"Love follows knowledge."
"Beauty above all beauty!"
– St. Catherine of Siena

Friday, July 18, 2025

Faith Filled Friday: Our Feast of Mt. Carmel, 2025

The actual feast day for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel was Wednesday, July 16th, but we celebrated it with a Mass, an Italian marching band, a procession, and then a parish BBQ on Sunday the 13th. 

 


The feast day is a special to the Carmelite Order, commemorating the giving of the brown scapular in 1287 by Our Lady to St. Simon Stock, an English member of the Carmelite Order.  

Our pastor, Fr. Eugene, is also a Third Order Carmelite, and we had many from his chapter at the Mass.  We also had people attend from the Padre Pio Society and of course the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel organization which is located in Brooklyn, NY.  We also had an Italian band.

Fr. Eugene, who is Italian-American, included in his homily a funny little story.  I’ll put this in quotes, but it’s not a direct quote.  He said, “so deep is the Italian devotion to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, that his mother once asked where in Italy is Mt. Carmel located?”  The love of this feast is so pervasive among Italians that his mother assumed the mountain was in Italy.  But it’s not.  It’s in Isarel.

Now back in 2017, I posted that year’s procession with plenty of pictures.  If you want to see stills, go here.  

For this year, I’m going to post three videos from the procession.  First coming out of Church.


 

 

The grand exit of our beloved Lady and being put on the rolling cart.



Viva Maria!

 

And finally the procession.


 


Seminarians and altar servers in the front, banners and flags next, the rolling cart, the band, and finally the parishioners.  That’s Fr. Eugene in his vestments directing the rolling cart.  We processed about two blocks, up an avenue, and then back around.  As you can see, our parish is not just full of Italian-Americans but quite diverse. 

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, pray for us!




Monday, July 14, 2025

Matthew Monday: Father’s Day 2025, The Air Show

As you may know, Matthew and I have what we call our Father’s Day adventure every Father’s Day.  It’s just a father and son outing.  I’ve documented our Father’s Days on my blog from when I started the blog in 2013.  If you click the “Father’s Day” tag at the bottom of this post you can pull up the Father’s Day posts through the years.  Some great pictures in those blogs.  And I do really get watery-eyed nostalgic looking back at Matthew as a little boy.

This year we went to an air show.  I’ve never been to an air show before, and obviously neither has Matthew.  It was the NJ Air Show and you can look at their website.  

The weather was overcast, so they had to cancel a few performances, but what we saw was thrilling.  The show started at 5:30 and was a combination of daytime and nighttime shows.  The daytime acts allowed for smoke trails off the planes while night show provided the opportunity to for fireworks off the planes. 

Let me give you a sample of photos and videos I took.

The show started with the National Anthem and the American flag was taken up to the sky by one of the Airythmia pilots.



That’s essentially a powered parasail with a pilot hanging to the parachute.  I will have more on Airythmia when their part of the show comes up.

Here’s a picture of two planes in tight formation.  This is a father and son team I think. 



Here is a movie of the two doing a near miss cross.



Here is a still picture of another near miss cross.


 

If speed, engine sound, and tight formation is your thing, here are three jets blasting across the sky.





I believe the group is called “The Next Generation Eagles.”  And a still picture.



I can’t recall every act, so I’m just going to give you some videos.  Here’s one with flips, nose dives, and maneuvers.







As you can see and hear, flights were accompanied by trailing smoke and music.

Let me get to the Airythmia Paramotor team.  This is so cool.  It’s basically a parasail with the pilot dangling in the air with a motor on his back.  Here’s a zoomed in photo as best I could capture it.



But they put on a show, a beautiful show. 






Here’s a movie clip of part of the show.  You can see there are a group of four.



Here is a photo of one them landing.



Man you have to have a lot of courage to go up in that thing.  They said they offer lessons for those that might want to take that up.  No Thanks.  Here is one of the pilots talking to the audience after their event.



I asked the guy when how much that gear weighed.  He said around a hundred pounds.  Wowser!


My favorite I think was this highly maneuverable plane.  I think it was called the “Long EZ,” piloted by Kyle Fowler.  Here is a still shot in flight.



Those wings are for hard maneuver authority.  Unfortunately I did not catch a video of it.  But you can read about the pilot, Kyle Fowler, here.  And watch a YouTube clip.

 


I think he did a smoke 360 for us too!  I thought Kyle Fowler and his Long EZ plane was the epitome of what stunt flying should be. 

They closed the show with another high maneuvering plane, the Fox Jet Sail Plane.  This was really neat.



The Air Show was a lot of fun for both Matthew and me.  The only picture we got of us was Matthew’s selfie.



