oven broke down. The bread had been popular, even reaching a future president when Los Angeles City Council Member and Monastery of the Angels fan Tom LaBonge gave a loaf to Barack Obama during his campaign. The sisters have also started appealing to benefactors and pondering reviving the charity garden parties, bridge teas, and retreats that once attracted movie celebrities like Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, and Jane Wyman.

"We're praying for everyone who is suffering in the financial slump," Sister Mary Raphael said. "And I think God let us experience it so we can know what other people are suffering, too."

Thinking back on the history of the community also serves as a source of consolation for the sisters. "It's been a long history with the sisters," said Sister Mary Raymond. "Four old ladies—not old, they were young then—had to struggle to get this place going. And they had to go out and beg, just like we're doing now, but they went from door to door."

Read or hear the full story, which includes a recipe for the pumpkin bread.

Nancy Murray, O.P. as Catherine of Siena, O.P.

Nancy Murray is a sister in many ways, first to her community of Dominican sisters, to all those she has served over the years—and finally to her brother, actor Bill Murray, with whom she shares a vocation of acting.

Sister Murray brings to life another Dominican, the great 14th-century saint and doctor of the church Catherine of Siena. Dressed in a Dominican habit and using only a few props and a put-on Italian accent, Murray takes her one-woman show,  Catherine of Siena: A Woman for Our Times, to audiences of all ages in parishes, schools, youth groups, even refugees in Darfur.

In preparation for her performances she sometimes reads back issues of parish bulletins to see what the community has been up to in providing help to others, then incorporates those stories into the play so that “they recognize themselves,” she told reporter Jeannette Cooperman in a National Catholic Reporter article.

After a life of intense personal prayer closeted in a room in her parents’ home, Catherine moved out into public life, caring for the sick and dying and visiting prisoners condemned to death. Murray has taught, worked with the poor, cared for those dying of cancer and AIDS, and visited prisoners.

Eventually Catherine went even farther out into the world, traveling and playing a major role in trying to reunite the papal schism in the 1300s which saw two men claiming to be pope. Catherine pressured Pope Gregory XI to leave Avignon in France and return to Rome to get the church’s house back in order. In a letter to Gregory she said, “When are you going to get back here? We need you to come back to Rome and be a voice of unity. The church is like a flock that is being torn apart by wolves.” Witnessing the corruption of the Avignon court, she said “it stinks” and compared the bishops Gregory had appointed to “weeds planted in the garden of a church.”

Murray commented on Catherine’s activism by saying, “Our Catholic Church, for example, has not had a stellar record. So when you look at somebody from the 14th century confronting it—a woman, who was 27 at the time—you can imagine how countercultural she was.” A former file clerk at Rotary International, Murray joined the Dominicans Sisters of Adrian, Michigan over some resistance from her mother, who had once witnessed a profession of religious vows and remembered the “drama of the young woman, throwing her crown of flowers to her parents and saying, ‘I renounce the world and all its treasures,’ ” Cooperman wrote. “It left a terrible impression on her,” Murray said.

But then her father, a former seminarian, signed the papers allowing her to enter the Dominicans, saying, “They have rules of silence; she won’t last long.”

After Murray’s dad died suddenly, she was sure her mother would summon her home. But her novice director advised her to ask her brothers and sisters, so she did. “You stay where you are,” they said, “and pray for us.”

by Sister Karen Zielinski, O.S.F.

It was a typical Saturday in Sylvania, Ohio, home of my community, the Sisters of St. Francis of Sylvania, Ohio. I had two major community events going on at the same time: a meeting and a weekend retreat. I attended the meeting and when we broke for lunch, I rushed to the retreat. Then I went back to my meeting. When the meeting ended early, I attended one of the retreat conferences. A friar there shared some words that hit me right in the heart:

“If a visitor came to your 89-acre campus and asked directions to a building, a Franciscan way of responding to the question is for the person to just accompany the visitor to the spot. That is a relational, Franciscan way of living.”

Just like the gospel message, simple but hard to live out, our presence to others is fundamental but often difficult to do. So many times a sister might present a lecture or a recital or have a fundraiser she is involved in, and we are asked for our support. Usually that means attendance at an event. We are often tired after a day of ministry or not feeling too well. The weather might be cold or rainy, and we just want to put our feet up and stay home. But we go to the talk or lecture. And once we get there, we are glad we did.

Of course all beauty is God’s, and when we rest in prayer, we rest in the presence and beauty of God. Prayer is the ultimate gift of God’s presence. We have to be there to receive that presence as well.

Saint Francis of Assisi’s presence to people guides me. “Francis once took a certain sick brother, whom he knew had a longing for grapes, into a vineyard, and sitting down under the vine, he first ate to give the other courage to eat.” He did not only send the brother the grapes, or send a representative.

Presence is a gift of attention and an opening of the mind to be receptive to the other person. In society today people often feel relieved simply to write a check, make a donation, or find a reason not to attend. Presence is a gift of time, that precious part of our daily lives that we guard for things which are important. There is nothing like being at an event, present in all our humanity to the other person. Being there is important.

The gift of our presence is very simple. We all can remember the times when we accompanied a family member or friend to a medical test. I remember having to go through an MRI test—something I dislike but need for my overall health care. A friend simply accompanied me to the test and sat there with me. It meant the world to me. She was just there beside me, being my friend.

Although a telephone call is not the same as being there, it can be a much warmer presence than email. So often my mother asks me if I have talked to my sister Judy. I tell her I have, because I email my sister often. When my mother asks, “How does she sound? How is her cold?” I realize that I have not been very present to my sister. But email is so convenient! Maybe I can try to make even my email message more “present” to my sister, too—more open to everyone.

Being there is not restricted to Franciscans but to anyone who has a Franciscan heart. A friend of mine who works for the Detroit Tigers baseball team gave me four tickets to a recent game. I went to the stadium with three other sisters. We got to our seats and because I had pulled my back out the week before I simply stayed in the handicapped section and advised my three sisters to go down to the better seats. While I watched the game in the top row, someone called to me. “You all alone? Where are your girlfriends?”

The African American man had one leg and wore a green jogging suit with the words “Turkey Man” on the back of his jacket. I had seen him 20 minutes earlier in the clubhouse—he was the team’s caterer for that game and had just unloaded pounds of freshly roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, and rolls.

“I told them to go down to watch the game. My back is on the mend,” I said to Turkey Man. Turkey Man came over to me and asked where I was from. I told him we were Franciscan Sisters from Ohio and had come to see the game.

“You should not be alone! I will bring you a Coke.” So Turkey Man got me a Coke and shared “Franciscan presence” with me. Oh, one of the sisters came up later and sat with me, but I was most touched by Turkey Man.

Much is said today about the art of being present. Saints Francis and Clare were highly skilled at that. Clare had a profound sense of God’s abiding presence. She never felt abandoned by God; she felt his presence at all times. Being there is actually quite simple: presence to our brothers and sisters flows from our presence to God. You gotta be there!

by Sister Marie Tersidis, O.P.

I grew up in East Africa. It was in 1977 that my vocation to religious life began to stir. I was born and raised around religious. My schoolteachers were 80 percent religious sisters. Besides, I have an older sister who is a religious. Providentially, our home is very close to the motherhouse of my sister's religious community so I had the privilege of attending daily Mass at the convent before school for seven years from the age of 10 to 17.

As I grew, observing the sisters coming to Mass in procession after their morning prayers and making their profound genuflection on both knees two by two, made my heart dance with joy. I could hardly wait to be one of them.

As soon as I completed elementary school, I sought to enter the convent, but by this time I did not want to join the community that my sister belonged to. I chose an international congregation, which meant I had to learn English. I did well with English. However, as I advanced in my religious training, I faced a challenge that threw me off my horse. The senior sisters who returned from their missionary activities shared with the novices their experiences in the missions.

The spirit of the founder was to preach the Word to all people and especially to the people in the remotest parts of the world. There are parts of the world where education is unheard of, and people are really primitive in many ways-clothing and eating, to mention a few. Now, one of the challenges at the missions was to identify with the people in their way of eating and dressing. That was way too difficult for me to conceive. I was too afraid to face this reality so I chose to go back home and pursue high school studies.

I tried to silence the voice within me. I thought I had succeeded when all of a sudden, [during] the final year of my studies, the desire came back stronger than ever. Now the dance changed. It was no longer an outward dance, but an inward dance of the heart. I had now to face the reality that I could no longer quench the desire to consecrate my life to God. It felt so unreal and yet so real. A mixed feeling! I started asking advice. My parish priest did not seem convinced of my vocation. This was very painful, but I trusted in God. Finally, I decided to go back to the same community I left.

I applied myself to my religious training. Two years passed. Then my fears about the missions began to build up. I could not believe I was to step out of the convent a second time.

And now, what next? What a dilemma! What a disappointment! I was plunged into a dense cloud where I was drawn to pray and to meditate on the word of God. I had within me the faith to seek the will of God in my life at any cost. My family was very mad at me because I had given up what was "the most important in the world," namely education and the good jobs that go with it.

Finally, the Lord, in his own mysterious way, led me to my true vocation. This I cannot explain because I never wanted to become a cloistered nun. Providentially, I was acquainted with a Dominican priest who wanted to establish a contemplative religious community in his country in West Africa. The priest was a good friend of the Dominican nuns in Lufkin, Texas, U.S.A. He managed to convince me that nuns live a normal life and that I should come to the States to be trained so that I could be of help in the formation of those interested in the life back in Africa.

I came to Lufkin and met the nuns. I was so scared that my neck hardly moved. I looked at them so carefully. I noticed they were happy. They dressed the same. There was nothing that indicated different classes in the way they dressed. Then I was led to the enclosure where I awaited strange things to happen. Nothing extraordinary happened. I noticed, too, they ate from the same table with the prioress and did everything in a good community spirit. I began to feel at home and at peace. I began to realize and savor the nobility of the life.

Before I knew it, my time for training was over and I had to go back to Africa to help in the formation of the postulants and novices. There I met another disappointment. The original vision of the community had changed remarkably within the two years I was away. I realized then that my real vocation was to be a cloistered contemplative after all. I sought to come back to Lufkin, and here I am.

All I had to do was to say yes to God, try it out, and let God do his work. I felt like Peter and the apostles when they spent all night fishing with no success. When the Lord gave the command to cast the net into deep water they caught more than they could handle. The same could be said of my vocation story. The Lord let me try so hard with no success until he plunged me into the enclosure.

Sister Marie Tersidis, O.P. is a sister of the Monastery of the Infant Jesus in Lufkin, Texas. Her story is reprinted with permission and adapted from Vocation in Black and White: Dominican Contemplative Nuns Tell of How God Called Them, from iUniverse and available from the major online booksellers.

"Our numbers fell and we were forced to cut back, and in 1996 we stopped making it completely when the last brother who knew the recipe died," explained Zvonko Topic, one of two surviving Trappist monks at the Marija Zvijezda, or “Star of Mary,” monastery near Banja Luka. "But we've now decided to bring it back to consumers here, and we'll be opening a small shop soon for tourists and visitors."

The recipe, traditionally known only to a single monk, had been rediscovered by another Bosnian Trappist in the 1970s while a novice at a monastery in Normandy, where the order was founded in 1664.

The cheese will be made at a farm belonging to the Catholic charity Caritas at Aleksandrovac, 12 miles from Banja Luka. Topic said the monastery currently has only three postulants and has been maintained by funding from the local Catholic bishop. Marija Zvijezda Monastery played a key role in Catholic life in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Topic said he hoped the community would slowly rebuild.

Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who follow the Sixth Century Rule of St Benedict, the Bosnian monks began making the Trappist cheese when the order returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1872 after fleeing Turkish rule. The monastery's 200 monks produced it on a mass scale, while also running a brewery, sawmill, craft school, brick and cloth factories, until their property was seized by Yugoslavia's communist regime after the Second World War.

Hmm . . . How about some Trappist ale to go along with that gourmet cheese. Yum.

Father Daniel Coughlin has done it again. As the first Roman Catholic chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives, he has to offer a lot prayers. A memorable one was the invocation at the memorial service for former President Gerald Ford in 2006 (see below). Last Tuesday he gave a meal blessing at the inaugural luncheon for President Barack Obama. Let's face it: The guy knows how to deliver a prayer. Here’s the text:

"Lord God of history, we have been blessed to witness the meteoric rise of President Obama, the long, faith-filled journey of African Americans, the vibrant hopes of a nation catapulting into new directions.

"Lord God of the present moment, we are blessed, as free people to see your hand in the peaceful transfer of power, and your guidance in the affairs of state. May we be attentive to your word and reach our full potential, with equal justice for all, compassion for the least, and self-discipline to achieve lofty goals.

"Lord God, be with us into the future, bless us by shaping a changing world into a more stable one where all peoples and all nations will live in peace. Protect and guide with creative touch President Obama and Vice-President Biden, their families, and all in public service. May each day be filled with peace and satisfaction because they are about building your reign here on earth. Amen."

And from the Gerald Ford memorial:

“ ‘How mighty is the hand that can turn a page of history!’ ” Lord God, you call each of us by name and you alone know each of us through and through. You have called Gerald R. Ford unto yourself and again he has responded to you with hope and is confirmed by America’s prayers just as he sought them when called to serve as president of this great nation.

“As we welcome Mrs. Ford and President Ford’s family and friends to this rotunda, the nation is called to surround them with their prayers—their sympathy for their loss and their gratitude for sharing his love and his loyalty with all of us for so many years in government service.

“Again, at this moment of death, we humbly ask you, Lord, to grant peace and reconciliation, healing and gentle civility to this nation, as this man so nobly tried to do in life’s singular moments by his efforts to close chapter upon chapter on America’s sadness.

