Living Monstrance

For a few months as a Franciscan, I lived in Lawrence, the poorest city in Massachusetts.  It’s a perfect place to be with the Lord.
One little 5-yr-old girl in the neighborhood, Darlene, had come to look up to me as a friar.  Whenever the friars had functions for the neighborhood children, she always stayed close [...]

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I used to volunteer in a hospital in Boston as a Minister of Holy Communion.  It is a great privilege.  After several years, I began to also pray the Divine Mercy chaplet for dying patients in the hospital.  The Lord always seemed to find a way for me to reach the very sick and dying [...]

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Rick Pitino is the head basketball coach at the University of Louisville.  He is one of the greatest college basketball coaches, and one of the things that he says is that when he recruits high school students to come to Louisville and play on the basketball team, he looks for a certain type of person.  He [...]

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Did you ever notice that Mary has a long list of different titles in the Church?  There’s Queen of Apostles, Star of the Sea, Our Lady of Victories, Mother of Mercy, and the list seems to go on forever.  And did you notice that she seems to change in appearance, too?  Her shrines depict her [...]

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When I first began volunteering in 2002 as a Minister of Holy Communion in a Boston hospital, one of the first patients I visited was Dan.  It was clear to me that Dan had a physical disability - his body wasn’t straight, and his arms and hands were undersized and poorly formed.  He also didn’t [...]

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Emmanuel. Emmanuel means, “God with us”. What does this mean?
As a postulant with a Franciscan community for a time, I was privileged to be able to assist the brothers with some of their apostolate. For the week before Christmas, some of the friars did a parish mission for a church in Virginia called St. Louis [...]

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I recently picked up my brother from the airport, and as we drove home to my parents’ house, he suggested that he take out the new GPS that he had used on his trip to Washington, DC, for me to play with.  “You can put in anything, like a list of restaurants, and it will [...]

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Picture 40 little second graders running around outside at recess in a schoolyard.  Picture a basketball hoop.  Picture a basketball on the ground.  Who wants to take bets on whether any of the little ones can get that basketball through the hoop?  Good luck!
Now, picture a 36-yr-old former high-school basketball player and coach, now postulant [...]

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I had the great privilege to go to Rome a few years ago and visit a friend in school there.  Rome is a mysterious city.  It has a mixture of pagan, medieval, and modern architecture and artifacts.  It also has a lot of smog because of those Euro-scooters that so many people over there drive.  [...]

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I lived on a mountain as a postulant with a Franciscan community for a month.  One of the difficult tasks was to get stuff up the mountain.  It was a difficult path, and it took an off-road 4-wheeler to make it all the way.  So, some stuff had to be brought up the old-fashioned way.
One day I had the [...]

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