Letter from the Pastor

From the beginning of time, the devil – who is real by the way – has tried to mislead us. And he often succeeds. Adam is the best example but he seems to be particularly successful in our day and age. Our permissive age and our consumer society seem to have given into the temptation that it is by bread alone that a person lives – bread signifying food, pleasure and all that is material. Many seem to believe that economic well-being as important as it is, is all that matters. There are many Catholics who are more excited by […]

Suppose that you were going to sum up your life to this point in one brief statement of twenty-five words or less – How would you do it? What would you say? Think about that for a moment. You have been living now for fifteen years, fifty years, seventy years, or however long it’s been. Those years have contained a combination of good and bad, success and failure, fulfillment and disappointment. Now you want to summarize them. How would you go about doing that? Admittedly, it would not be easy to do. Clarence Darrow, the brilliant American lawyer, as he […]

Do you remember, from your childhood days, the neighborhood football game when everyone wanted to play quarterback? Sometimes you’d stand around and argue and take forever getting started. Usually the way it was resolved was that the one who owned the ball got to call the plays. But finally everyone had to agree to play a different position, otherwise you could not even have a game! Then if you stayed with the sport and gave yourself a little time to grow up, you discovered that it can be just as much fun to throw a good block as it is […]

A few years ago, newspapers carried the story of an elderly man in Ohio who froze to death when the utility company turned off his electricity. He owed a bill of $18.38 that he could not pay; the service was discontinued, and he froze to death. It would be easy to get angry with the utility company over that, but to do so would be over simplification, and we, I’m sure, know it. The utility company did not deliberately freeze that man to death, any more than his neighbors deliberately let it happen. The problem was not a shortage of […]

Time Magazine a few years ago carried an article of the latter years of billionaire Howard Hughes. If the story is to be believed, it is one of the most tragic ever told. It tells of a story of 15 years of seclusion, loneliness, boredom, and drug addiction. For most of that time his only entertainment was watching old movies on his private screen. His primary food was chicken soup, and his only associates were people who were paid to be with him. He neglected his appearance until his hair and beard reached to his waist, and his fingernails were […]