“May the brightness of hope and the promise of eternal life reward this modest man, the Honorable Gerald Ford. And may the story of the 38th president of the United States inspire others in this nation and around the world to respond to your providential call as he did. Lord, call many to seize their moment to make a difference ‘by serving the people’s urgent needs’ Then empower them to make bold steps in searching for ways of peace and reconciliation, just as he did. ‘For mighty is the hand that can turn a page of history.’ ”

For more information about the Office of the Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives, go to chaplain.house.gov/.

When Mickey Rourke accepted a Golden Globe award recently for best actor in the film The Wrestler, he said, “It’s been a long road back for me.”

(By the way, Mickey’s not afraid to use some colorful language, so be forewarned if you’re a “younger or more sensitive viewer.”)

After roles in the 1980s-era movies Diner, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and others, his life went downhill. Arrested for various misdemeanors, he tried a career as a professional boxer, and like many aspiring fighters got the stuffing knocked out of him, to the point of disfiguring his face. By 1998 he was contemplating suicide.

Then he turned to a Catholic priest, who suggested he pray to Saint Jude, the patron saint of people in difficult and even desperate situations (“hopeless causes,” the phrase usually associated with this saint, always seemed wrong to me because if people were feeling truly hopeless they wouldn’t be praying in the first place).

Rourke wrote a reconciliation letter to his ex-wife, tucked it behind a statue of Saint Jude, and lit a candle. These days he has a statue of the Virgin Mary in his living room and talks about “turning the other cheek.”

"I let my past destroy me.” Rourke said. “I was walking around my adult life with my fists clenched, pointing the finger at everyone but me. But I finally opened my hands and said, Wow! This is a lot easier than walking around with smoke coming out of my a--."

Watch more Award Season videos on AOL Video

"He's just the doorman." With those words residents of an upscale co-op in Manhattan dismissed the young Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent his summers working as a doorman to help pay for college. This Catholic schoolboy turned tough prosecutor on some of the past decade's most high profile cases is not now so easily dismissed. Fitzgerald, who holds the position of U.S. Attorney for the Eastern Division of the Northern District of Illinois, was once again in the spotlight with the recent of arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was charged with selling the Senate seat left vacant by President Elect Barak Obama.

Fitzgerald has a reputation as a workaholic and uncorruptible who fights mob bosses, terrorists, drug lords, and double-dealing public servants.

Friend Richard Phelan, a Chicago lawyer, says of Fitzgerald "If he were not a prosecutor, he'd be a priest. He's totally and completely dedicated." (Time, Oct. 30, 2005).

His parents, who were born on opposite sides of County Clare, Ireland, met in the United States and raised their son in the Midwood-Flatbush area of Brooklyn. After attending Our Lady Help of Christians grammar school and Regis Jesuit High School, he was a Phi Beta Kappa math and economics student at Amherst College and received his law degree form Harvard Law School in 1985.

"I'm very indebted to my parents. They were very hardworking, straight, decent people,” Fitzgerald said in a 2005 Washington Post article by Peter Slevin. “The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn't grow up in a household where people were anything but direct. I'm hoping that if you're a straight shooter in the world, that's not that remarkable."

This onetime doorman has made a career of showing the prison door to an array of criminals. In addition to being the special prosecutor investigating the leak of the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the defendants in the bombings of U.S. embassies; the staff of the 9/11 commission called him one of the world's best terrorism prosecutors. He also extracted a guilty plea from Mafia boss John Gambino and successfully prosecuted former Illinois governor George Ryan and associates of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley on influence-peddling and corruption charges.

View Fitzgerald’s press conference announcing the arrest of and criminal complaint against Blagojevich:

Newsweek recently ran an item in Lisa Miller's Belief Watch column about online communion-the participation in communion over the internet. Apparently it works like this: After some preparation people watch a celebration of the Lord's Supper online and improvise communion at home. You can see an example at www.holycommunionontheweb.com, a ministry of Rev. Dr. Tom Madron of Nashville's Trinity United Methodist Church. The site makes a point of saying it "is something of an experiment with web-based worship."

Miller says this kind of thing is a manifestation of how the internet is redefining and creating community, even when it comes to worship. Some, like Christian musician and preacher Zeph Daniel, see online religious community as an alternative to institutional religion. "Leave religion," he says, "and find God."

Of course it's easy to see how this arrangement would not work for Catholicism. Consecration and communion comes from the hands of priests and then eucharistic ministers; there's no way (yet) to send it electronically. Another big issue is how you see community: Can you really have a celebration of the assembled body of Christ if you're not physically with other people?

Madron, a former CEO of a tech company, acknowledges this difficulty and does not see online communion as a substitute for attending a service and bringing your body along. "There's a communal aspect to the eucharist," he told Lisa Miller, "that's difficult to satisfy on the Web." But, he says, "There's a whole long list of people who just simply can't make it regularly to a church-for example, people in the military, or people whose I jobs require them to travel a lot, or students. . . . how we can provide authentic worship experiences through the Web for people who are not part of the institutional church?"

(BTW, Mass on TV has been around a long time-any Chicagoans of a certain age may remember the famed Mass for Shut-Ins program. The U.S. Catholic bishops even issued "Guidelines for Televising the Liturgy" in 1997. You can read that one at www.usccb.org/liturgy/current/tv.shtml). Also, I seem to recall a Vatican instruction on the issue of online liturgy from some time ago, but I cannot find it on the Net. So if anyone can track that down (unless I'm imagining it), please let the rest of us know.
-Joel Schorn, Managing Editor

“Nuns in Italy restaurant brawl” ran the headline on the BBC News website. How could I resist?

Which leads me to another question: What would we do without the church in Italy? (As someone with major Italian heritage, I can ask this question without fear of offending.) The same country that brought us the priest who wanted to start an online beauty contest for nuns now gives us a priest and two nuns who allegedly beat up a restaurant manager in the village of Rutino near Salerno in southern Italy.

Apparently the community to which the priest and sisters belongs owns the restaurant property and had been leasing it to Antonio (in some reports Aniello) Esposito, 49. When they showed up at the premises to “discuss” the situation, they were not pleased to find a wall had been knocked down and seating installed. In addition, said Esposito, “I was giving out receipts, which didn’t suit the nuns, who wanted everything under the counter.” Then things got ugly.

“Passersby had called us,” said local police chief Antonio Tata, “because the three attackers were turning over tables and chairs and smashing plates as well as attacking the owner—it was like a scene from a Wild West saloon. We were called to the venue and inside found a group of people fighting—the restaurant boss, two nuns, and a priest.”

Esposito was taken to the hospital with neck and stomach injuries. “I was hit with a chair by the priest and then ended up on the floor,” he told authorities. “The next thing I knew the two nuns were kicking me and hurling unspeakable insults at me.” Authorities were investigating but hadn’t yet made any formal charges.

“My clients deny the allegations,” said Gaetano Di Vietri, lawyer for the three, two of whom—the sisters—are 83. “Let’s be realistic here. All three have a combined age of 160 [a little math problem here?] so it’s not very likely they are going to attack a 49-year-old man. What is more important here is that the premises are being occupied illegally by the restaurant and the police and the owner know that.”

Born in Manhattan into a blue-collar Irish family, Patrick Buckley worked at Smith Barney as a foreign exchange trader, earning a high salary. He enjoyed parties and the single life. He had an expense account, traveled, and entertained foreign traders. But now, at 43, he is called Father Pat and is the associate pastor of St. Stephen’s Parish in Warwick, New York. He was interviewed by Francis Moore.

You did not choose the priesthood as a teenager, right?
I chose what I wanted to do—put my degree to use, work in the business world, live the high life, go out to parties, be in the thick of millions of dollars, feel the high of money in your pocket.

The job was all you expected, but you became a priest. Why?
There was something missing: a lot of time with God. When you open your heart just a little bit to the grace of God, he gets in there and he doesn’t let you forget about it. That’s what happened to me. I kept thinking about it. My uncle was a priest. He never asked me to be a priest, but I kept watching him whenever I went out to see him on weekends, and I said, "Here’s a man who enjoys what he’s doing." It’s not about money; it’s about bringing Christ to and getting Christ from people.

It wasn’t the angel on the bedpost and it wasn’t bolts of lightning, it was walking to work after a snow storm at 6:30 in the morning and starting to see God in things: the homeless guy laying in a cardboard box, seeing that life isn’t about everything at your beck and call, the nice shoes, getting to work, having your coffee. Some people are cut out for that, but God was trying to tell me you’ve got to do something different.

Had you ignored a calling?
I ignored it! But if God wants you he works on you. It’s up to you. You respond. That’s where free will comes in. In my case, I didn’t want it; I was ignoring it but, in his divine plan, I know that the right time was when I left. That’s the great thing about God. He knows what’s going to happen; he lets it play out. Easily I could have rejected it.

Were you praying about the priesthood?
If I didn’t pray as I was discerning, I would never have made it to the seminary. Every morning I prayed before I went to work. I prayed that I would stay healthy, do well, and “is this what you want from me God?” That’s cooperating with God because when you pray you’re actually letting God into your life. Each one of us . . . God has the best in for us.

Have you discovered any benefit or reward from becoming a priest you never expected?
I think you become humbled. On the day of ordination, other priests who are like thirty or forty years a priest, come and kneel down before you and ask you for a blessing. So you are all built up and starting to feel like Superman, like you’ve got these powers. And when you actually do the blessing you feel like you’ve been humbled into the priesthood.

My expectations have all been fulfilled. Every day is something greater. It’s a surprise. Mother Theresa was right: We’re all instruments in God’s hands, and that’s a template for everybody. As a married man, God uses you to bring his love to your wife and your family. God uses me at the altar, at the nursing home. My expectations have all been fulfilled, even surpassed.

How have you changed as a person from when you were younger?
Have I changed much? No. Have I changed for the good? I’ve let God’s grace work in me. In the business world, you more went with the flow. As a priest you have to be more of a listener—compassionate and understanding. That’s the hard part. You never look down at people. You’re not higher than them. When you go into the priesthood, don’t look to be served; you’re there to work with people, to serve them. But, if you use the priesthood for your own personal agenda for power, you’re wrong.

What is calling about?
Calling is about being Christ-like to other people. If you have weaknesses, I should help you improve them, yet be who you are. That’s what’s good about being a priest. Everyone is different yet we have the same goal to be Christ-like.

There are three ways to go. God may say, “You’re not going to be a priest, you’re going to be a married man with a family and maybe a great lector at Mass. You’re going to bring up your family with Christian values. That’s one way. Or you’re going to be single the rest of your life and you’re going to do wonderful things. And the other way is the priesthood and the religious life. It all winds together with the question are you who you were when you were growing up.

Every day as a priest is a challenge and every day there is something new. I’ve never been happier. Have an active prayer life. A prayer life leads to avoiding temptation, and God can work with you when you pray. Cooperation with God and his grace help you make right decisions. If a young person thinks about becoming a priest, never look back. Be thankful you’ve answered the Call. Trust in God.

Dr. Magimai Pragasam, one of the presenters, highlighted the contribution of media to the growth of humanity but also discussed the damages media cause among children today and the practical strategies to develop healthy media habits so that children become critical consumers of media.

Bill Sianis and his infamous goat

Prayer and superstition are very different things. Sometimes, though, they seem to butt up against each other, so to speak.

The Chicago Cubs recent three-game-sweep departure from the National League playoffs—a repeat of last year’s exit—once again raised the specter of a curse laid on the team, especially the “curse” of the billy goat.

Even if you don’t believe in a curse, you have to wonder. As everyone knows, the team hasn’t won a World Series since 1908—when Russia had a tsar and Wilhelm II was the German Kaiser; before widespread radio, not to mention penicillin and rural electrification—and haven’t appeared in a Series since 1945. This last playoff appearance joins a list of calamities: the slow death of 1969; the abrupt fall into the abyss against the Padres; being overmatched against the Braves and the Giants; and then what happened against the Marlins.

For curse true-believers, it all goes back to restaurant owner Bill Sianis and his goat. The linking of a curse with a goat is loaded with a good deal of legend, but the basic story is this. In the 1945 Series, when the Cubs played the Detroit Tigers, Sianis, the proprietor of the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago (immortalized in the “cheezborger” bits on Saturday Night Live) bought a ticket for himself and a goat to one of the Series home games in Wrigley Field—an attempt both to publicize his establishment and “give the goat” to the Tigers. While allowed in, he was eventually asked to remove the animal because it presented, well, a hygienic challenge.

In retaliation Sianis reportedly said something to the effect of: "Them Cubs, they aren’t gonna win no more,” and later, after the Cubs did exactly that, sent team owner P. K. Wrigley a telegram that read, “Who smells now?”

The “curse” was probably the creation of a sportswriter looking for a colorful story, but 63 years of futility and heartbreak, as well as several unsuccessful attempts to lift the curse, have lent it a certain credence.

Jump to 2008. Before the start of the Cubs’ playoff division series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Cubs’ chairman Crane Kenney left a voice mail for Father James L. Greanis, a priest of St. James Greek Orthodox Church in Valparaiso, Indiana. “I’m a devout Catholic, and I’m not superstitious, but if there is anything there, I want to take care of it,” Kenney told Greanis. The call lead to Greanis’ appearance at Wrigley Field a few hours before the game when he blessed the Cubs’ dugout with holy water—and event caught on camera by a TBS cameraman:

"It’s not for ensuring the Cubs winning,” Greanis said in Chicago Tribune story by Paul Sullivan, “but for being safe and protected. I’m a priest first, and a Cubs fan second.”

Apparently the Cubs’ hope, however, was a bit more on the superstitious side. They reportedly thought one Greek American could lift the curse of another. But, Greanis said, “It’s not unusual. In Greece, the priest blesses soccer teams, and they did it in the Olympics, too. It was not intended to be a PR stunt or anything. . . . I don’t want anything to be mocked, and neither did Mr. Kenney.”

