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.
As a culture, we are still in the midst of the great secular holy season called the NFL playoffs.
It was astonishing to see thousands thronging the Jai Alai arena in West Palm Beach a few years before the death of Rev. Patrick Peyton when I helped him with a Rosary Crusade, but I should have known that by his standard it was an unexceptional number, even smallish.
Father Richard John Neuhaus's work will be remembered and debated for decades.
This is the time of year when I repeat Christina Rossetti's lines:
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway.
I am old enough to remember the last slump -- I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade.
Avery Cardinal Dulles was one of the greatest thinkers in the modern Roman Catholic church and perhaps its most distinguished representative in the United States.