A great and different Father’s Day!

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Sunday Meditation: The Good Samaritan

For the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C, we come to the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  You know this parable quite well I suspect, mainly because as Moses says in the first reading, the moral is written in your heart.  You have heard the parable and it connects with the law written in your heart.

 


 

There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test Jesus and said,

"Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law?

How do you read it?"

He said in reply,

"You shall love the Lord, your God,

with all your heart,

with all your being,

with all your strength,

and with all your mind,

and your neighbor as yourself."

He replied to him, "You have answered correctly;

do this and you will live."

 

But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus,

"And who is my neighbor?"

Jesus replied,

"A man fell victim to robbers

as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead.

A priest happened to be going down that road,

but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side.

Likewise a Levite came to the place,

and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side.

But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him

was moved with compassion at the sight.

He approached the victim,

poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them.

Then he lifted him up on his own animal,

took him to an inn, and cared for him.

The next day he took out two silver coins

and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction,

'Take care of him.

If you spend more than what I have given you,

I shall repay you on my way back.'

Which of these three, in your opinion,

was neighbor to the robbers' victim?"

He answered, "The one who treated him with mercy."

Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

   ~Lk 10:25-37

 

Since you know the parable so well, I am going to provide a homily that provides the allegorical interpretation.  This is Fr. Ryan Murphy E.P. of the Heralds of the Gospel, which is not a religious order but a religious association.  You can read about them here. 

 


So the wounded man is analogous to Adam, the oil and wine to the sacraments, the Good Samaritan to Jesus, and the Inn the Catholic Church.  An interesting reading.

This is one of the best pastoral homilies you will ever hear.  Fr. Mike Schmitz hits a homerun ith this.  You will not want to miss this.



That study at Princeton was mind blowing.  I totally relate to those students.  “When we rationalize, we wind up telling ourselves rational lies.”  Remember that!

 

 

Sunday Meditation: "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live."

 

 

No hymn today, just a dramatization of the parable by the Jesus Film.

 


They took liberties but I love the touch of the little girl speaking the moral at the end.

 

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Short Story Analysis: “The Displaced Person,” by Flannery O’Connor, Post #1

This is the first of three posts on Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “The Displaced Person.”  In my commemorative post of the 100th anniversary of O’Connor’s birth, I mentioned I would be posting on this story.  In that post I also delved into O’Connor’s essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” where O’Connor provides her aesthetic philosophy to writing fiction.  I will touch on that aesthetic philosophy in this post as it applies to “The Displaced Person.”

What compelled me to read “The Displaced Person” was the issue of immigration that has arisen in the past few months with the Trump administration.  Someone posted that this story captures the Catholic view on immigration.  So I pulled out my Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories and opened up to “The Displaced Person.”  If you don’t have a hardcopy version and wish to read it, there is an online facsimile in PDF of the entire book.  You can find it here,  and “The Displaced Person is on page 205 in the PDF format.  (Be aware, the hard copy page numbers don’t exactly match the PDF version.)



Published in 1955, the setting of “The Displaced Person” is roughly contemporaneous to the writing.  Immigration was certainly in O’Connor’s news since Eisenhower’s mass deportation program of Operation Wetback began in June of 1954 and ran through the summer into September.  This was a mass deportation of Mexican illegal immigrants but the reality was that legal immigrants and even American citizens of Mexican descent were confused.  In all, over a million people were deported.  Let me apologize up front for the slurs that will run through this essay.  I am just articulating the language of the story and the times and it has nothing to do with my personal language or characterization.

O’Connor’s story takes place at the southern farm of a Mrs. McIntyre where she has a poor white family, the Shortley’s, and several African-Americans as the long time paid help.  Mrs. McIntyre, a widow, takes in an immigrant man with two children from Poland from a government policy to integrate immigrants.  The setting is shortly after World War II, and so Poland has experienced a large number of displaced and poor people.  The farm has struggled to break even, and the long time help is either lazy or incompetent.  The Polish immigrant, a Mr. Guizac, the displaced person, is just the opposite. He is a workaholic, very competent, and capable of fixing all the farm equipment.  His family has been displaced by the Nazis in Europe and are now refugees.  An American Catholic priest has sponsored the immigrants and had them placed with Mrs. McIntyre.