Whatever the motive, it didn’t help. Cubs’ starting pitcher Ryan Dempster gave up seven walks, Dodger first-baseman James Loney hit a grand slam, and the Cubs’ bats went into the freezer. “Now,” Greanis said, “I guess I’m just another Cubbie Occurrence.” Join the club.

At Holy Family Medical Center in Des Plaines, Illinois, chaplain and School Sister of Notre Dame Marlene Panko told Health Progress magazine, “we respect the integration of mind, body and spirit.” And she’s doing just that with her Loving Heart, Healing Hands program.

To the background of soft, instrumental music, Sister Panko gives hand massages to staff members and then talks and prays with them. She’s been providing this service for 10 years, starting it at a hospital in Santa Monica, California.

“I wanted a program that would not take away time from [the employees’] jobs,” said Sister Panko. “Soft music and touch, in my mind, are healing qualities. That’s an important part of this program. It just takes 3 to 5 minutes for this experience. That is what captivated the staff. They don’t have to miss out on their responsibilities, and they get a lift to help them get back to their work. You can see the peace and relaxation coming over them as I massage their hands.

“As a chaplain,” she said, “I see myself being available to patients, families, and staff members. I have many opportunities to work with patients and families, but my heart goes out to the employees and doctors and nurses. They work hard and carry heavy responsibilities. They deal with life-and-death situations every day. This weighs heavily on the staff. The helpers need help, too.”

The employees Sister Panko ministers to praise her for her work. “I firmly believe in the power of prayer,” said Eleni Harris, a psych intern-therapist. “Praying with Sister Marlene has provided me with a sense of inner peace, clarity, strength, and acceptance. I have witnessed miracles in both my personal and professional life. She truly touches and inspires all who come in contact with her.”

A Roma nun from Slovakia has said that membership of the European Union has done little to help eastern Europe's large Gypsy minority, despite pledges of support after most countries in the region entered the now 27-nation grouping in 2004.

"The [European Union] is supposed to have brought better conditions here but most Roma communities are still just as poor and downtrodden,” said Atanazia Holubova, a sister of Slovakia's Greek Catholic Church, which follows the Eastern liturgy but is in communion with the pope. "Although funds had been earmarked for Roma communities by the EU's governing commission, these were often diverted for other uses by local administrators," Holubova told Ecumenical News International.

When Chase Hilgenbrinck of Major League Soccer's New England Revolution wanted to talk with president of player personnel Michael Burns and coach Steve Nicol, the two “weren't exactly sure what he was going to say,” Burns said. “It’s not what you usually hear.”

Hilgrenbrinck with the
New England Revolution
 

What they heard from Hilgenbrinck was that he was retiring from professional soccer to enter the seminary and become a Roman Catholic priest.

Hilgenbrinck, 26, a defender and captain of the Revolution’s reserve team, will attend Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. After his studies he will report to his home diocese of Peoria, Illinois for assignment.

"I felt called to something greater," Hilgenbrinck told ESPNsoccernet. "At one time I thought that call might be professional soccer. In the past few years, I found my soul is hungry for something else.

“I fell back on what I knew, and that was the Catholic Church," he said. "I grew up as a Catholic. I was always involved in the church, went to Catholic schools. It was when I got out on my own that my faith really became mine. I really embraced it. I didn't have to go to church any more, I was free to really believe what I wanted to believe.”

Because professional sports careers tend to be short, did he consider putting off his move into the priesthood until his soccer career ended? "Trust me, I thought of that," he said. "I discerned, through prayer, that it was calling me to the Catholic Church. I do not want this call to pass me by," he said. "I was putting up a bunch of barriers, saying I'm not worthy to be called to something like that. But, one by one, the barriers started to come down.

"We are all called to do something. I feel like my specific call is to the priesthood. So, no, it was not possible to continue with soccer. It's absolutely inevitable."

Player personnel president Burns commented on Hilgenbrinck’s decision, "When he said it, I was glad. I was glad for him. This is something that he clearly wants to do, and we wish him all the best."

SpiritCitings has featured everything from rapper martial-arts priests to ex-trucker religious sisters and Trappist monks who sell office supplies, so you shouldn’t be surprised when we bring your attention to a Capuchin Franciscan friar who's into heavy metal.

Brother Cesare Bonizzi, a 62-year-old friar from Milan, has been singing for over 10 years and fronts a band called Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother). The group has just released its second album and recently performed alongside bands such as Iron Maiden at Italy’s “Gods of Metal” festival.

Bonizzi, who calls himself a “preacher-singer,” discovered heavy metal about 15 years ago and says he was “overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer energy of it. I do it to convert people to life, to understand life, to grab hold of life.” To see Brother Cesare in action, here are two news stories about him, one in English, the other in Italian:

 

Answering a need to defray the costs of supporting their retired and infirm sisters, as well as to extend their traditional Franciscan ministry to the poor and marginalized, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God in Pittsburgh have gone into the fair-trade coffee business.

Their Franciscan Blend coffee is locally produced by Arbuckle’s Coffee Company in Verona, Penn., and the coffee beans are purchased from Fair Trade importers.

According to Nick Rodi, a spokesperson for the sisters, “Over half of the world’s coffee is produced on small family farms with only a few acres of coffee trees. Alone, a small family farm cannot compete with larger corporate farms that control the international market price for coffee. With no alternative source of income in rural and agricultural communities, these families often live in extreme poverty.

“Fair Trade certification helps small coffee farmers organize into cooperatives that link them directly to coffee importers and allow them to sell their coffee. Through Fair Trade, importers are encouraged to extend financial credit to cooperatives and develop long-term trading relationships. Fair trade farmers are also guaranteed a premium over the prevailing price paid for coffee on the international market, allowing them to earn an income that will support their families.”

“Franciscan Blend Coffee is a wonderful blend of win-win,” said U.S.A. Provincial Minister Sister J. Lora Dambroski, O.S.F. “For us, as Franciscan Sisters, it is an opportunity to realize our life direction of extending the hospitality of God. For poor coffee farmers and their families, Fair Trade means a better income for their hard work, allowing them to hold on to their homes, keep their children in school, and invest in the quality of their harvest.”

The 12-oz. bags of ground regular coffee are available from www.osfprov.org/FranciscanBlend.htm or by calling 412-885-7223.

In June Father John McLaughlin left his parish north of Boston to become the first vocations director for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, which serves Catholics in the branches of the U.S. military, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and people in U.S. government service overseas. McLaughlin will travel to bases around the country to build relationships with the chaplains in closest touch with those considering a call to Catholic religious life. Retreats and correspondence with interested troops will follow. He will also speak to military personnel about the possibility of pursuing a religious vocation, said a June 12 Associated Press story by Jay Lindsay.

He and church leaders believe the armed forces offer a promising source of vocations. Members of the military service, he thinks, could be open to service in the church as well. “You start realizing how fragile life is,” he said. “And when people start thinking in those terms, they eventually start thinking about helping people in life.”

Besides facing questions of life and death, service men and women tend to have traits necessary for religious life, including self-discipline and a willingness to sacrifice, said Monsignor James Dixon of the Military Archdiocese.

Church officials estimate 11 percent of seminary students during the last three years have served in the military or had a parent who served. The archdiocese has for a long time reached out to service members but never had the money to hire someone dedicated to that job, Dixon said. “We finally got to the point where we think it’s become an absolute necessity,” he said.

McLaughlin believes he’ll be helping both the church and the troops in his new job. If he succeeds in recruiting more priests to dioceses, he said, those dioceses may be more likely to allow their priests to serve in the military, where the priest shortage is particularly acute.

In the Army, for instance, only 100 priests serve more than 105,000 Catholic soldiers, said Chaplain Ran Dolinger, a spokesman at the Army’s office of Chief of Chaplains.

Army chaplain Paul Hurley, who attended seminary with McLaughlin in the early 1990s, campaigned for his friend to get the job without McLaughlin’s knowledge. Hurley said McLaughlin has an authenticity and a knack for getting young people to talk about what’s important to them. Those characteristics are crucial when someone is deciding if life as a priest, sister, or brother is right, he said. “He’s got that special touch,” Hurley said. “He finds a way of connecting with people where they’re at.”

A former Boston College wrestler and later a high school coach, McLaughlin, 50, said his first major encounter with God came when he was stabbed in the liver at age 20 while walking near Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace. He and his brother were jumped without provocation, he said. As he lay on the street, McLaughlin prayed for forgiveness and for his family. “Even when I faced the worst hardship I turned to God,” McLaughlin said.

His commitment to the priesthood came more than a decade later, after experiencing an overwhelming peace during visits to a Marian shrine. “I thought, this is what God wants me to do, is to tell people about that and bring that peace of God to them,” he said.

“The hope is that they’ll think about it, talk to me about it, and then at the end of their [military] commitment, that’s when they’ll make the decisions,” he said. “All I know is that if I show them I enjoy the priesthood and believe in it, if God wants it to happen, it will happen.”

How do you think the church would best serve those in the military? What do you think are good ways for the church to recruit vocations to religious life among military personnel?

In the wake of the death of journalist Tim Russert, the public has found out a lot about his Catholic faith, including the influence of growing up Catholic in Buffalo, New York and of his grade school teacher Sister of Mercy Mary Lucille Socciarelli and Father John Sturm of Buffalo’s Canisius High School.

In the book The Person Who Changed My Life: Prominent Americans Recall Their Mentors, Russert said of Socciarelli: “In the seventh grade at St. Bonaventure School in Buffalo, New York, Sister Mary Lucille, a Sister of Mercy, was both impressed and yet concerned by—shall we say—my excessive energy in class. She expressed that in her words, ‘We have to channel that energy, Timothy,’ because I was prone to mischief. One day she told me, ‘I’m going to start a school newspaper and you’re going to be the editor. This means that you have to give out assignments, you have to edit the copy, you have to write your own articles, you have to go around and interview students, teachers, and administrative people, and publish the paper. You have to distribute it. You have to decide whether you're going to charge for it, or if you’re going to have a fundraiser to underwrite the cost.’

“It became this extraordinary project that I threw myself into and so did all my friends. If left us little time to get in trouble because we were so devoted to the paper, called The Bonette after St. Bonaventure School. Then she said, “If you don't keep up your grades we're not going to be able to do the second edition of the newspaper.” That made us all committed to studying harder. It became a real class project.”

Russert established the Sister Mary Lucille/Father Sturm Award, a cash prize provided to a Buffalo Catholic school teacher each year who has made a difference in a child's life by acting as a mentor.

At the memorial service for Russert, Socciarelli returned the favor:

A new book sheds light on a little-known branch of Catholic religious life: cloistered Dominican sisters. In fact, the book’s introduction says, they make up the oldest part of the Dominicans, predating the order’s official founding by 10 years.

A collaboration of Dominican monasteries in the United States under the sponsorship of the Association of Dominican Nuns of the U.S.A., Vocation in Black and White: Dominican Contemplative Nuns Tell How God Called Them has 23 stories of calls to this kind of religious life.

The book hopes, it says, “to aid those discerning a call to the monastic life, to recall the ‘first love’ of those who have chosen it, and to raise awareness of Dominican contemplative life. The following accounts are told by the nuns themselves. They are all true, although a few sisters prefer to remain anonymous. Given the many contributing factors and the mysterious element in every vocation, selection in what to tell is necessary. This choice was left to each nun.”

The book is available from iUniverse; a community of Dominican sisters; and the major online booksellers.

Msgr. Mark Giordani
on his Harley-Davidson Road King
 

On a flatbed truck parked between the Paterson, New Jersey County Jail and St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Monignor "Father Mark" Giordani (right) presides at the Annual Bike Blessing and Mass for the couple thousand bikers who stop in downtown Paterson on their way to the yearly Memorial Day Rolling Thunder event, when bikers assemble in Washington, D.C. to honor Americans who have died in wars, are missing in action, or have been prisoners of war.

When Giordani came to the United States from Italy, where he was born, he asked to be assigned to the poorest parish in the Paterson diocese. Today he is rector of the St. John the Baptist Cathedral parish, which numbers 3,000 mostly Latino members. He also serves as chaplain to the county prison, the Paterson police and sheriff’s offices, and the New York-New Jersey Port Authority—a job he took ten days before the 9/11 attacks. Giordani also founded the Christian Riders Motorcycle Club in Paterson in 1969 “to promote faith, dignity, and brotherhood through motorcycling.”

His arrival in the U.S. led him as well to move up from his Vespa motorcycle to a Harley-Davidson Road King (see above)—which is decorated with images of Christ’s life. “We have the Nativity,” Giordani told Lucky Severson of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. “We have the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, and, of course, the Holy Spirit on the tank, which branches out to the saddle bags.”

He loves riding. “It’s just exhilarating—the sense of freedom, the sense of enjoying the beauty of God’s creation, and it’s just a powerful and magnificent gift for me,” he said. But his involvement with motorcycles goes beyond personal enjoyment. He also ministers to people—bikers—who can feel unwelcome in churches. “We’re ostracized just for our hobby, our mode of transportation,” said rider David Bove, “and it’s nice to be in a group of people that kind of look like me. We all have the same mindset.”

Giordani attests to the faith of many bikers, even if they don’t belong to a church, let alone a Catholic church. “They read the Bible,” he says. “They say their own prayers, and they offer prayers for those who are sick, so there is a special connection with God in their own unique way. I mean, what does God want really want from us? A loving, humble heart. So uncomplicated.”

When Mercy Sister Joan Margret Schwager, R.S.M. isn’t teaching in a classroom in Whitefish, Montana, you may find her on slopes instructing 5 to 8 year olds in the basics of skiing. After beginning to ski 15 years ago, a friend who works a ski resort asked Schwager is she would be interested in teaching skiing. Now she coordinates instruction for about 40 young beginners each season. “It’s fun and an opportunity for great evangelization, too, during the great chats one has riding up and down the ski lifts!” she said.

