Priest a wartime legend
He was a soldier to the end. His threadbare army tunic hung on the wall, and his room was filled with religious icons, rosaries and holy pictures.
He was a soldier to the end. His threadbare army tunic hung on the wall, and his room was filled with religious icons, rosaries and holy pictures.
The garrulous Timothy Michael Dolan, preacher and raconteur extraordinaire, chooses his words carefully.
As I was saying to an old friend the other day, as we passed a crowded hamburger franchise: "Look at all the rugged individualists, lining up for their Big Macs! Look at all those freethinkers!"
We are not the first generation puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattans tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy.
This week the world lost a rare writer at the age of 43.
Literature offers us a rich panorama of marriages in which the woman is a shrew and the husband a victim.
After his Vigil Mass, the body of Msgr. William B. Smith was carried out the main doors of St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, for the last time, and I wondered how many thousands of entrances and exits he had made through those same doors since he had first arrived as a seminarian.
On January 11, my family went to noon Mass at Blessed Sacrament parish in Seattle. It was being celebrated by our visiting priest, but after he processed up to the altar, we were astonished to see that Father Tom Kraft had taken a seat beside him.