Hello and welcome!
As I mentioned in last month’s post, this year the Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention was held in Denver, so I went out a couple of days earlier and stayed with the Capuchins and my classmate, Father Simeon Gallagher, and was able to visit with my nephews.
The convention was held at the Gaylord Convention Center, right out near the Denver airport. It is a huge complex that can accommodate around 4,000 people, so it was a wonderful place for the convention. Thousands of Knights gathered from around the world.
One of the big events during the convention is the report of the Supreme Knight.
Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly, who is doing a great job, gave a report on the membership. Of course, there are over two million men who belong to the Knights worldwide, mostly in the United States and Canada, but they now have membership in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, France, Korea, and now Spain. So for the first time, they had Spanish representatives there. They also have been expanding on college campuses throughout the United States. The Knights are present on 320 college campuses and have almost 40,000 college students who are members of those councils.
He also spoke about the Knights’ mission of service. The amount of volunteer hours that they give comes out to 130,000 hours each day. And, over this last year, they donated more than $200 million to charitable works and the works of the Church. Just to give an example, they donated 175,000 wheelchairs throughout the world.
The Knights were originally founded by Father McGivney to take care of poor immigrants, particularly those whose fathers died in the factories without any insurance, and there was no social safety net in those days. And they are still very much focused on helping the poor and the disabled, and, of course, on promoting vocations, men’s spirituality, and the Christian life of families. It is an extraordinary blessing for us to have this great organization in our Church.
The liturgies were magnificent. The new Archbishop of Denver, Archbishop James Golka, celebrated the opening Mass and gave the greeting at the dinner.
The keynote at the banquet was given by Archbishop Paul Coakley , who spoke about the virtues of patriotism, which was very appropriate for the 250th anniversary of our country.
I was very happy to see the Massachusetts delegation at the convention.
Of course, they all looked wonderful in their tricorn hats – even Archbishop Henning wore one at the banquet, though I didn’t get a picture of that!
Another initiative that was highlighted at the convention was their Pilgrim Icon Program. The Knights have been spreading the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through a Sacred Heart Holy Hour, and they feature the famous image by Pompeo Batoni that is in the Church of the Gesù in Rome.
They spoke about how the image of the Sacred Heart is so important for immigrants, and it reminded me of the statue of the Sacred Heart I have in my office.
It has been in my family for over 200 years, and it is one of the few things my family brought with them from Ireland. They only came with some beautiful books on the history of Ireland and that statue. So, it was certainly very important for our immigrant family.
Then, on August 9th, I had the Mass of San Lorenzo at St. Patrick’s in Roxbury, which was a patronal feast for the Cape Verdean community. I was there with Father Nicanor Vivas, the new pastor, and the Capuchin friars and Franciscan sisters who work with the Cape Verdean community.
They had a procession where they carried the statue of the deacon St. Lawrence, and I told them in my homily that it brought back many memories for me. At one time when I was visiting Rome, I got a call from an Italian friar whom I did not know, Father Fulgencio, inviting me to visit the papal basilica of San Lorenzo. (As it turned out, Father Fulgencio was the brother of our own Padre Pio, who worked with the Cape Verdeans here in Roxbury!)
It was the only papal basilica I had never been to, and when I went, I was very surprised to find that it is administered by the Capuchin friars. It was built in the first couple of centuries of the Church, and they claim to have there the body of St. Lawrence, martyr, and the body of St. Stephen, brought from the Holy Land. There are also several popes buried there, including Pius IX, the one who brought the Capuchins there.
They also have catacombs underneath the basilica, and Alcide De Gasperi is buried there. He is one of the four founders of the European Union and is a Servant of God, like Robert Schuman of France. It is amazing that the European Union was founded by very devout Catholics, two of whom have had their cause introduced for canonization, and another was Konrad Adenauer, who lived in hiding in a Benedictine monastery during the war, fleeing from the Nazis.
So, I was glad to have an opportunity to tell them a little about the place where St. Lawrence is buried.
It was also wonderful to see that Father Nicanor is enthusiastically embracing his new ministry there. I told him we miss him at the cathedral, but I know that he will do very well wherever he goes. It was a beautiful celebration; a little bit of a
On August 11th, I was happy to have three seminarians from Pope John XXIII National Seminary join me for dinner: Brother Anthony and Brother Michael, who are Capuchin lay brothers and are now studying for the priesthood, and Alexander Baugh, who had been with the Oratory of St. Philip Neri and joined the Diocese of Venice, Florida, where our new Capuchin bishop, Bishop Emilio, is.
