Dear Friends,

What motivates an 84-year-old to shoot a young man knocking on his door? That’s the issue in a recent shooting in Kansas City, where a young black man knocked on the wrong door, as he was picking up his brother, and the homeowner, an 84-year-old white man, shot him twice. Miraculously, the young man has survived, and the shooter is being charged with a crime. The police indicate that racism may be a factor.

Dear Friends,

I’m not shouting “fire” in a theater but I do smell smoke. The culture seems to be burning itself down quicker than we can put out the flames. True enough, political wranglings give me much fodder to inveigh against. And I do seem to have this compulsion to point out foolishness that needs to be pointed out. But my overarching concern is not to opine the state of affairs but to give Christians some tools to provide the culture with Life support. But at this point in our journey it may be helpful to define what we believe our Catholic culture should look like. This is especially for the benefit of the newly baptized and confirmed. After all they are starting out their Catholic life and may need a few pointers from us so they can grasp what it means to be part of the Catholic world.

Dear Friends,

Alexis de Tocqueville in his much-quoted “Democracy in America” wrote: “Our descendants will tend more and more to be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the Roman Church.” Was he correct and if so, what evidence do we have?

Dear Friends, “The chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas but to destroy Jesus” Matthew 27:20 Pilate offers the crowd a choice.

The Gospel writers keep the Hebrew name Barabbas instead of the Greek translation: Barabbas meaning in Hebrew “son of God”.

So the choice Pilate offers: which son of God do you want? The revolutionary, the zealot or this one the Nazarene whom you call king of the Jews…We want Barabbas.

Dear Friends,

In a recent interview, President Biden said, “What’s going on in Florida, is as my mother would say, close to sinful.” Wow. I must admit I never thought of Florida as a den of iniquity. Well, maybe Miami Beach or the Keys but certainly not Tallahassee or Clearwater. So, what almost sin has Florida committed? The “close to sinful” sin is that the Florida Board of Medicine put the brakes on sex-reassignment surgeries (mastectomy, hysterectomy, castration etc.) on minors.

Dear Friends,

The US Attorney General, recently testified before Congress and was grilled on the case of Mark Houck. Mr. Houck, a prolife advocate got into a scuffle with a pro-abortionist, who was saying vulgar and foul things to Mr. Houck’s 12yr old son while he and his son were protesting in front of an Abortion Clinic in Philadelphia. The local prosecutor declined to press charges, but the Federal Prosecutor decided to charge Mr. Houck with violations of the FACE Act which “prohibits violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.” Mr. Houck volunteered to surrender to the Federal Prosecutor but instead, the Prosecutor sent in a SWAT team with over two dozen heavily armed agents to arrest Mr. Houck early in the morning at his home where he lived with his wife and seven children. A Federal Jury acquitted Mr. Houck of all charges.

Dear Friends,

The Beatles chimed out, “You say goodbye and I say hello’. So, I’ll start with the ‘goodbye’ and move on to the ‘hello’.

Our Director of Pastoral Care, Whitney Lynch, who has served us well for the past many years has moved on to a new position with the Diocese of Phoenix. Which makes me conflicted…good for them not so much for us. Whitney had a unique skill set that suited our Parish and its demographic perfectly. Add to that a very generous personality and vibrant faith, and she was just, sort of like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way!

Dear Friends,

Any time we worship anything other than God we dance around the altars of Baal, a false god. The more we do, the more frantic we become and the more we begin to hurt ourselves. Sounds like addictive or compulsive behavior to me. That is exactly what happens when we substitute a material thing for God. We will dance around it more and more frenetically until we start to harm ourselves. Witness an addiction to a drug: the thing we convinced ourselves would help turn us around begins to harm us.

Dear Friends,

The great question to us is whether we are still capable of being truly shocked or whether it is to remain so that we see thousands of things and know that they should not be, and must not be, and that we get hardened to them. How many things have we become used to in the course of the years, of the weeks and months, so that we stand unshocked, unstirred, inwardly unmoved.

This quote comes from Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J a German priest who was part of the Resistance to the Nazis and was convicted of treason and hanged by the Nazi’s in 1945. Maybe it’s because of the extreme horrors of the Camps that we too easily become unshocked by what we see today.

Dear Friends,

The cause for the first canonization of a US born priest has begun in Chicago. This journey to sainthood reminds us once again how God can write straight with crooked lines: Fr. Augustus Tolton (1854-1897) was also the first native born black man and former slave ordained a priest from the US. As St. Paul reminds us, God often uses what the world considers insignificant to confound the rulers of this world.

Dear Friends,

I am always struck at how the secular culture latched on to the feast of St. Valentine. This simple Roman priest who gave his life for love impacted our culture in a way that all the great Roman emperors and Popes have not.

Dear Friends,

The country witnessed another horrific police involved killing in Memphis recently. Even though the number of these types of killings is low relative to the amount of interactions police officers have with suspects, it is still unacceptable and constant vigilance, training, supervision, and accountability must be in place.