Why does O’Connor make the immigrant from a European background rather than what would have been more likely a Mexican background?  It’s hard to say.  The Wikipedia entry on the story says that O’Connor’s family had hired such an immigrant from Poland.  But she changes so many other aspects of the situation that making the character Polish goes beyond personal experience. Perhaps she was trying to not link it with the political issues that would have been circulating around her.  Perhaps she was making the immigrant more exotic to American readers.  Perhaps she was trying to eliminate contemporary prejudices that had been built up over time with American-Mexican relations.  Perhaps she selected an ethnicity that white Americans could more easily identify with.  What is important is that she picked a Catholic ethnicity, though Mexican and Polish would have sufficed there.

The story is divided into three sections.  The first section is told from Mrs. Shortley’s point of view.  The story opens with the car that brings the Guizacs to the farm.  There is an immediate sizing of the immigrants and placing them into categories. 

 

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, “Time marches on!” This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from her elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find out at once what they were capable of.  (p. 196)

 

Pagination throughout are taken from the hardcopy Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1971.



“Gobblehooks” is Mrs. Shortley’s way of slurring “Guizac.”  What we see is a predisposition to assume characteristics on the stranger.  Mrs. Shortley doesn’t think the Guizacs will last but to her shock, he outworks her husband and the long time hired help.  Mrs. McIntyre, at first skeptical of the newcomer, is now thrilled.

 

Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. “At last,” she said, “I’ve got somebody I can depend on. For years I’ve been fooling with sorry people. Sorry people. Poor white trash and niggers,” she muttered. “They’ve drained me dry. Before you all came I had Ringfields and Collins and Jarrells and Perkins and Pinkins and Herrins and God knows what all else and not a one of them left without taking something off this place that didn’t belong to them. Not a one!”

(p. 202)

 

In time, Mrs. Shortley began to feel insecure about her future at Mrs. McIntyre’s.

 

Mrs. McIntyre had changed since the Displaced Person had been working for her and Mrs. Shortley had observed the change very closely: she had begun to act like somebody who was getting rich secretly and she didn’t confide in Mrs. Shortley the way she used to. Mrs. Shortley suspected that the priest was at the bottom of the change. They were very slick. First he would get her into his Church and then he would get his hand in her pocketbook. Well, Mrs. Shortley thought, the more fool she! Mrs. Shortley had a secret herself. She knew something the Displaced Person was doing that would floor Mrs. McIntyre. “I still say he ain’t going to work forever for seventy dollars a month,” she murmured. She intended to keep her secret to herself and Mr. Shortley.

 

“Well,” Mrs. McIntyre said, “I may have to get rid of some of this other help so I can pay him more.”

 

Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some time. “I’m not saying those niggers ain’t had it coming,” she said. “But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a nigger what to do and stand by until he does it.” (pp. 207-8)

 

But Mrs. Shortley realizes that getting “rid of some of the help” will eventually include her and her husband.  Part 1 concludes with the Shortleys leaving the farm before Mrs. McIntyre lets them go.  If we step back here, we realize that the Shortleys have become displaced people as well.

Part II is mostly told from Mrs. McIntyre’s point of view.  She surveyed the farm and saw how well it’s being run by Mr. Guizac.  She conversed with one of the African-American help about Mr. Guizac.

 

“We seen them come and we seen them go,” he said as if this were a refrain.  “But we ain’t never had one before,” he said, bending himself up until he faced her, “like what we got now.” He was cinnamon-colored with eyes that were so blurred with age that they seemed to be hung behind cobwebs.

 

She gave him an intense stare and held it until, lowering his hands on the hoe, he bent down again and dragged a pile of shavings alongside the wheelbarrow.  She said stiffly “He can wash out that barn in the time it took Mr. Shortley to make up his mind he had to do it.”

 

“He from Pole,” the old man muttered.

 

“From Poland.”

 

“In Pole it ain’t like it is here,” he said. “They got different ways of doing,” and he began to mumble unintelligibly.

 

“What are you saying?” she said. “If you have anything to say about him, say it and say it aloud.”

 

He was silent, bending his knees precariously and edging the rake along the underside of the trough.

 

“If you know anything he’s done that he shouldn’t, I expect you to report it to me,” she said.

 

“It warn’t like it was what he should ought or oughtn’t,” he muttered. “It was like what nobody else don’t do.”

 

“You don’t have anything against him,” she said shortly, “and he’s here to stay.”

 

“We ain’t never had one like him before is all,” he murmured and gave his polite laugh.

 

“Times are changing,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening to this world? It’s swelling up. It’s getting so full of people that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive,” and she tapped the words, smart, thrifty, and energetic out on the palm of her hand. Through the far end of the stall she could see down the road to where the Displaced Person was standing in the open barn door with the green hose in his hand. There was a certain stiffness about his figure that seemed to make it necessary for her to approach him slowly, even in her thoughts. She had decided this was because she couldn’t hold an easy conversation with him. Whenever she said anything to him, she found herself shouting and nodding extravagantly and she would be conscious that one of the Negroes was leaning behind the nearest shed, watching.  (pp. 215-6)

 

We see here is the distant world of the stranger intruding into the familiar world of the farm.  Mrs. McIntyre can say “times are a changing;” they seem to be changing for the better for her.  She likes what the displaced person has brought over.  But the African-American, like Mrs. Shortley, feels insecure in the face of a worker who works for less and does so much more.  Mrs. McIntyre is looking for an opportunity to acquire more displaced people from Poland and then be able to let go the African-American farm help.  If this should happen, then the African-Americans become displaced as well as the Shortleys.   The “times are changing” is happening outside the farm as well.  The story is within the time span of the northern migration of African-Americans (1910-1970) known as the Great Migration.) They too will become displaced and searching for work in what is almost a different country up north.  Interestingly, Bob Dylan in 1964 came out with a song, “The Times They Are a-Changin'” which captured the social volatility of mid twentieth century. 



Sunday, July 6, 2025

Sunday Meditation: The Missionary Charge

So today we jump to the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time.  You might ask, as my son did at Mass this morning, how did we get to the Fourteenth week.  I just spent a half hour trying to figure this out, and I could not account for all fourteen weeks.  From the Baptism of the Lord, this year on January 12th, to the week of Ash Wednesday, this year on March 5th, is eight weeks, and each of those are one of the weeks of Ordinary Time.  Then we have six weeks of Lent, including Palm Sunday and Holy Week.  That is followed by seven weeks of Easter Time to Pentecost, and then it’s the tenth week of Ordinary Time.  What happened to the Ninth Week?  The Solemnities of the Holy Trinity, Body and Blood of the Lord, and Peter and Paul counts as the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth weeks.  That brings us up to today, the Fourteenth.  But what happened to the ninth?  If someone can explain it, please let me know.

 


The Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C brings us to the mission sendoff of Christ to the disciples in the Gospel of Luke. 

 

At that time the Lord appointed seventy-two others

whom he sent ahead of him in pairs

to every town and place he intended to visit.

He said to them,

"The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few;

so ask the master of the harvest

to send out laborers for his harvest.

Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves.

Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals;

and greet no one along the way.

Into whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace to this household.'

If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest on him;

but if not, it will return to you.

Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you,

for the laborer deserves his payment.

Do not move about from one house to another.

Whatever town you enter and they welcome you,

eat what is set before you, cure the sick in it and say to them,

'The kingdom of God is at hand for you.'

Whatever town you enter and they do not receive you,

go out into the streets and say,

'The dust of your town that clings to our feet, even that we shake off against you.'

Yet know this: the kingdom of God is at hand.

I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that town."


The seventy-two returned rejoicing, and said,

"Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name."

Jesus said, "I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.

Behold, I have given you the power to 'tread upon serpents' and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you.  Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven."

   ~Lk 10:1-12, 17-20

 

Bishop Barron gives a detailed exegesis on this passage.



So that is interesting.  There are the three inner circle of Apostles (Peter, James, and John), there are twelve apostles, and 72 disciples who He sends off here.  These parallel similar groupings with Moses in the Old Testament.

For the Pastoral Homily, I am going to post Pope Leo XIV’s Angelus Message for today.

 


Cannot do better than the Holy Father for a pastoral homily.  Did you catch this:

Dear brothers and sisters, the Church and the world do not need people who fulfill their religious duties as if the faith were merely an external label. We need laborers who are eager to work in the mission field, loving disciples who bear witness to the Kingdom of God in all places. Perhaps there is no shortage of “intermittent Christians” who occasionally act upon some religious feeling or participate in sporadic events. But there are few who are ready, on a daily basis, to labor in God’s harvest, cultivating the seed of the Gospel in their own hearts in order then to share it in their families, places of work or study, their social contexts and with those in need.

“We need laborers who are eager to work the mission fields,” not those who “occasionally act upon some religious feelings.”  Gosh, that sounds like Pope Francis!

 

You can read the transcript of his Angelus message in English, here

 

 

Sunday Meditation: “Whatever town you enter and they welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick in it and say to them, 'The kingdom of God is at hand for you.'”

 

 

What a wonderful hymn, “Send Us Out”  by John Michael Talbot. 

 


 

Taking nothing for your journey

For God will give you His bread

And for every house that you enter

Pray the peace of God descend

 

Send us out to proclaim the reign of your kingdom.

Send us out to proclaim and to heal

Send us out with your power and your authority.

To overcome, and to heal the world