On August 13th, Father Mark Shimave, a priest from Wukari, Nigeria, visited us at the cathedral along with his bishop, Bishop Mark Maigida Nzukwein. They were staying with Father Dan Zinger from St. Mary’s in Lynn, though he couldn’t be with us because he had a funeral.
Bishop Nzukwein is from a very new, small, and poor diocese where the Church has been terribly persecuted by Muslim extremists. He told me that the challenges of the Church there are very great. Many of their churches have been burnt down and destroyed.
They have a history of good relations with the Muslims, but they have a very radical group trying to dominate the country politically, causing a lot of violence against the Church. The bishop shared something very interesting: he has encouraged Muslim families to send their children to Catholic schools, because a lot of these radicals don’t want the children to go to school so they can use them as soldiers. It is a very alarming situation.
On August 15th, four Capuchin brothers made their solemn vows at our parish, St. Augustine’s in Pittsburgh: Brother Timothy Rubeling, who has been working in Papua New Guinea and just came back; Brother Kevin Campos, who is from Brazil but whose family lives in the States and joined our province; Brother Sam Roberts; and Brother Philip Paulson.
I know these men very well because I live with them when I am at Capuchin College in Washington. They are wonderful friars, and we are blessed to have them finally professed in our community.
On August 17th, Jim Driscoll, who sadly passed away a couple weeks later, visited me at the cathedral with his daughters, Katie and Molly. Jim, who had been the executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference for so many years and done extraordinary work, was very, very sick with cancer.
So, his daughters brought him to visit me, and I was privileged to be able to pray with him. He had just received the Anointing of the Sick from Father Bryan Hehir, and it was an opportunity to be able to say farewell to him at that point.
He knew that he was dying, though we did not realize it was going to be so soon. But we are very grateful for his life, his witness, his service, and grateful that I had the opportunity to thank him personally and to pray with him before he died.
On August 21st and 22nd, I was at Thomas Aquinas College in Northfield in Western Massachusetts.
I had the opening Mass for their school year, followed by an assembly where they introduced all of the new students, and a new professor made his oath of fidelity according to Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
Thomas Aquinas is a college that uses the Great Books format and discussions or conversations rather than lectures, focusing very much on the Catholic formation of our young people. Their main campus is in California. The president is Dr. Paul O’Reilly, and the dean in charge of the Northfield campus is Dean Shaun Cunningham, who is Msgr. Richard Cunningham’s nephew. They have two chaplains there: Brother Greg Markey and Father Chung, who is a graduate of Pope John XXIII Seminary.
The campus was originally part of a compound founded by Dwight Moody, a very famous Protestant evangelical. After that closed, it was eventually acquired by Thomas Aquinas College.
They redid the chapel to make it a Catholic chapel, which is very beautiful.
On the altar, you see St. Thomas Aquinas on the right and St. John Henry Newman on the left.
It was very encouraging to meet with the students and see how enthused they are for the excellent Catholic education that they are getting. They have had many vocations come out of that school, and I spoke with Bishop Byrne, who concurred that it is such a blessing in his Diocese of Springfield to have Thomas Aquinas College there.
On August 28th, I celebrated the opening Mass at Our Lady of Providence College Seminary. Formerly, we had a college seminary at our Brighton campus, but for the last several years, we have been sending our college seminarians to this seminary in Providence. There are now seminarians there from various dioceses, and the largest group at this point is from Boston. They have around 30 young men down there, with about eight from Boston.
The men receive an excellent training in philosophy at Providence College, and their formation is done in-house at Our Lady of Providence Seminary.
Father Patrick O’Connor from our archdiocese is on staff as formation coordinator, and Father Ryan Connors of the Diocese of Providence, who was at St. John’s for so many years, is now the rector there. I had a day of recollection for them with Mass and a conference, and had lunch with them.
During the day, Bishop Bruce Lewandowski came to visit, as well. He is a Redemptorist. In my first diocese, I was ordained by a Redemptorist bishop, and all of my priests were priests whom he knows very well, so we were able to talk about mutual acquaintances and friends that we have.
Then, on August 30th, I celebrated a Mass at Bridgewater State Hospital, where I had not been for many years. We were joined by Deacon Chris Connelly, several other permanent deacons, and Alan Blevins, a lay chaplain and pastoral clinician, who was very instrumental in arranging and assisting at the Mass.
