Foot-washer

  2nd Sunday in Easter  Cycle C https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/042725.cfm Apr 26 & 27, 2025 St. Thomas the Believer Last month, our second graders and their parents participated in a retreat to prepare themselves for their First Communion which they are just about to celebrate [will celebrate tomorrow].  At the end of a two-hour session, Fr. Bruno took the participants on a tour of the church.  We concluded in the sacristy—the room in the back where the priest gets ready.  The retreat started to run past the allotted time, but at the conclusion, Fr. Bruno asked the second graders for final questions.  He was perhaps expecting something quick and easy.  One of the kids, named Ellie  had clearly been waiting for this.  She stuck her hand up eagerly and said, “I have two questions: first, why did God flood the earth? And second, why can’t women be priests?”  Fr. Bruno looked surprised and said, “those are very good questions, bu...

Bellarmine University Our Lady of the Woods Chapel https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/033124.cfm Good morning, Bellarmine. Happy Easter. The Lord is Risen, Alleluia! In Jesus’ time, the most important and popular art form was the Greek tragedy. These plays originated in Athens in the 6th century B.C. and were performed in large amphitheaters built on the side of hills. They were originally religious in nature, honoring the god Dionysius. A small number of actors (with powerful voices) wearing masks acted on stage while a chorus sang a commentary on the action. Tragedies tell the story of the downfall of a great hero. The noble protagonist of the story is virtuous yet imperfect in ways that make him sympathetic. He has a “tragic flaw” that lead to catastrophe. The most famous example is Oedipus Rex whose flaw is lack of knowledge about his family and his origins. The conclusion of the tragedy is called a catastrophe, a Greek word that means ‘sudden downturn.’ This may b...

  5th Sunday of Lent Scrutinies https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/040625-YearA.cfm  We just heard the second longest Gospel reading by numbers of words in the entire Sunday lectionary.  If you are keeping score, last week’s reading was 851 words.  Today’s is 843 words.  These readings are preparing us for our Passion readings next week which are almost three times as long.   Today, we heard 45 verses – the entire 11th chapter of the Gospel of John.  Out of the 45 verses, I would like to focus on one verse (11:35), which is the shortest verse in the Bible.  It is just two words: “Jesus wept.”   Jesus cries two times in the Gospels.  Today, we see him cry over the death of his beloved friend Lazarus.  Next week, before entering Jerusalem in a procession of palms, Jesus cries for the fate of the city, which is doomed to be destroyed by the Romans in the next thirty-five years in a siege that will result in tens of thousa...

St. Agnes Catholic Church 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022325.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes. Among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, warriors would demonstrate their bravery through a practice called “counting coup.” This test of courage involved riding or running up to an enemy and touching or striking him with a hand and then retreating from danger. This act won prestige for a warrior, which could be recorded on a coup stick decorated with notches and feathers. It could also persuade and enemy to admit defeat without inflicting lasting violence on him besides injuring his pride. This form of ritual warfare was a creative way to resolve conflict among communities without engaging in devastating battles that ended in death and disability. I think about this practice when reading both our first reading and Jesus’ instruction in the Gospel to “love your enemies and do good to them.” In the first reading, David, the charismatic w...

St. Agnes Catholic Church Feast of the Holy Family https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122924.cfm Good evening / morning, St. Agnes, Merry Christmas and happy Feast of the Holy Family.  My maternal grandmother, Barbara Emrich, grew up in the Highlands.  She and her family lived in a little house on Princeton Dr. not far from where Bellarmine University is now.  Her father, Joe Emrich, was a railroad man, working for the old Louisville & Nashville or L&N company.  Her mother, Nona, stayed at home and raised 9 children.   There were five boys and four girls in the Emrich family.  They were a deeply Catholic German family; two of the sons became priests and one of the daughters an Ursuline nun.  They embodied, in a way, an old model of what a Catholic family looked like.   In that little house, the boys had one bedroom and the girls another and they  shared one, solitary bathroom.  My grandmother was the baby of the fam...

  Bellarmine University Our Lady of the Woods  Christmas Eve Vigil Mass  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122524-Night.cfm  Pray for Peace, People Everywhere  Merry Christmas, Bellarmine, to you and your families.   If you’re like my family you’ve been hearing and listening to Christmas songs for about a month nonstop.  We’ve heard them on our smart speaker, the radio, at Christmas concerts, piano recitals, and St. Agnes’ Christmas pageant.   Miriam, Max, and Petra, who are all five years old, have been really into “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  Something about the repetition in the song really appeals to their age … while also driving adults a little crazy.  When EJ, our oldest, was three, he sang “Jingle Bells” for a solid year.  The next year, he started up on “We Three Kings.”  Again for a whole year, we were hearing  ”Woah … hoh....  Star of wonder…!” Christmas songs can be overwhelming and ines...

  Holy Family Catholic Church Gold Mass (Feast of St. Albert) Wis 13:1-9  Mk 9:2-10 How many of you have heard of “Tiktaalik?”  Do you know what a “Tiktaalik” is?  I’ll say the word again: Tiktaalik.  Tiktaalik is the name of an animal that lived 375 million years ago.  It was a fishlike aquatic creature that was among the first to evolve the ability to crawl out onto dry land. Tiktaalik’s fossils were found by paleontologists Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin twenty years ago in the arctic on Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, northern Canada.   Tiktaalik is called a “transitional fossil,” which embodies a transition from one major evolutionary stage to another. A second example of this is archaeopteryx, which embodies the transition of dinosaurs to birds.  Tiktaalik is sometimes referred to as “a fish with wrists” having fish-like qualities, but limbs that could support its weight as it crawled onto land, as an early ancestor of the amphibians....