Foot-washer

January 24, 2021 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012421.cfm   If you ever visit the city of Venice in Italy, you will see a peculiar sight.     Flying  from flag poles all over the city, is a red and yellow flag with a huge image of a winged lion holding a book in its paw.     As it turns out, this is the flag of Veneto, the province that Venice is in.       The lion represents St. Mark, the evangelist who wrote the second Gospel.  You see, twelve hundred years ago, a group of clever and crafty Venetians travelled to Alexandria in Egypt.  Once there, they stole the body of St. Mark and snuck his remains away in a barrel covered in produce and took him back to Venice.  Then the Doge of Venice built a giant, glorious basilica called, of course, “St Mark’s” with an altar over his remains, and the city has showed off their great Christian pedigree by flying their St. Mark flag everywhere.  And they t...

January 3, 2021 https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/010321.cfm Happy Epiphany and a continued Merry Christmas as we celebrate the   10 th   Day of Christmas.     And Happy New Year, to boot. If you have ever been down to 4 th  Street Live you may have noticed a peculiar historical maker on the street out front.  It chronicles one of the most famous ‘epiphanies’ in modern times. A 43 year old monk named Thomas Merton who lived in the Abbey of Gethsemane near Bardstown was visiting Louisville in 1958.  4 th  Street was bustling then as now.  He wrote:    “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness ... [I felt such a sense of reli...

An article from The Tiger , Saint Xavier High School's alumni magazine, Winter 2021. 

      3rd Sunday of Advent (Dec 13, 2020)   https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/121320.cfm      There are two secret donkeys in St. Agnes Church.  Don’t worry.  I am not referring to any parishioners!  Three weeks ago, I preached about Jesus’ spirit animal and told you that there are four animals in the permanent artwork of this church: the sheep with St. Agnes and the dove, and the eagle on the standard of the Roman soldiers on the stations of the cross.  Did you find the fourth?  I would be surprised if you did, as I said they are secret donkeys.  I will show you where they are and I will ask Will to show an image of the artwork for those of you streaming at home.   These animals are in the Nativity scene behind the high altar on what’s called the “apse.”  The stable here is presented as a cave and the Christ-child is lying in his manager at its mouth.  In th...

  For several years, I have had a robust sense of pride in the American Catholic Church’s ability to maintain unity throughout our history.     Protestants may splinter … and splinter … and splinter again an unending cycle of division.      Not the Catholic Church.     Even in the period leading to the Civil War—a conflict that pitted brother against brother and led so many other denominations to split into north and south (like the Southern Baptists)—we remained one, holy, catholic and apostolic. This emphasis on unity has been immensely reassuring to me when considering the culture wars and other challenges of our day.                 Yet, this summer my perspective was challenged and my pride punctured by two books:  Racial Justice and the Catholic Church,  by Fr. Brian Massingale, SJ and  The History of Black Catholics in America  by Fr. Cyprian Davis, OS...

  “In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.”        ~ Anne Braden (1924-2006), Louisville racial justice activist   Anne Braden was a local white advocate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.  She and her husband Carl are most famous for purchasing a house in the then exclusively white neighborhood of Shively for a Black couple.  Both Bradens were arrested as “Communists’ for their act and the house was dynamited after irate neighbors shot it up and burned a cross in the front yard. Anne was not deterred and continued the fight for the remaining fifty years of her life, founding a newspaper and several antiracist organizations.      Anne provides an exce...

    I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon          --The Song of Songs, 1:5 (trans. from the Greek LXX)   The early Church Fathers believed that the Song of Songs in the Old Testament was a love poem composed by King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (today’s Ethiopia), who was a beautiful woman with black skin. In their allegorical vision, this couple symbolized Jesus and the Church.     As Fr. Cyprian Davis writes,  “Solomon is a type of Christ, and just as the queen of Sheba came to Solomon to consult him because he was wise, so the Church comes to Christ who is Wisdom himself.  As a result, since the queen of Sheba is black, so must the church be black and beautiful.  Her very blackness is a symbol of her universality; all nations are present in her.”    In America, having black skin carries a heavy burden.  Black m...