When we were driving into the hospital, I realized it was on Titicut Street. That reminded me that back in the ‘60s there was a documentary that came out called “Titicut Follies,” which was sort of an expose of the conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital, which is part of the Massachusetts Department of Correction. In those days, there were a lot of people who were in mental institutions, and some of those institutions were not well-run at all.
I was a young priest in Washington when the Supreme Court issued their decision, O’Connor v. Donaldson, in which they said that it was unlawful to hold people in mental institutions unless they were deemed dangerous to others or to themselves. At that point, many people were released from the hospital system en masse, and this, in many ways, the beginning of the homelessness crisis.
Of course, the homelessness crisis has only gotten worse, compounded by the lack of care for mentally ill people, the rising addiction rate, and the lack of affordable housing. The homelessness problem will never go away until all three of those issues are dealt with.
In Washington, you were very aware of how many mentally ill people are on the streets because they would come to the cathedral rectory and the cathedral constantly. The pastor at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Father John Kuhn, organized a wonderful St. Vincent de Paul group to care for the needs of these people. At one point, his father died and left his house near Catholic University, and he used that to open what he called the Anchor Mental Health Association. He involved a lot of volunteers from St. Matthew’s Cathedral who would socialize with the mentally ill from St. Elizabeths Hospital, which is probably the largest mental hospital in the United States. Anchor Mental Health expanded into having a number of halfway houses and workshops where they could hire mentally ill people to do basic work, such as stuffing envelopes. Anchor Mental Health is now part of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Washington, and they continue to do extraordinary work.
It was comforting to be there at Bridgewater State Hospital today and to celebrate Mass. A very large crowd of men came to the Mass, and a number of them told me that I had confirmed them, either in Fall River or Boston. And even a number of the staff came to tell me that I had confirmed them and to tell me what their confirmation name was.
Afterwards, I had a chance to meet with the staff.
I was very impressed with the credentials of all the psychiatrists, nurses and psychologists. It was inspiring to see how these people, who could be earning huge salaries in the private sector, have dedicated themselves to this demographic at the state mental hospital. It really was inspiring, and it was beautiful to see the interaction of the staff with the patients, how caring and considerate they were with all of them.
I was also invited to a presentation on the Ragon Institute, which was extraordinary.
Terry and Susan Ragon created this center for scientific investigations, bringing together scientists from MIT, Harvard, Mass. General Hospital, and from around the world to work on developing vaccines for diseases such as HIV, malaria, Dengue, and tuberculosis.
It was very encouraging to meet a lot of the doctors and scientists working there and to hear about the extraordinary things being promoted by Terry and Susan Ragon with the institute.
I was particularly impressed by one of the scientists who was showing us around, who happened to be from northern Brazil. He said, “My grandparents were illiterate, my parents went to grade school, and I graduated from MIT.” It was just an amazing story.
I also want to share with you an interesting article I came across in Commonweal magazine written by Cathleen Kaveny, a professor at Boston College, “The Importance of Being a Burden,” addressing some of the economic pressures fueling physician-assisted suicide in the States.
It reminded me how the new Prime Minister in England responded to the issue of physician-assisted suicide in Parliament, stating that before we can deal with that, we need to have good palliative care and medical care for the dying, which I thought was a brilliant thing for him to say.
The whole issue of people having to spend down the patrimony of the family for end-of-life care is something that, in the long run, is going to be very powerful and is already causing a great deal of suffering for families. The United States has a large middle class because there has been a transfer of wealth from generation to generation. People buy a house, and then they leave it to their children, and so on, and that is disappearing. It is getting harder for people to buy a home, and when people go into a nursing home, they lose all of the savings that they wanted to be able to leave to their children and grandchildren. A lot of these kinds of problems are impacting societal attitudes towards physician-assisted suicide, so I was very intrigued by the insights in that article.
Finally, I want to say how deeply concerned I remain following the revocation of Temporary Protected Status for many in our Haitian community. TPS has provided vital refuge and stability to thousands of families who have become vital members of our parishes, neighborhoods, and the broader community, and I pray that Congress acts to address the situation.
Archbishop Wenski of Miami recently spoke about the great contributions of Haitian immigrants to our local communities in an interview with EWTN, and I’d like to share it with you:
Until next time,
Cardinal Seán