Schwager is a member of the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Regional Community of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas and is part of the team in the Sisters of Mercy New Membership Office.

Brothers Ignatius and Edward with their B&B awards

“All guests who present themselves,” Saint Benedict of Nursia wrote in his Rule for monks, “are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25:25).” Fifteen hundred years later, a group of monks on Chicago’s South Side are continuing the Benedictine tradition of hospitality: a Benedictine Bed and Breakfast.

The Monastery of the Holy Cross’s Benedictine Bed and Breakfast has won national awards from the hospitality industry and is listed on several travel and food websites. Most nights from spring through early winter the bed and breakfast, which is housed in a former parish complex the monastery occupies, operates at full capacity. It is also available year-round. Drawing on an international as well as national and local clientele, the B&B has welcomed guests from countries on almost every continent, including New Zealand, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Denmark, Russia, Finland, Wales, Croatia, Switzerland, the Philippines, Japan, the Middle East, South Africa, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, England, Canada, and Austria.

For more information on the monastery, visit www.chicagomonk.org

.

Universal Music was looking to get on the Gregorian chant bandwagon, but where to find monks to record some? Then company execs ran across a YouTube video (see below) featuring the Cistercian monks of Austria's Heiligenkreuz Monastery, and it was a deal. The monks join a Universal artist roster that includes Amy Winehouse and Eminem.

Novice Bryan Cuocci, O.S.B.M.

I first felt the call of the Lord to follow him more intimately at the age of 10. At that time I participated enthusiastically in the various religious activities of my parish. As I grew older, I did volunteer work at a nearby orphanage and got involved in children’s catechesis. I was also a member of the Catholic Youth Action. The Lord’s call became clearer to me when I was 15, at World Youth Day 2000 in Rome with Pope John Paul II, when I heard interiorly with a soft and irresistible voice the “come, follow me” of the Lord. God called me to be His ‘sentinel of the dawn’. Moved by immense joy I responded, “Here I am, Lord, may your holy will be done in me!”  The One and Triune God had captured me with His love.

From that time on I understood that God had chosen me to consecrate myself totally to Him. I did not yet understand, however, where He was calling me to live this vocation. And I did not know how I was going to communicate this choice to my family, who, though devout and practicing Catholics, had other plans for my future.

For about four years, I prayed for discernment to understand where the Lord wanted me to live the religious vocation to which he was calling me. I always remained open to others, and always had the desire to work with others. But I desired above all to pray and to be in the constant presence of God. At first I never thought of my vocation to be a monastic one. But truly, our thoughts are not His thoughts, nor our plans His plans.

Gradually, I understood the basic points of my vocation to be the life of prayer, community life, faithful witness of the gospel, devotion to the Blessed Mother of God, and the religious habit as a sign of my special consecration to God. That which touched me most was the biblical example of the “narrow gate” and the words from the gospel, “You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world . . . freely you have received, gratuitously you give.” These words gave me the courage and the strength to offer myself to God in a radically evangelical life without reserve. Surely there were always problems, but the Lord sustained me always by his grace.

During my philosophical studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, I met the Basilian monks of the Exarchic Greek Abbey of St. Mary of Grottaferrata. This is an ancient Catholic Monastic Order of Oriental rite and traditions that has ecumenical dialogue as its specific mission within the Church. The monks live and pray to bring about Jesus’ ardent prayer to the Father at the Last Supper “so that they all may be one” and the words of St. Paul, “so that God may be All in all.” In fact, the Byzantine rite is a great help for the Orthodox brethren to draw closer to the Catholic Church, and the Latin Catholics to approach more easily to the Oriental Christianity.

Immediately I was touched by the monks’ lifestyle, marked by prayer. I was particularly struck by the spirituality of Saint Basil the Great and the Byzantine tradition. I was also captivated by their interesting activities, their profound and joyful fidelity to the monastic life, their fraternal life, and their openness to life in Christ. In short, my contact with the monks was a spark of light that ignited in me great happiness and serenity. I finally understood that it was here that God was calling me. “You have called me? Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will: You are my highest Good forever!”

After an experience of about 20 days in the monastery, I entered as a postulant in August of 2005. On June 28, 2006, during the feast of the Apostle Saints Peter and Paul, I made the monastic investiture and then entered into the novitiate. The first year of novitiate was a year of abundant graces. Guided and accompanied by the novice master Fr. Antonio, I began to deepen my relationship with God. I studied the monastic Typikòn (our Holy Rule), the Byzantine liturgy, the Greek liturgical language, the writings of Saint Basil the Great, the ascetic life, and the spirituality of the holy fathers and the Holy Scriptures. I have served in our laboratory for the restoration of ancient books and in our infirmary, serving the sick in the community. I am presently a second year novice and God willing, I will make my solemn vows next year. As part of the ascetic-monastic formation, I am studying theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University and at the same time doing diverse duties in our community.

The monastic life is a mystical experience which someone enters only through God’s invitation. The solemn vows are evidence. But it is an invitation that requires our attention. Yes, because the Lord Jesus calls many, but some people do not listen, do not realize that their names are uttered by the lips of God. My invitation to all youth like me is this: If you feel this attraction towards God, don’t put off the flame of Love that the Creator has ignited in you. Respond generously and readily and you will never regret it! God is love! 

I belong to: The Exarchic Greek Abbey of St. Mary of Grottaferrata. For more information about the Basilian Monks, contact Father Antonio Costanza, O.S.B.M. at 0039-06.9459309 or write to: Basilian Monks—Exarchic Greek Abbey of St. Mary, Corso del Popolo 128, I-00046 Grottaferrata (Rome) Italy. E-mail: segreteria@abbaziagreca.it

Ode and Body+Soul magazines goes out to people interested in "conscious" living—health, an environmentally friendly lifestyle, and peace. Now, alongside the ads for organic chocolates are those for the Sisters of Providence, headquartered in St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana.

"It's the right audience for us," Diane Weidenbenner, the director of marketing for the sisters, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "The magazines appeal to women interested in a right relationship with God, other people, and earth."

The sisters devote more than 340 acres of their 1,200-acre grounds to organic farming and also host the White Violet Center for Eco-Justice. Located in a former laundry facility, this education center and meeting facility includes a wetlands restoration project, a trail of bluebird houses that is part of a Cornell University bird study, a herd of 50 alpacas, a straw bale retreat house, organic and biodynamic gardens grown for farmers' markets, a library, and a greenhouse where staff members produce seedlings for use in organic/biodynamic gardens.

The ads, said Sister Denise Wilkinson, vicar and first general councilor for the Sisters of Providence, are intended to appeal to anyone in need of spiritual nourishment. If someone is interested in joining the community or donating, all the better.

Sister and Foundress Annamarie Cook, S.L.W.

The Sisters of the Living Word, founded in 1975, minister in 12 dioceses across the United States. Their mission is to reflect and affirm the Word, Jesus, who frees the oppressed and gives new life. “As Jesus was sent by the Father in the Power of the Spirit, so are we sent as Sisters of the Living Word. We reflect and affirm the Word in the Word, the Word who continually frees the oppressed and gives new life.”

In keeping this mission alive, the sisters celebrate the memory of foundress Annamarie Cook. Her unbounded courage—based on total, loving openness to God’s call—is a poignant model for the Sisters. Cook passed away October 20, 2005. In her own words: “As I look back to 1975 I am grateful to God for forming us as a new community. I look forward to whatever time I have left in this world to continue to bring Christ to others wherever and whenever I can. Meantime, I live from day to day knowing that all I want to do is His will in whatever way it is shown to me. When He calls me at the end of my journey, I will say a happy ‘Yes.’ ”

Their works include youth and adult education, parish, campus and diocesan ministry, health care, retreat and spiritual direction, counseling, healing ministries, environmental advocacy, and outreach to new immigrants as well as to victims of violence, hunger, unemployment, and homelessness.

“Living among this Lakota tribe has helped me to see the beauty of a people that has survived in small numbers against great adversities.” —Elaine Tworek, S.L.W. is ministering to the young, the elders, the sick, and those in search of deep faith in Lower Brule, South Dakota. Her deepest desire is to help empower and invite each individual to claim and share their personal richness and goodness so the entire community can grow stronger in faith and love.

“I feel blessed to be here. Our parishioners are from all over the city, and a number of our parishioners are homeless. I feel privileged to be with them for breakfast and lunch listening and sharing with them. This also affords me the opportunity to give them resources that might benefit them. In addition to this, I am a director for religious education for our small religious education program. Our teachers and children are an inspiration to me. I am truly grateful to God for leading me to this parish.” —Vianney Moore, S.L.W. is ministering at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and its center, St. Jude, which is located at the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans.

“Collaborating with our sacramental minister and my brothers and sisters in this faith community, we have been able to fulfill—a long-desired dream—that of building a new church and hall. This dream became a reality in 2002 with the dedication of this new building—indeed a day of celebration and thankfulness to our God for the support given by our bishop, benefactors, and parishioners.” —Joanne Fedewa, S.L.W. is Pastoral Coordinator of Christ the King Parish in Flint, Michigan.

“I believe so much in the body-mind-spirit connection that I explored massage therapy as a ministry. This is what my ministry is to this day.” —Jeannine Randolph, S.L.W. offers massage therapy at the House of the Good Shepherd whose residents are abused women. She also offers massage therapy to the frail elderly at various nursing homes, including Lutheran Home, Resurrection Life Center, and Addolorata Villa, all in Illinois.

Most people think religious orders were founded centuries ago, but many were established in the last few decades. Does that fact change how you think about religious orders?

In 1964 Sister Lois Aceto, a Racine Dominican sister, had been teaching in that Wisconsin city for 14 years when her order gave her the opportunity to fulfill her dream as a foreign missionary: After spending five months in Lima, Peru learning Spanish, she and three other Dominican sisters went to Bolivia. The group had no specific instructions and “didn’t even have a place to stay,” Aceto told Racine Journal Times reporter Marci Laehr Tenuta. “I went there kind of naive about many things.”

After the sisters spent a period riding the buses of La Paz, Aceto started teaching religion in the public schools. There she organized high school and college students to work on justice-related issues—a delicate matter in a country then governed by a dictatorship. “You can’t talk against the government without getting arrested, which I was twice,” she said
Aceto also started a small library and hospital and a school for the blind, a task for which she learned Braille. Other activities included keeping young people out of brothels. “Boy, was that an education, let me tell you,” she said. “I’m always doing things I’m not prepared to do.”

Traveling outside La Paz, Aceto established an outpatient clinic for people with no medical care. She supervised orphanages and started a group for street children called New Hope. “It was beautiful,” she said. “It’s still going, by the way.” In an effort to be better prepared for her ministry, she even went to Madrid to study medicine.

When her father became seriously ill in 1981, Aceto returned to the United States. But she didn’t stop working on justice issues. She became involved in local programs like Restorative Justice and the Conflict Resolution Center housed at Neighborhood Watch, of which she is the director and where she trains others to be mediators and teaches conflict resolution in area prisons.

Aceto recently published a book, Journeying toward Justice, that recounts her time in Bolivia. “I feel driven to share my story,” she writes in the book. “For this is not merely one woman’s story: It symbolizes many of us—unknown, perhaps to all but a few—but people earnest, zealous, dedicated to serving God in the way we feel called, to engaging ourselves in the struggle for peace and justice in the world.”

Aceto says her work in Bolivia “changed me completely. I loved it, every minute of it. It taught me how to rely on the providence of God. You learn how to walk with God, all the time.”

Journeying toward Justice is available at

.

Elias Mallon, S.A.

For more than 20 years Father Elias Mallon, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, has worked in Christian dialogue with non-Christians, Muslims in particular. His most recent efforts have been with Franciscans International, a nongovernmental (nonprofit) organization and the United Nations, where he is involved in issues of interreligious conflict transformation and peace building, including those in the Middle East. He also speaks and teaches widely.

Previously Mallon was on the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Bossey, Switzerland, where he also represented what is now the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He worked as well at the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute, a ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, and was even interim dean for a year of Auburn Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary in New York City.

In addition to his ecumenical work, Mallon has taught Old Testament and Near Eastern Languages.

“How one asks a question greatly determines how one seeks the answer,” Mallon says. “For centuries Christians have been asking if non-Christians could be saved. Early on in my work with non-Christians the question which arose for me and continues to motivate me is: What is our good and loving Creator trying to tell us by the existence of different religions in our world? It is a question which fascinates me, humbles me, and drives me on.”

What do you think people can learn from dialoging with those from other religions?

Mother Dolores Hart, O.S.B.

Mother Dolores Hart, prioress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a Benedictine monastic community in Bethlehem, Connecticut, has helped bring about an arts and crafts renaissance of sorts at the monastery. The community has released its fourth CD of chant. It hosts a 200-seat open-air theater. Steel sculpture created by Mother Praxedes Baxter—a former printmaker who also helped designed the abbey’s church—adorns the grounds.

But then Regina Laudis is not Hart’s first foray into the arts. She gave Elvis Presley his first onscreen kiss.

Before entering monastic life in 1963 at age 24, Hart had appeared in 10 films, including Loving You—in which she kissed Elvis— King Creole, and Where the Boys Are. She had begun visiting Regina Laudis while performing on Broadway in The Pleasure of His Company, for which she received a Tony nomination.

“Acting was what I thought I always wanted to do, and there was nothing about it I didn’t like,” Hart said in a December 30, 2007 New York Times story by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton. “I loved the idea of playing different parts, of learning about other people’s lives. But then I came to visit the abbey and realized I belonged here. Like the theater, the monastery gives people a different view of life and inspires them to come alive, to fully live their story.”

