Advent Retreat

This is just a quick blurb promoting the Advent retreat at St. Peter Chanel Catholic Church in Hawaiian Gardens, CA.

Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca

Crazy week!

Make that a crazy couple weeks; my last post was 12 days ago!

Metaphysics and Latin still reign my coursework as my favorites by far. Ancient Philosophy is becoming more substantial as we take an in-depth look at Plato and Aristotle for the remainder of the semester (the first third of the course was all the Greeks before Plato). In Literature, we read the Divine Comedy (principal passages) since I last posted.

We had members of NET Ministries visiting the Boston area this week; they stayed with us for two nights. They are a traveling team of young adults that give retreats and workshops for middle and high school-aged youth around the country. It was exciting to have modern missionaries in our midst.

Fr. Michael Gaitley was just ordained with the Marians of the Immaculate Conception last weekend. I had met him at St. Peter Chanel several years ago when he was studying with the Oblates. He came to St. Clement's to celebrate a first Mass here on Tuesday.

This week was also full of canceled classes (can't really be full if there's something missing...) due to teachers traveling and adjusting classes in order to give a long exam in one section. My schedule is so irregular anyway that such changes do not actually constitute much of a disruption.

Confirmation classes are going well; our second meeting was better organized and more comprehensive; we are getting the hang of it now, and I expect it will continue to improve, for the children's sake. Please continue to pray that their hearts may be opened to receive Our Lord and Our Lady and that they will begin to listen to and follow God's call for them each day for the rest of their lives.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to seminarians, released on Monday, the Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist. In it, he highlights the importance of having good priests and shows us how to pursue our formation, in all four pillars identified by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II: spiritual, intellectual, pastoral, and human. Pope Benedict is very conscious of the opposition and difficulties that priests and seminarians face today, as well as the potential for modern technology-based means of evangelization to make a profound difference in the near future. He closes with the following:

"Dear seminarians, with these few lines I have wanted to let you know how often I think of you, especially in these difficult times, and how close I am to you in prayer. Please pray for me, that I may exercise my ministry well, as long as the Lord may wish. I entrust your journey of preparation for priesthood to the maternal protection of Mary Most Holy, whose home was a school of goodness and of grace. May Almighty God bless you all, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Until next time,

Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca

Thank you, Cristóbal Colómbo!

Seminarians got a day off for Columbus Day. So we went to Mount Monadnock, in Southern New Hampshire, about a 2-hour drive away. I'll let the pictures (and videos) do the rest of the talking.

Love the Immaculata!

Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca

Class, Ordination, Vocations, and Pizza (!)

This week has been incredible. I had two major assignments: a paper (25% of my grade) for Ancient Philosophy and a quiz (10% of my grade) in Latin. The paper was just a selection of quotes from a chapter of one of our texts, indicating the most important points, but those 30 pages of reading turned into 11 pages of quotes, almost 7,000 words, and took over 3 hours to type up, even with my quick typing (average 80wpm) - I had to do it in 4 shifts in order to avoid Carpal tunnel distress and combat typing fatigue that reduces my typing accuracy and makes everything take longer. The Latin quiz was to a vocabulary (translate single words) quiz of 10 questions, taken from a bank of over 100 words we have learned over the past 5 weeks. Each class meeting for the remainder of the term also contains a reading/pronunciation quiz for two students; by the end of the semester, we will all have had our chance at reading aloud, worth another 10% of our final grade.

Friday night, a few of us attended a diaconate ordination of 7 Jesuits at Boston College. Those who were ordained came from all over the country; the presiding bishop was Archbishop Gregory, of Atlanta, GA. It was very nice to see the religious in attendance; there were several Redemptorists, a few Dominicans from Ann Arbor, MI, and many Jesuits, who traveled to concelebrate at the ordination. The music selections were beautiful, including a song I sang with the choir back home: the Ignatian prayer "Take Lord, Receive", also known as the Suscipe, the first word in the Latin version.

Saturday after the Mass, the first Mass at which I played the violin here, I attended a talk by the vocation director of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, from Ann Arbor Michigan. She was accompanied by a 4th-year sister (who studied Computer Science in Texas) and a postulant, who just entered after studying at Harvard and making her Total Consecration to Mary under the direction of Fr. Greg Staab, OMV (just like me! well, not the Harvard part...). It was nice to see Dominicans, and to see that they are doing so well. The Motherhouse in Ann Arbor is bursting at the seams with over 100 members in community and a large postulant class of 22 this year (sounds just like the Nashville community). The sisters stressed how important it is that religious support each other (and, by the same token, that the whole Church support each other), and demonstrated that rather than seeing a decline of interest in the religious life, that vocations abound, witnessed by their 22 entrances and the 100 emails she receives each day. The Dominicans in Ann Arbor also take in a total of 400 women at 3 vocational discernment retreats each year.

We topped off the week with a gourmet pizza dinner, cooked by yours truly and Br. John last night. Till next week,


Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca

Teaching Confirmation

My first Confirmation class! Our students are 7th graders from South Boston - the boys are separated from the girls, and team-taught. The boys get 5 of us seminarians (three from the Oblates and two from St. John Seminary); the girls get 4 women from the parish. It was a good first class, in which we were able to meet the students, introduce the first lesson, and attend Sunday Mass with them.

We are delivering content mandated by the Archdiocese that teaches the first-year Confirmation students about love, happiness, relationships and decision-making, including multimedia content by Jason Evert and others. The program, called Created for Love, was created a few years ago with consultation from experts in all the pertinent fields, including local professors of philosophy and theology, specialists in adolescent psychology, and medical professionals who are accustomed to serving children in this age group and remedying their various issues. The program includes a supplemental DVD with videos to educate the parents regarding faith and moral issues relevant to their children at this time in their lives, and how to accurately describe various physical and psychological changes their children undergo, so that they might use that additional information at their discretion to better bring up their children and provide a richer support system for them at home.

It is a good program, and this semester-long session for the 7th graders includes more than just that content.

Please pray for our students, and for all those preparing to receive various sacraments in the Church, that they might come to an intimate relationship with Christ, spurring them to learn more about their faith and, consequently, grow even closer to Him.


Love the Immaculata!
Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca