Today is Saturday and that means I have to go to church again. I could go tomorrow, but that is just prolonging the pain. I’ll go to the 5pm Saturday Mass today and get it over with. That’s what people do, don’t they? They go to get it over with. Why? Obligation, guilt, habit, concern […]
Category: Making Church Matter
I began my annual vacation on Friday here in Avalon, New Jersey, joining a large group of extended family members. There were, on and off, about 25 to 30 of us. Interestingly on Sunday morning, this group of Italian-American, parochial school Catholics mostly all stayed away from the local church. What did they do instead? […]
As noted in the previous post, the number one project this summer is getting “the book” done, a project my associate Tom Corcoran and I have been working on for the last year. It will be only a little book (about 60,000 words) but one that tells our story and what happened to us and […]
Earlier this year we had an independent team of pastoral leaders visit our parish and give us a frank assessment of what they experienced. Largely we got good grades. But we were shocked, I mean really shocked to read their assessment that beyond the pastor and his associate, there was no ability to articulate […]
When the day of Pentecost came, the apostles were all together… suddenly a sound like the blowing of a mighty wind came from heaven… all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit…Peter stood up and addressed the crowd… “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you, and you with the help […]
We are all set for the third week of our series all about the next generation, “Generation iY” as author Tim Elmore calls them: basically, people born in the last twenty years. This Sunday we also celebrate the Ascension; the Bible tells us that 40 days after his resurrection Jesus was taken up to heaven in […]
We’re currently in the second week of our series about the next generation, called “Lost Investment” (Frankly, I have absolutely no idea why we’re calling it that, since the whole point is to make an investment in the next generation; nobody else seems to remember the thinking behind that decision either. Anyway, if you don’t […]
After spending so much time in Rome, immersed in history, this weekend we are definitely going in another direction. Our new series, the last of the 2010-2011 year, is a very different kind of series for us…its all about youth. For a number of years now we have enjoyed the reputation as a church with […]
One more post on my last day here in Rome. I had the interesting experience yesterday of visiting the Papal Palace, as it is called, also called the Apostolic Palace or the Palace of Sixtus V. Really, it is a vast series of buildings from which much of the administration of the Roman Catholic Church […]
When Italians say “La Citta” they always mean Rome. It is the city. Of course for Roman Catholics Rome is also the center of our Church community, our chief pastor is the bishop of Rome. And there is two thousand years worth of Christian history here to prove Rome’s pride of place: art and […]