The monastery combines contemplative life not only with the arts but also with with making products from the animals the sisters keep on the grounds: raw-milk cheese, ice cream, honey, jellies, leather, and other things that help support the community. Cheese-making is supervised by Mother Noella Marcellino, who has a doctorate in microbiology. “As an enclosed community, we have the time to contemplate, create and nurture our crafts, and then send the results out into the world,” she said. “That’s our gift to people.”

“She encourages us,” Marcellino said of Hart, “to tap into our emotions and to find a positive way to express them. Mother Dolores taught us that emotions are universal—that everyone experiences happiness, sadness, anger, joy, and passion—and that we can use them to better connect with people outside the abbey through our art, whether it be in the plays we host, in the songs we sing, or in the ways we celebrate God as we chant and read prayers during worship.”

“Music and the arts help people come alive,” Hart said. “They lift people’s minds and spirits, and in that enlightened state help people find God. God isn’t a whiskered old man. He’s alive and can be experienced in things that move us to feel love or beauty. That’s why we use the arts as a form of prayer, and then try to share those prayers with other people.” The sisters have also recorded several "Women in Chant" CDs (see their website).

Despite 45 years of religious life, however, Hart is still a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and, according to the rules, keeps her Oscar votes a secret.

“I went from a lead role to a supporting role,” she said, describing her transition from actor to religious sister, “but it’s where I belong.”

How would the arts help you express your faith?

From the heart of a missionary

Words come rushing into my awareness as I think of my missionary life so far . . . Kenya, my dream come true, far away from my birthplace of Detroit, Michigan. Fulfilling years of wondering, praying, searching, which culminated in my joining the Medical Missionaries of Mary, in Boston, Massachusetts. One dream, of being a nurse, had already come to fruition; now the missionary segment was unfolding. I was sent to a place called Turkana, a desert area tucked away in a corner of northwest Kenya. It was a land so totally new to me and “foreign,” yet it was there, in a seemingly barren land, that my life really bore fruit. I found a new life, a new home and all my dreams were fulfilled.

How to sum up my years as a missionary? So many experiences: joys and frustrations of learning a foreign language, becoming part of a gifted people so very different from my own. So much learning: about life and death, risk-taking and loving, failures and accomplishments. I discovered within me: my love for a people and land that is so deep that they will always be enmeshed in my heart and soul. It was a land where I experienced the deeper meaning of communion and commitment, of realizing more deeply what a missionary really is, the costs as well as the tremendous gift.

O what wondrous things I have experienced! What can compare with an old woman’s toothless smile as she eagerly awaits the often mispronounced or haltingly expressed words I speak in her language? Or who would trade anything for the laughter of a healthy baby and mother who have successfully fought the battle against tuberculosis? Again, what is equal to helping to quench the thirst for knowledge about God, about healthy living, about what the “rest of the world is like” that young people have?

Whom did I find? I found friends, people I am close to and will remain so until the day I die. I found Christ already present among the people who were labeled animists by some and heathens or pagans by others. I, the missionary, was missioned to, in countless ways, such as the heartfelt compassion I received from a starving mother of three who comforted me as I cried while telling her we had no more food to give, that our supplies were finished after a year-long drought and famine. I am the woman of little faith that, during that same famine, when death from hunger and disease were literally all around us, thought that Christmas would be dismal—but who had the best Christmas of her life! I experienced that Christmas Eve the true spirit and meaning of Christmas shining in the eyes and hearts, in the faith and joy of the people. These and countless other experiences I hold dear and will cherish always.

I lift my heart in gratitude to God for my missionary vocation and for all I have lived and experienced as a result! Glory and praise to our God!

I belong to: The Medical Missionaries of Mary

Lasallian Teacher Immersion
Program Participants

“This is my 35th year in education,” says Christian Brother Patrick Conway. “One thing I’ve noticed is the shrinking pool of male teachers, particularly as related to theology and religion teachers. In the United States today, 19 percent of all Catholic school teachers are men. In the public schools it’s 21 percent . . . .”

To address this shortage, the Midwest province of the Christian Brothers has initiated the Lasallian Teacher Immersion Program to guide more young men into teaching. The program draws on students from Christian Brothers universities and colleges and gives them supervised classroom teaching experience and chances to serve those in need, all while earning college credit.

The first group of Lasallians volunteered at an inner city middle school for at-risk young people and worked in shelters, soup kitchens, and day-care facilities. In addition, they took classes themselves at nearby Christian Brothers schools. A future semester will involve students in a five-week program in Guatemala. Other activities include community living and working at a Catholic Worker house.

The Lasallian program returns the Christian Brothers to their roots of working in inner cities among immigrants, Brother Patrick tells Catholic News Service. “We are now returning to our mission. We have been trying to become more attuned to the plight of the poor.”

Have ever thought being a teacher? What do you think would be the rewards and challenges of teaching?

About Me: I grew up in a big family, 6 kids—I was the second oldest. We all went to St. Patrick School, which is where we received the sacraments and first learned about our faith. Although I enjoyed the teachers and the sisters, it never occurred to me that I could aspire to be a religious sister.

Nancy Gucwa

While a senior in high school, I was considering becoming a lawyer, but the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) announced it would accept women. I was intrigued about its history of developing leaders of character. So I graduated with the first class of women, serving 5 years active duty after graduation. I then left active duty, and with an M.B.A. got a job at a large bank in downtown Manhattan, all the while staying in the Army reserves. I enjoyed this job, the fast pace of the city, and the world of finance. Five years later, I accepted a position in St. Louis with a different firm that offered more responsibilities and new challenges.

In St. Louis, the job became busier, often requiring late hours and weekends. I felt I had no time for the Army reserves, so I put that aside for a while. I had a full life, with working and dating and a weekly Bible study with a great group of people. The latter led to learning about various retreats in the area, and I would squeeze one or two weekend retreats in my busy schedule.

My Vision: Although outwardly successful, I still felt something important was missing. So when my company was purchased and my job was phased out I started working for myself in a financial seminar business, which afforded me a more flexible schedule. I had time for more prayer and reflection that really fed my soul.

In November of 2004 while on retreat at a hermitage in High Ridge, Missouri, I chatted with the priest there, telling him about myself and my career journey. At a break in the conversation, he shocked me with his invitation, “Have you ever considered a religious vocation?” It hit me like a bolt of lightening, and I knew I found what I was searching for. Yet, what kind of religious order? To help me narrow this down, I found a wonderful priest who helped me discern whether an active or contemplative order would be a better fit.

After visiting several orders, I visited and fell in love with the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Clyde, Missouri, a contemplative order. We live a monastic life of work and prayer, following the rule of Saint Benedict. We make altar breads and also pray the Liturgy of the Hours several times a day. I have been here a year and a half now and feel extremely happy and blessed. I would encourage all women who have had careers, even in their 30’s and 40’s, to consider whether a religious vocation is right for them.

I Belong to: The Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Clyde, Missouri

How would use your talents if you were a member of a religious community?

"Formula J"
Spiritual Water

The $15 billion-a-year bottled water industry may not seem a likely source of controversy, but surprisingly it is. Critics point to the fact that bottled water doesn’t always differ in quality from tap water, encourages the unsanitary reuse of plastic bottles, contributes to the accumulation of garbage, and leads people to ignore the lack of reliable supplies of drinking water for a billion of the world’s people—including the 30,000 people who die every week from unsafe-water-related diseases and the almost 6,000 children who die daily from diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation.

Now several companies have entered the fray by using religion to market their bottled water. Spiritual Water, for example, a new line of purified municipal water, sells under 10 different Christian labels—including  "Formula J"  with head of Jesus with the Fatima prayer in both Spanish and English on the bottle (see above right)—and claims to help people “stay focused, believe in yourself, and believe in God,” reports a Newsweek story by Lisa Miller. The Spiritual Water company, founded by someone who used to be in the pest-control business, donates a portion of its profits to charity. It also says its containers are ecofriendly because fewer people are less willing to throw out a bottle bearing an image of Mary or Jesus.

In Minnesota, however, a group of Catholic sisters have a different taken on the bottled water issue: They object to the whole idea. “I believe that water is a gift of creation, and it’s a gift for everybody. Nobody’s exempt,” says Sister Mary Zirbes of the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, Minn. “It’s meant for everyone, and therefore it should not be a commodity to be sold. It should be free to everyone.” With the Benedictine Sisters of St. Joseph and other faith groups nationwide, the Little Falls Franciscans have begun a letter-writing campaign and designed and distributed coasters to encourage people to drink water straight from the tap.

What do you think of using religious images in products and advertising?

Blessed Maria Schininà

About Me: Blessed Maria Schininà was born in Ragusa, Italy in 1844 to noble parents. Maria, the fifth of eight children, lived her days of infancy and adolescence surrounded by the care and attention of her parents and brothers.

Until the age of 21 Maria was no more than a carefree girl born of a wealthy family. Her intense and happy life alternated between religious duties she carried out with her family and her love for beauty, which she continuously perfected through music, fashion, and above all dancing. Maria never displayed any particular spiritual inclinations, even if she inherited her parents’ sensitivity towards the poor and the needy.

The death of her father in 1865 induced her to change her life, which she often declared did not satisfy her inner needs. Her soul could no longer ignore the cries of the poor who were living only steps away from her home. Her comfortable lifestyle was too much of a contrast to the misery just outside her door. It was for this reason that Maria began to look into herself, enlightened by faith and God’s calling which became ever clearer at the feet of the Eucharist. These were years of deep reflection.

In 1874 her youngest brother got married, leaving her and her mother alone. This turn of events posed no obstacle to her. She took off her elegant clothes and dressed like the poor, saying: “Let that which served my vanity go to the poor.”

From this moment on she decided to dedicate herself completely to the sick, the poor, and the outcasts who languished in the most squalid hovels in Ragusa, and to abandoned children, without paying attention to the criticisms from people of her social class who thought she was insane. Everything she did was suggested to her by her love for the Eucharist, which would constitute a fundamental characteristic of her life she would pass on to her spiritual daughters.

My Vision: Maria made herself poor to serve the poor, to cure in them “the suffering members of Jesus’ body.” Her life definitely took a new course. She started to participate in various humanitarian and charitable initiatives.

In 1877, after being elected directress of the new Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria, she was able to attract young people in Ragusa, becoming a living example of how to carry out a “true social revolution” in the light of the gospel. A voice she heard one day while praying before the image of the Sacred Heart told her to obey the “ministers of the church.” This revelation brought her to renounce the monastic life and found an institute, following the advice of the archbishop. This institute would give material and spiritual aid to the poor and the needy in her city.

She loved Christ in the poor. “Love and reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus” meant for Maria Schininà an offering of herself by serving those who are poor and marginalized. She called the new congregation the Institute of the Sacred Heart. This congregation continues to serve the poor in different parts of the world: Italy, the United States, Canada, Madagascar, the Philippines, Nigeria, Romania, India, Panama, and recently France.

I Belong to: The Institute of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Sister Maryanne Pierre, O.P.

Despite years of war and hardship, Sister Maryanne Pierre has helped to keep Baghdad’s St. Raphael’s Hospital open to those who need medical care. The Dominican sister, 58, was recently named a CNN “Hero of War,” a group of people the news network recognizes for their “feats of courage, nobility of purpose, or life-risking situations” to “avert conflict, save lives, or otherwise achieve an extraordinary mission.”

Sister Pierre was born in Iraq and was attracted to the Dominican sisters, who had established a community in Baghdad in 1873. After studying in France and the United States, Pierre returned to the Iraqi capital to work at St. Raphael’s.

In addition to treating sick and injured people during the Iraq war, St. Raphael’s, one of the few hospitals to remain open during the fighting, also had to deal with a large number of premature childbirths. “The fear caused many women to have premature births, Sister Pierre said. “Three hundred and fifty babies were born in two weeks.” Falling bombs and looters did not deter Pierre and the hospital staff from keeping the facility open. Most recently she went into the streets and asked U.S. Marines to guard the hospital.

“This is my job to stay here to help people,” she said. “Even during the first Gulf War we stayed. It’s our duty to stay here for all the people.”

What do you think of Sr. Pierre's work? Do you find it inspiring? Frightening? Both?

For 900 years the Augustinian monastery of Klosterneuburg (see video below) has risen above the banks of the Danube just north of Vienna. Though it is one of oldest monasteries in Austria, it has, since 2003, become a leader as well in a quite modern enterprise: the environmentally friendly heating of its immense facilities.

Two state-of-the-art biomass furnaces have replaced a number of obsolete heating systems or systems fired with fossil fuels in the monastery, a leisure centre, the hospital, and two municipal buildings in the city of Klosterneuburg. This new equipment has reduced CO₂ emissions by 97 percent.

Installed underground to preserve the monastery’s façade, the construction of the biomass boilers also allowed the monastery to build a new a wine storage hall (the region is famous for its winemaking) and new underground visitor parking.

Sister Maria
Rosa Leggol, S.S.S.F.

When Sister Maria Rosa Leggol was 6 years old, she saw a group of German nuns passing through her hometown of Puerto Cortes, Honduras. After inquiring with the parish priest about who these women might be, she decided on the spot to become a religious sister. Three years later she prayed to the Virgin Mary to help her find the sisters she had seen. When she left the church she saw a train carrying two of those very School Sisters of St. Francis. “Never,” Sister Leggol says, “has a prayer had such a direct answer.”

After going through her novitiate at the community’s motherhouse in Milwaukee—“I learned how to pray, how to work, and how to have courage from those German nuns,” she says of this time—she returned to Honduras and began working in a hospital in Tegucigalpa.

Her work at the hospital helped to make her aware of the plight of the city’ poor young children, many of whom lacked even a semblance of an education or a normal upbringing. Sister Leggol has come to call these children “moral orphans” because many of them have been, in the words of journalist John Allen, Jr., who wrote about Sister Leggol in the National Catholic Reporter, “so badly failed by their own parents as to be effectively without a family.”

Sister Leggol’s work led to the founding of the Sociedad Amigos de los Niños, which offers abandoned and frequently abused children in Honduras a home, education, and the possibility of employment. She has also established 86 free health clinics in the country, which serve the dual purpose of providing basic health care to poor and rural Hondurans and also giving jobs to recent medical-school graduates. In addition to these efforts she also created a training center for young Honduran women who work as maids and a boarding school for needy rural boys.

"If you really understand God's call," she told NCR, "if you're clear that you have a vocation that comes from God for which you are responsible, then nothing stops you," she said. "I'm very strong in that way. Nobody gave me this job—I made it."

Her determination is legendary. She went over the head of her superior to begin the home for children, severed a relationship with a supporting foundation who wanted her to stop accepting handicapped children and mothers along their children, and once in the 1960s ran onto an airport runway to stop a plane from taking off so she could get the signature of a businessman on board who had agreed to donate to the children’s homes.

“I’m not an easy person,” Sister Leggol says. “I try to think 15 steps ahead all the time, which is why people think I’m crazy. If I had ever been married . . . all I can say is, poor man!”

Father Ed Nowak, C.S.P.

About Me: When I first thought of becoming a priest, I was a freshman at Penn State University, heading towards an engineering degree and contemplating marriage to a lovely woman named Lucille.

One day, while at the university, I attended a discussion sponsored by the Newman center on the topic of married priests. I remember telling our campus minister at the time that I would consider being a priest if I could be married. I told God that I would be open to the idea if things didn’t work out with Lucille. Time passed and Lucille and I did break up and I kept my promise to be open to the possibility of being a priest. I then began to look for some definite sign from God.

Although I didn’t receive any big signs, I did get lots of little indications that helped me to discern my call. For one, when seeing how active I was within the church, my dorm mates became convinced that I was likely to become a priest. I, too, began to realize that at vocation talks I felt as if the priest was talking directly to me. I asked some priest friends how I could be sure I had a vocation. They assured me that when the time was right I would be at peace with the decision.

It all came together for me the fall of my senior year at a friend’s wedding. I realized that I was identifying more with the priest at the ceremony then I was with the groom. Later, I saw the priest dancing, having fun, and receiving many hugs. Well this worked for me since I really enjoyed dancing and didn’t want to give it up to become a priest. I went back to Penn State that evening and things seemed to be coming together. I awoke the next morning feeling very happy about becoming a priest. I waited till the next weekend to tell my family and when I told them they were very supportive. They remained supportive and helpful throughout my discernment process.

My Vision: Now that I knew I was to be a priest, the next part of the discernment was —what kind of priest? As I looked at all the options, I began to explore religious communities and was drawn to the Paulists. The relatively small size of the community and the Paulist mission of evangelization, ecumenism, and reconciliation to North America really fit in to how I wanted to serve the Church as a priest.

Since May of 1989, I have enjoyed many years as a Paulist priest. It has been a challenging and wonderful journey thus far, and I am still dancing, hopefully for many years to come!

I Belong to: The Paulist Fathers

Have you had signs, even little ones, about your calling in life?

Father Ed Nowak, C.S.P. is currently working as the director for vocations of the Paulist Fathers. The vocations office is located in New York City. He has ministered in the areas of campus ministry in Minneapolis and Santa Barbara, RCIA, evangelization, outreach to inactive Catholics, and young adult ministries. His story is reprinted here from the website of the Paulist Fathers.

For years the reality of trafficking in human persons “was a kind of global family secret,” said Msgr. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican undersecretary of state. Now, thanks to greater public awareness efforts, more people know about this $12 billion industry that in 2005 put at least 12 million people into forced labor.

The effort to publicize this issue has been taken up by 30 women religious from 26 countries who at a recent conference in Rome formed the International Network of Religious Against Trafficking in Persons, a CNS story reported. Together with the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the International Organization for Migration, the Italian Union of Major Superiors, which represents 95,000 religious sisters working in Italy, have designed a training program to help foreign women escape forced prostitution.

Women religious have made a commitment “to take on the great moral evil of human trafficking,” Holy Names of Jesus and Mary Sister Susan Maloney told the conference, an effort she called the “great ministry of the 21st century.”

Father Larry Janowski, O.F.M.

A vocation to religious life can be large enough to leave room for other vocations—being a poet, for example.

Just ask Father Larry Janowski. A member of the Franciscans since 1968, Janowski recently published his first book of poetry, BrotherKeeper (Puddin’head Press), named for the book’s poem about the death of a 5-year-old thrown from the 14th floor of a Chicago housing project for refusing to steal candy.

Janowski’s work has earned him prizes, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and his poems have appeared in a number of literary magazines. He gives poetry readings and workshops on a regular basis and is also a contributor to a new literary journal, Fifth Wednesday. With master’s degrees in both fiction writing and theology, Janowski is also an adjunct professor of English at Dominican University and Wilbur Wright College in the Chicago area.

On his way to becoming a poet, he says in an interview with the suburban Chicago Arlington Heights Post, “I had written poetry in high school and college and I remembered all the things I loved about poetry: the economy of language, the compression and the images. The fact that every word, every punctuation mark, every choice about a line break, all of those things are incredibly important. And yet your whole piece could be on a single page.” After a while, he says, “I began to realize my religious background and training also contributed to the kind of poet I am.”

Janowski does not so much consider himself a religious poet as a religious person who is a poet. “As with all people,” he says, “I’m in a constant quest for spiritual meaning, for some heartbeat everyone shares. A poem, a good one, can allow you to see you are not alone—and that goes for the poet as well as the reader of the poem.”

Speaking of his vocations as priest and poet, Janowski recently told Chicago Public Radio, “I think that a great deal of being a member of a religious order is to pay attention to people, to listen to them, to try to hear what they’re saying, and also what they’re not saying. And it seems to me that that is what poetry is all about. It’s all about blessing people with a little bit of your own experience. In poetry we say, ‘This is something that I have learned, or maybe something I haven’t learned yet. Or this is something that has touched me, or something that I have lost.’ ”

Icon of Mother
Theresa Maxis, I.H.M.

About me: Mother Theresa Maxis, cofounder of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was born an illegitimate child of a Haitian mother and white British father, a fact concealed for over a century. An IHM historian discovered the truth in the mid-1940s while writing the history of the congregation’s first 100 years.

Although the IHM community has confronted racism since at least the 1930s, in their schools, during the Detroit civil disturbances in the ‘60s, and in many other political actions, its members didn’t realize their own cofounder was a woman of color, nor did they realize there was a cover-up until the writing of the book, No Greater Service, published in 1948.

Mother Theresa Maxis played a key role in forming four communities of women religious, including the first African American community of women religious in the United States, the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The other three communities include the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM's) of Immaculata, Pennsylvania; Monroe, Michigan; and Scranton, Pennsylvania.

I belong to: The Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

My vision: During her time in the Oblates, Teresa had spent some time as the community’s elected superior. Unfortunately the era was one of pre-Civil War bigotry in Maryland. The bishop didn't see the need for an African American community of sisters and forbade them to take in new members. The threat of of the community's dissolution was very real. She left the fledgling Oblate community and traveled to Michigan to join a Redemptorist priest in founding a new order of religious sisters to teach immigrant children. From this beginning sprang the three communities of IHM's.

The four communities are now formally involved in a reconciliation and healing process confronting racism. In September of 2006 the four communities wrote a statement proclaiming the racism in their history and condemning the sin of racism.

Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh, the 90-year-old president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, can’t see much anymore, though graduate students still keep him up on current events by reading him the newspapers every day in his office. So he might have had some trouble watching his portrait go up last Tuesday at a ceremony at the National Portrait Gallery.

The photo is not just any portrait. It depicts him hand in hand with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a rally in Chicago’s Soldier Field celebrating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Father Ted, as he is known, chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which helped to pass the act by documenting how the voting rights of African Americans were denied.

The civil rights commission was one of 16 presidential commissions on which Hesburgh served during both Democratic and Republican administrations, working on issues from civil rights to Middle East peace to nuclear arms control.

His legendary ability to bring people together was a decisive factor in his effectiveness. He reached agreement on the civil rights commission’s recommendations by taking the commissioners on a fishing trip to Wisconsin. As the Vatican’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hesburgh invited two personal friends from the Soviet and American delegations to a successful meeting in his hotel suite. “Just buzz me if you need anything,” Hesburgh told them.

Father Ted served as president of Notre Dame for 35 years—longer than any other college or university president in the U.S.

Archbishop Leo
Cornelio. S.V.D.

The Catholic Church continues to “go green,” and by that I don’t mean only the liturgical color of Ordinary Time. In a sign of the church increasing concern for the environment, Archbishop Leo Cornelio, newly installed archbishop of Bhopal, India, said he would accept only one kind of congratulatory gift: tree saplings. Archbishop Cornelio, a Divine Word Missionary, said he intended the gesture to highlight concern over rising pollution and growing indications of global environmental degradation.

In response to his invitation, Archbishop Cornelio received more than 10,000 saplings, which he said would be planted at Christian institutions and in other public places.

About Me: In his ministry with incarcerated and at-risk youth, Father David Kelly, C.PP.S., anticipates that he will fail at least 70 percent of the time. He has worked against those odds in inner-city Chicago for two decades. At the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, which he helped found, staff members work with youth, help families heal from the violence that claims their sons and daughters, and reach out to a neighborhood that can seem like a war zone.

My Vision: Idealistic and pragmatic at the same time, Father Dave believes that only the reconciling power of the Precious Blood of Jesus can bring peace to such a place. “Reconciliation does not happen readily. In fact, it rarely happens,” he said. “But first and foremost, it is the work of God. It begins with the victim. And it makes of both the victim and the wrongdoer a new creation.”

I Belong to: The Missionaries of the Precious Blood

Fr. Leo's Cookbook

If his production company can find enough sponsors, look for Fr. Leo Patalinghug and his Grace Before Meals program on a Public Broadcasting Service station next year. In the program, Fr. Leo, a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the director of pastoral field education at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, visits families and cooks with them. An accompanying cookbook of the same title links 50 homestyle recipes to the liturgical year, family milestones, and even life disappointments. It also includes scripture passages and essays about feasts.

Fr. Leo is no stranger to cooking. As a child he says he was “easily bored” and would help his mother in the kitchen. Later, while in seminary at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he would cook for his fellow seminarians when he had the time.

The idea for the cooking show was born while Fr. Leo was cooking for some priest friends, one of whom said he wished he had a video camera to film the process. After being transferred to St. John Church in Emmitsburg, Fr. Leo teamed up with a parishioner and television producer to create the program.

Fr. Leo, who is also a break-dancer and martial arts practitioner, sees the show and cookbook as a “movement to bring God’s family back to his table,” he told Catholic News Service. He sees his vocation as a priest to “feed God’s children—body, mind, and soul.”

You can find out more about Fr. Leo’s project at www.gracebeforemeals.com. The 2009 issues of the VISION Annual Religious Vocation Discernment Guide and Vocation Network website has a full length article about Fr. Leo.

Abbot Martin Marty, O.S.B.

About me: James Joseph Alois Marty was born in Switzerland in 1834, the son of a shoemaker. Before the age of two, his mouth and face were both severely burned when he drank from a bottle of acid in his father’s shop. The acid caused swelling that nearly suffocated him and would leave his face permanently disfigured.

In 1847 Marty enrolled in the Benedictine school attached to Einsiedeln Abbey. After graduation, he entered the Benedictine novitiate at Einsiedeln and took the name Brother Martin Marty when he made his vows. He was ordained to the priesthood a year later and began teaching moral theology at the monastery school.

In 1860, at the age of 26, the abbot of Einsiedeln sent Marty to Southern Indiana to help solve the problems of the fledgling missionary community of Saint Meinrad. Marty facilitated peace between conflicting factions in the small Benedictine house and articulated a vision for the new community.

My vision: He envisioned a Benedictine abbey that would serve as a spiritual and liturgical center for the area, educate priests in a seminary, and provide pastoral assistance to the local people. This vision of monastic life, combining a life of prayer and work with support for the pastoral work of the church, has remained the mission of Saint Meinrad Archabbey o this day.

Although the assignment was intended to last only one year, Marty was elected the first abbot, and under his leadership Saint Meinrad flourished, becoming one of the cornerstones of Benedictine life in the United States. After a decade and a half of monastic leadership, Marty was named to lead the church in the missionary territories of the Dakotas. He became bishop of the Dakota territories and later the second bishop of St. Cloud, Minnesota, where he lived the rest of his life and demonstrated great enthusiasm in his work with the Sioux.

I belong to: The Benedictine Monks of St. Meinrad Archabbey.

Many thanks to Brother Christian Raab of St. Meinrad Archabbey for information on Bishop Marty. Information also drawn from Wikipedia.

Sister Karen Marie
Barile, O.S.H.J.

About me: My call to a religious vocation started when I was about 8 years old. When I grew up I was going to be a nun. My father would see me walking around the house with my “towel veil,” and he would say, “You know, if you become a nun, you can't get married.” I assured him I did not want to get married, to which he would joke, “Good, then I won't have to buy a gun."

Time passed and my family moved to an area where Sisters were not active in the church my family attended, so they no longer had an influence in my life. As my teen years passed, I not only lost the thought of becoming a nun, I had gone away from the church all together. After a long time away, and within a short time after returning to the church (but not the sacraments yet), I started hearing a voice in me that maybe I should become a nun. Each time the thought came to me, I’d laugh it off as I felt that receiving the sacraments should be a prerequisite to entering religious life.

When I had returned to the sacraments, the thoughts of entering a convent would suddenly appear, but I was able to push them away due to the fact that my active life was in full swing and I had many responsibilities. I couldn’t just drop everything for a thought that was possibly—maybe—from God. After all, that would be quite a risk! After consistent inner promptings, I finally decided to stop fighting the “possibilities” and started praying to God that if this was what He really wanted, to please get me there, as I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

I would pray this prayer every time my mind turned to the convent, and then one night instead of the inner voice giving me the typical inspirations of the past several years, I heard, “So, now why can’t you look into the convent?” As I started to make the usual mental list, I realized that all the reasons that kept me from searching were no longer there. With still a bit of skepticism, I said, “OK, I’ll look into it if only to prove that this is not what I’m supposed to do. Then I won’t have to think about this again, and I can finally be at peace.”

I belong to: The Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Hubbard, Ohio. Mother Maria Teresa Casini founded the order in 1894. Our charism is to offer our lives for the sanctification of priests. This calling is most visibly seen through our work of caring for retired priests, working in parishes, and running a school and day care which our Sisters were asked to take on when they first came to the United States from Italy.

I was strongly drawn to the charism of offering my life for the priests, as I believe the priest is the door to the heart of Christ. The holier the priest, the more people he will bring to Christ. There is one thing, however, that can stand in the way of doing God's will: ourselves.

My vision: Now, here I am, four years later in my second year of professed vows, preparing for the many joys and challenges that await me in Rome, Italy where I will continue my formation and study to prepare for ministry during the next two years. There are also a few things I have learned about God through this journey: —God is full of surprises —God never gives up on us —God is never outdone in generosity So, if you think God is calling you, don’t say no: Say you’ll look into it!

For more information about the Oblate Sisters, contact Sister Teresina Rosa at 330-759-9329 or write to: Oblate Sisters, 50 Warner Rd., Hubbard, OH 44425, email: jcoblate@aol.com.

Passionist Founder
Saint Paul of the Cross

About me: The future founder of the Passionist Congregation of priests, brothers, and nuns was born in Ovada, northern Italy, in 1694. Paul Danei was the eldest of six children and as a young man the main support of his father’s dry goods business. In his early childhood, his mother used to gather the children at her knee each day, telling them gospel stories, especially the details of Jesus’ Passion and death, as well as the lives of the saints, including the desert fathers.

Anna Maria probably had no inkling how her Paul remembered and pondered these stories, as they resonated with the grace of God in his young soul. Gradually, Paul and his brother, John Baptist, found their own desert in the family attic, where they prayed and imitated those ancient desert ascetics, even as the presence of God was becoming the center of their young lives.

Since the family fortunes varied, Paul’s teenage years passed as a “working student,” learning some Latin and Christian doctrine as he could. Whether at this time or in later life, Paul fed his soul on the writings of Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Saint John of the Cross, books that gave him the language and understanding of mysticism.

One milestone marked his first conversion: the impact of a priest’s sermon. Those words preached at Mass pierced his young heart, setting him on fire with love for God. Paul always called that sermon his “conversion.” Subsequently, he renounced the bequest of his uncle’s estate and declined a prearranged marriage.

As time passed, Paul's spirituality matured, but still he discerned no clear call. He became afflicted by a trial of relentless scruples, with severe temptations against faith. Paul prayed, did penance, but relief was long in coming.

Then, world events shook all of Italy: The Turks declared war on Venice, the pope summoned a crusade, and Paul signed up—a chance to suffer martyrdom for the faith. Even before embarking, as he was praying in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord let Paul know that being a soldier was not exactly what he had in mind for him. So, armed with discharge papers, Paul returned home to pick up where he had left off, and to wait, wait, wait, for a clear indication of God’s holy will.

I belong to: The Passionist Congregation.

My vision: In 1718, when Paul was 24, the Blessed Virgin Mary took his life into her own hands, appeared to him clothed in black, with the sign of the Passion sign over her heart, and told him to gather companions and preach God’s love to the people. Every uncertainty in Paul’s heart melted, his soul glowed with love, and he broke into a flood of tears—at last: blessed assurance. Other visions followed, as did intense interior trials, but Paul claimed the grace Mary gave him, was clothed as a hermit by his bishop, and made a solitary retreat of 40 days during which he wrote a rule for the community Mary had asked him to found.

Paul lived to be 82, after he had founded many monasteries of Passionist men and one for the Passionist nuns in 1771. And in every one of his monasteries, he loved to pray in the attic!

Details of Saint Paul's life drawn from Rev. Gabriele Cingolini, C.P. and compiled by the The Passionist Nuns of Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.

Feast day: October 19

“Visit the prisoner” is one of the corporal acts of mercy. Holy Cross Brother James Van Dyke not only visits prisoners, he counsels, trains, and helps them find services as well.

Brother Van Dyke works for the Correctional Services Department of the Salvation Army in northern Illinois, primarily at Cook County Jail in Chicago and the maximum security Stateville prison in suburban Joliet. Besides the traditional chaplain tasks of facilitating prayer and Bible study groups and offering counseling to inmates on spiritual and family matters, Van Dyke serves on a Life Learning Program team that provides inmates with spiritual, educational, and life skills classes along with self-help and substance abuse recovery groups.

Van Dyke also works with nonviolent offenders to explore alternatives to incarceration. For those released from prison and trying to reintegrate into mainstream society, he identifies services such as job placement, housing, and support groups. He was a pioneer in establishing the county’s drug treatment courts, which combine legal sanctions with treatment and a preventive approach to future drug-related crimes.

About me: My desire to respond to God through religious life came when I was a sophomore at Smith College. A certainty about God’s invitation to me started in prayer and reading of Saint John of the Cross. As time went on, only the “way” of entering religious life seemed to envelop me in peace. As college graduation and my 21st birthday drew near, I made an effort to ignore my desire to enter religious life and considered other alternatives such as graduate school.

These other alternatives, however, could never compete with the peace that entering religious life seemed to bring me. I did not know any sisters; so entering a religious order seemed terrifying, a bit like jumping into a dark well. On a college retreat during my senior year, I met a Cenacle sister who suggested that I consider the S.H.C.J. She spoke to me about Cornelia Connelly, the foundress of the society, and how Cornelia wanted her sisters to love the children they taught. As she spoke, a great certainty came over me, a feeling that this was the religious community for me.

I wrote a very vague letter to the provincial of the society and in turn, I was invited to take the entrance tests. I wrote to say that I would take the tests and enter in September. I had no idea I needed to be “accepted.” I met the Holy Child Sisters for the first time when I took the psychological entrance tests, and I loved them!

My vision: The society has encouraged me to develop all of my abilities, even those I did not know I had! I have even been able to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. As a member of the society, I have taught high school as well as college students. Teaching has given me the ability to impact the lives of students and in turn, I have been changed by my experiences with them. I enjoy watching students come alive as they learn new concepts and ways of thinking.

Over the years, the society, the church, and our world have changed significantly. But my certainty about belonging in the society has never been in doubt. When I was a novice, I remember thinking how amazing it was that God called me to a relationship with him and how astounding each religious vocation was. Even though we are now seeing smaller numbers of religious vocations, I am not discouraged–each one still seems like a small miracle to me!

I belong to: The Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

This article adapted with kind permission from the vocations website page of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

About me: Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) was an intellectual prodigy, earning his law degree while still a teenager. But a brilliant eight-year legal career came to a sudden end when he failed to read a few words of an important piece of evidence. His lapse meant the collapse of his case—the only case he ever lost. He admitted his mistake, apologized to his client, and left the courtroom for good.

In the aftermath of this professional disaster, Alphonsus turned in quite another direction: visiting the sick in a hospital for terminally ill people. Here he experienced a call to priesthood and began doing missionary work in and around Naples, Italy. This call would lead him to founding a religious order of women and later men, the Redemptorists.

Not long after bringing together his first followers, however, conflicts began between members of the community and the local nobility that would plague the young order for decades. On top of that, as he aged he suffered from asthma and migraines, his sight and hearing began to fail, he limped, and, later, severe rheumatism caused his head to become permanently bowed. All these ailments, however, did not stop Pope Clement XIII from appointing Alphonsus a bishop.

Liguori also managed to write more than 100 books, practically invent modern moral theology, preach, hear confessions, compose music and poetry, and paint. Early in his life he had promised himself never to waste a moment, and he lived up to that vow.

In his retirement Liguori returned to lead the Redemptorists. He gave the task of updating the community’s rule to another priest. This the latter did—in a way that made the order unrecognizable. When this would-be reformer brought the new rule to the nearly blind Alphonsus, he told him all was in order; all he had to do was sign. In the conflict which followed the new rule, Alphonsus found himself on the losing side of a divided order—at odds with half the community he had founded.

If that were not bad enough, in Alphonsus’ final years he experienced a dark night of the soul, a period of profound doubt and spiritual struggle. Only in the last days of his life did he regain a sense of consolation and peace.

After his death things changed again. The Redemptorists were reunited and put on a solid footing; today they number 7,000. Pope Pius VI, the man who had forced Liguori out of his own community, opened the cause for his canonization. Alphonsus was beatified in 1816 and canonized in 1839. In 1871 he received the rare honor of being named a doctor of the church, an eminent teacher of the faith.

I belong to: The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.

My vision: The path to Liguori's achievements was not an easy one. He was willing to give up his ambition and a prestigious career to serve others. He faced things we like to push away—mistakes, illness, conflict, setbacks—and he was unable to reap many of the benefits of his hard work. Yet he flourished anyway and developed many sides of his talents. In not letting struggle derail him, he shows us that responding to our life vocation is a lifelong process that requires patience, resilience, honesty, hard work, and faith even amid our doubts.

Feast day: August 1

About me: Maria de Mattias was born on February 4, 1805 in Vallecorsa, a small village in the mountains of

Maria de Mattias, Foundress of the the Adorers

central Italy, about 50 miles southeast of Rome. Her father, Giovanni de Mattias, came from a prominent and well-to-do family in the village.

At that time the Italian kingdoms and republics were in constant conflict with one another. Those who were on the run hid out in the mountains around Vallecorsa and preyed on the villagers and peasants. Unemployed young men from the town were attracted to these bandit gangs. Their way of life may have had an influence on Maria’s devotion to the Blood of Christ, rather than the bandits' blood of violence.

Maria was a lively, creative, and energetic child. Women of her day were forbidden a formal education, so she taught herself to read and write; she received much of her religious education from her father. Being an upper-class girl of the time, she grew up isolated and a bit self-absorbed, but in her mid-teens she felt the hollowness of her life and began to search for more meaning. One day when she was looking at herself in the mirror, she felt her gaze drawn to an image of the Virgin Mary. She felt that Mary was calling her to something more.

At age 17 she attended a mission preached by Saint Gaspare de Bufalo, a Missionary of the Precious Blood, an existing religious community. His preaching on the love of God, poured out in the blood of Jesus, touched Maria deeply. She felt that Gaspar's invitation to imitate Jesus by giving one's life for one’s brothers and sisters, especially the poor, was addressed directly to her.

In 1834, at age 29, Maria founded the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Acuto, Italy. To her, the greatest mark of God's love for us is the blood his Son shed on the cross. Maria poured every ounce of her energy into shaping her religious community. She traveled widely—on donkey, on foot, by carriage—on treacherous mountain paths in all kinds of weather. She gave up monetary comforts and food to better serve neighbors in need.

Maria was able to open about 70 communities during her lifetime, mostly in the towns of central Italy but also three in Germany and England and one in Rome, where Pope Pius IX called on her community to establish a presence.

My vision: Fueled by a fervent love of Christ, Maria made it her mission in life to help people release the creative power within them to serve God and neighbor. She reached out to those in need, especially women and children, offering practical aid while guiding them to stronger faith lives.

Maria empowered people by carrying out various roles: as a talented teacher, a prolific letter-writer, an impassioned preacher, a compassionate listener, a patient diplomat, a creative collaborator, a resourceful problem-solver, and an untiring advocate. She laced every pursuit with prayer. "Pray much," she said. "Be of good heart and have unbounded confidence in God." It was an exhortation she practiced faithfully.

Maria had a profound love for God and remarkable ability to enable others to use their talents and gifts to build up God's Kingdom on earth.

I belong to: The Adorers of the Blood of Christ

Feast day: February 4

Father John P. Foley, S.J. and Cristo Rey students
 

Newsweek magazine named Jesuit Father John P. Foley as one of the people to watch in 2007. Foley presides over the national Cristo Rey (“Christ the King”) network of Catholic high schools.

In 1996, Father Foley, who has been a Jesuit for 53 years and previously had been an educator in Peru, went to the Chicago’s largely Hispanic Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood to open Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in one of the city least-educated areas. Working with over 100 corporations, the school runs a work-study program in which every four weeks students work five days and attend classes for 15 days. Groups of four students share a full-time job. The companies pay a salary for each full-time job which accounts for about 70 percent of tuition, to which families also contribute.

In a city where some high schools see 50 percent of their students drop out, Cristo Rey’s four-year dropout rate was 6 percent, and 96 percent of the students went on to college programs. Since the Chicago school opened, 11 more schools have opened in Cristo Rey’s network, and seven more are scheduled to open this summer in urban neighborhoods where poverty is high. It seems at least these schools have returned to the mission Catholic high schools used to have in this country: serving immigrants communities and giving their young people an affordable and faith-centered way to move ahead in the world.

Franciscan Sister Evelyn Brokish has a scrumptious supply of divine creations at her candy store, Poverello Delights, in Highland, Indiana. Opened since October of last year, Poverello Delights is the realization of a dream, says Brokish, recently interviewd by Debbie Bosak for Catholic News Service.

Her signature candy is ChocoNutty Trio, consisting of three layers of dark chocolate, peanut butter, and white chocolate. But she continues to receive inspiration for different types of candies from her customers, including her sweet chocolate Cashew Wheel, created to please a customer who said he was planning on stopping by the shop and hoped to find something with cashews. "Everything is homemade and from the heart," says Brokish. "I think customers appreciate that this store is different form any other candy store."

Proceeds support the ministries of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi. A slip of paper accompanying each purchase explains the origins of the name Poverello, an Italian word meaning "little poor person," once used to describe St. Francis of Assisi. "People are usually surprised that I'm a nun," says Brokish, "but it leads to all kinds of questions and discussions about God, vocations, morals, and even politics." Visit www.poverellodelights.com/.

Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.

“Ever since I was a kid, I devoured books on history,” says historian Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. of his journey to the Catholic Church. “I would never describe my odyssey as being an intellectual journey,” he said. “It was more or less a falling in love with history. It made me fall in love with one of the things history talks about and that would be the Catholic Church.”

Davis received the University of Dayton’s Marianist Award in recognition of his contributions to intellectual life, including his groundbreaking book, The History of Black Catholics in the United States. A Benedictine monk for more than 50 years, Davis is professor of church history at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana and also the archivist for the Benedictine abbey there and other organizations.

In addition he has advised the U.S. Catholic bishops on the pastoral letters having to do with the African American Catholic experience, Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) and What We Have Seen and Heard (1984). Davis himself, said Father Paul Marshall, S.M., rector of the University of Dayton, has a “presence. He carries the sacred with him. You can see God within him.”

Vision Vocation Guide just sent out a press release on Trends in Catholic Vocations based on the very encouraging statistics we've gathered from Vision Vocation Match and two recent vocation surveys we conducted among discerners and vocation directors. All of the statistics are fascinating; be sure to check them out.

Here's one stat I'm betting will change in the coming year: In answer to the question: What resources have you found most helpful in gathering vocation information?, 42 percent of respondents rated Discerners' blogs "Not Important at All." My prediction: That percentage will completely flip within a year, with at least 40 percent rating discerners' blogs as an essential resource. Please pass on links to discerners' blogs you already know to be helpful to those exploring a religious vocation.

Father James DiLuzio, C.S.P.
uses his performance experience as a priest

Art, music, athletics, writing, web design —whatever your talents, there’s a good chance you can make them part of a religious vocation, not leave them behind. Take the case of Paulist Father James DiLuzio. In the days before he became a priest you may have seen him on TV in a soap opera supporting role or as an extra, putting his UCLA masters of arts degree in drama to work. After becoming a lector and a member of the evangelization team at New York ’s St. Paul the Apostle parish in New York , DiLuzio encountered the stories of scripture in a new way and asked himself, “What stories are we telling? How do these stories impact human life?”

His priesthood—he was ordained in 1993—and his interest in storytelling have led him to become part of a unique parish mission experience: Luke Live. Over three days he proclaims the first 15 chapters of Luke’s gospel by heart. Between his proclamations there is preaching, meditations, and music. Recently he introduced Luke Live 2, which includes proclamation of the last 9 chapters of the gospel, stories of saints, meditations, and music.

With Luke, DiLuzio says, “I find myself happily integrating my pre-ordination work as an actor, singer, English and drama teacher with my priesthood and Paulist ministry, engaging the faithful in encounter with the gospel in ways that are culturally relevant and illuminating.”

—Source: Paulist Today

How do you think you could use your talents if you were in religious life?

oesn’t let age—or height, for that matter—get between her and her work as chaplain to the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team. Seventeen years ago, Sister Jean, a member of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, planned to retire. But Loyola’s then-president convinced her to take a job counseling basketball players about dealing with the demands of sports and academics. Her role evolved into team chaplain, and these days she leads the team in prayer before tip-off, cheers them on during the game, and makes herself available as a friend and someone to talk to.

Soon after the university hired coach Jim Whitesell, Sister Jean walked into his office and told him, “It’s great to have you.” Then, Whitesell says, “she gives me a five-minute lecture on what I need to do with the program. She said, ‘You need to work on team spirit,’ and this and that. I was taken aback, but she was right on point.’ ” “Sister Jean is our biggest supporter,” says junior forward Tom Levin. “She always has faith and confidence in us, and she can always put a smile on our faces. Sister Jean has taught me to believe in myself and the team, and has shown us that hard work will pay off in the long run.” During her tenure as chaplain, Sister Jean says has “learned what it really means to work hard and give up your entire self. Sometimes we don’t think that young people do that, but these young men do, and it shows.”

The next time you receive communion, there's a chance the original wafer came from the hands of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Maintaining a tradition of making altar bread the sisters have passed down through generations, these Benedictines produce 2 million breads each week in their Clyde, Missouri monastery.

The sisters began baking altar bread in 1910, using an open fire and cast-iron baker. Now they distribute wafers to churches in the United States, several other countries, and, they say, “on the high seas.” By baking breads, the community supports its contemplative lifestyle and also participates in the liturgical and spiritual life of the church. They have been featured on television program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.

Not long ago, the sisters addressed a pressing need that seemed to have no satisfactory solution. In keeping with the belief that Jesus used a wheat bread at the Last Supper, Catholic teaching has required that communion bread be made with wheat and contain gluten, a protein found in wheat. At the same time, as many as one in 133 people suffer from celiac disease, which prevents them from consuming gluten. In an attempt to create a gluten-free bread, the sisters found a company that produced wheat starch, which is wheat with the most of the gluten removed. After much trial and error, they finally produced usable altar bread that held together, was edible—and contained only 0.01 percent gluten, or 1/270 of the maximum amount of gluten a celiac can consume each day. Problem solved!

Mary Annette Gailey had worked at a day-care center, in retail food management, customer service, and with computers. Then, drawing inspiration from her father, who had worked in a Mack Truck engine plant, she became an over-the-road tractor-trailer driver. It was here she also received a call to become a religious sister. After several years of discernment, Gailey, 38, recently made her final vows with the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

Gailey frequently drove in silence to take better advantage of the contemplative side of her solitary hours on the road, which lent themselves to listening to God and sorting out the direction her life was taking. Driving a truck “allowed me to listen to the Holy Spirit,” she told the Associated Press. “It was a metaphoric journey being played out.”

“I was spending time in solitude, with just the Holy Spirit, and God spoke to me,” she said. “It’s definitely not like people picking up the phone and someone calls you . . . . There’s no lightning bolt. It’s much like a quiet whisper and listening to your own heart.

Her discernment process included attending come-and-see events, keeping a journal, meeting regularly with a vocation director, and living as an affiliated member of the Holy Family Sisters. For a while she spent one week living as a layperson, and another as if she were to be part of religious life. Her experience living as a religious gave her greater peace. “Someone said to me, ‘Go where the peace is,’ ” she said. “When you find the deepest peace, you know it’s true.”

“God never stops calling,” she says “When do we finally listen?”

The San Damiano Foundation,

, produces films highlighting the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi and the Franciscan concerns for social justice, peace, and nonviolence. Under the guidance of author, photographer, and filmmaker Gerard T. Straub, who is a Secular Franciscan, and his staff, the foundation produces fundraising films for Christian charities which aid the world’s poor. It also screens films at churches, high schools, and universities across the United States.

The foundation gets its name from the church outside Assisi, Italy where in the year 1205 Saint Francis, not long after his decision to commit himself to God, went to pray and seek guidance about whether he should lead a life of solitude and contemplation or service to the poor and spreading the gospel. While praying in San Damiano, which was deteriorating, he heard the voice of Christ say, “Francis, go repair my house which, as you see, is falling completely to ruin."

He understood this command literally, and so he begged supplies and rebuilt the church a brick at a time. After completing the restoration a year later, it then dawned on Francis that Jesus also meant the whole church, and so Francis set upon the tasking of rebuilding and renewing the universal church, as well as himself.

San Damiano Foundation's productions include films on poverty—both material and spiritual—soup kitchens, migrants, contemplation, and people heroically making a difference by working among the poor and the sick.

Chapel Basilica, Conception Abbey, Missouri
 

Forgiveness was central to Jesus’ ministry and mission. And the Benedictine monks of Conception Abbey in Conception, Missouri have made it central to their own mission in the five years since gun violence tore their peaceful world apart.

Lloyd Robert Jeffress, a 71-year-old retiree, walked into the abbey 90 miles north of Kansas City on the morning of June 10, 2002 and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rife, killing two monks and leaving two others seriously injured. Jeffress later killed himself.

The doors at Conception Abbey are still unlocked and open and forgiveness continues to be the reigning theme as the members of the rural monastery quietly marked the fifth anniversary of the tragedy this week. Since the shootings, little has changed in terms of how the monks go about their daily routines and interact with visitors. Father Gregory Polan, the monastery's abbot, said ending the monastery's practice of openly welcoming strangers would defeat their purpose of living Christ's teachings.

If anything, said Polan, the shootings helped reinforce the teachings of Saint Benedict, the founder of the abbey's religious order, who instructed monks to keep death always before their eyes as a way to gain perspective on how to live their lives.

Local law enforcement has also kept a close relationship with the monastery, a bond that began on the day of the shooting. “The unbelievable strength and faith . . . have overwhelmed us,” said Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Espey. “We're always welcome. . . . It brought a lot of people closer together.”

* Source: An article for the Associated Press

Tuesdays are Vocation Night on "The Busted Halo Show" with host Paulist Father Dave Dwyer. Last night Father Dave interviewed VISION Executive Editor Patrice Tuohy (hey, that's me!) about VISION and its highly successful new online feature VocationMatch.com. I was impressed with how well Father Dave prepared for our interview. He was up on all the trends in religious vocations and how young adults and vocation directors are using new technology and media to find each other.

Understanding the power of media is nothing new for Dwyer, who produced and directed television for MTV and Comedy Central before entering the priesthood. He now serves as the publisher of BustedHalo.com, the Paulist website for young adult seekers, and hosts his weekday call-in radio show, which began last December. "The move to satellite radio is a natural progression of sorts," says Dwyer in an interview by Bill McGarvey posted on BustedHalo.com. "I feel proud to stand on the shoulders of Paulists of years past who were pioneers in Catholic book publishing, radio, film and television." Dwyer is confident that if "St. Paul were alive today, trying to get the message of the Gospel out, he’d have a website, a blog, a podcast, and a channel on satellite radio." Not to mention, a webcast, vodcast, and vlog. Thanks, Father Dave, for your help in promoting vocations and creating a culture of discerment.

“The Busted Halo Show” airs live every weekday between 7-9 pm EST on Sirius channel 159.

When he was in high school Father Michael Zaniolo wanted to get married and have a family and career. His life started going in that direction when an interest in building and designing led him to becoming an electric engineer. But “I felt a spiritual emptiness,” he tells the Chicago Sun-Times. “The more I prayed, the more I kept sensing and hearing, ‘I want you to be priest.’ And I kept telling God, you’ve got the wrong guy. Finally, I said to the Lord, OK, if this is what you want me to do, I will explore it.” Ordained a priest in 1988, Zaniolo has been the chaplain of Chicago’s

since 2001.

“With 50,000 airport employees and tens of thousands of travelers passing through daily, the airport is fertile ground for ministry to anyone who needs to talk about what is going on in their lives,” he says.

Zaniolo is the city’s one full-time chaplain who with several other priests is available to hear confessions and celebrate the Eucharist. Three deacons and several lay volunteers also assist at ten weekend Masses. In addition, his work involves being visible and available to workers, travelers, and even homeless people at the airport. “Once people find out I’m a priest, they’ll say, ‘Father, can you pray for so and so?’” Zaniolo’s “parish” also includes three fire stations that serve the airport, a police station, and nearby hotels, restaurants, and parking facilities.

“I hear confessions every day,” says Zaniolo. “It’s something that people usually don’t do every day, but for some reason, here at the airport . . . I hear them regularly. For the travelers, I’m sort of like an anonymous priest, so they can really unburden themselves.”

A tough part of his job is being one of the go-to people at the airport for emergencies. “I remember once a teenager committed suicide and her parents were on their way to Hawaii. I had to deliver the bad news and comfort them until they could find a flight back home,” he tells the Sun-Times. “Once a flight attendant’s eighth grader got hit by a train while the flight attendant was on the plane. They always call me for those things.

“The nice thing about being an airport chaplain is that it really allows me to be a priest. I do have a lot of administrative things to do . . . but I also have more opportunities to hear confessions and to give some advice and counsel to people.

“The reward is I get to really see the movement of God within someone’s life,” he says. “I could not have designed a life better than I have now.”

After 21 years as president of Maryland’s College of Notre Dame, School Sister of Notre Dame Kathleen Feeley, 78, “felt the call to go to Africa, because of all Africa has suffered and all the needs it has, especially in education,” she tells the Baltimore Sun. Following Fulbright fellowship trips to China and India, she heard—at a birthday party of all places—of the new Catholic University of Ghana. She contacted the president, and “he almost jumped out of the computer,” Feeley says. His message: “Come immediately.”

The university area, with its power outages, bad roads, and unairconditioned convent, is a far cry from Baltimore, where, Feeley told The Catholic Review, “I had an overdose of comfort and security.”

Most of the university’s 500 students are committed Christians and bring a faith perspective to their studies. “I love the sense they have of living in a spiritual world,” says Feeley. “It’s a quality I hope they keep.” In her teaching of English and religion, Feeley says her “goal is for them to read. Their lives will be much richer.” She also tries to expose her students to new ways of interpreting the Bible, with which they are very familiar. “There is a tendency toward literalism,” Feeley says. Besides teaching, Feeley also works with School Sisters of Notre Dame novices from all of Africa.

Her work in Ghana, she reports, has enlarged her view of Catholicism, led her to rely more on the Holy Spirit, and increased her appreciation of her community’s idea of transformation. “Being transformed is more than being your best self,” she says. “It’s being the self you never knew you could be.”

Would you consider taking on a big challenge at any point in your life?