Early in my priesthood, I was privileged to be mentored by Monsignor Arthur Matthew Tighe, longtime pastor of Visitation Parish, site of my first assignment in 1987. Then, like now, there were various discussions and debates among Catholics about how the church should function as a sacramental institution, a hierarchical enterprise, a community of faith […]
I am concerned about maintaining our Catholic presence in Kansas City’s urban core in the future. We have a limited number of priests serving our diocese; the bishop and diocesan leaders must send priests where Catholics live and worship to provide sacraments—there is not a proportionate number of Catholics living or worshipping in our inner […]
Dr. Ralph Wilson, director of Joyful Heart Renewal Ministries, once wrote: “If you ask your average heathen youngster what Easter is about, he’ll tell you about the Easter bunny and finding decorative baskets filled with annoying plastic grass that sticks to every household furnishing and those pastel foil-covered football things that are a sad excuse […]
“You say we’ve got nothing in common, no common ground to start from, and that we’re falling apart…And I said, ‘What about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’ And she said, ‘I think I remember that film, and as I recall, we both kinda liked it.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s one thing we’ve got’.” Those lyrics from […]
“I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains. There’s more than one answer to my questions, pointing me in a crooked line. And the less I seek my source as a definitive, the closer I am to fine.” From the Indigo Girls to […]
On Valentine’s Day, 1929, in Chicago, when tension between organized crime gangs and city police exploded, there was a bloody massacre that is still talked about today. Four years later in June, at Kansas City’s Union Station, another bloodbath occurred when local mobs and what later became the FBI tangled in a similarly notorious shoot-out. […]
A year ago, working with a wonderful team at Rockhurst, we activated a podcast with the same title as my blog: “Upon This Rock.” We began by interviewing Alvin Brooks, for whom the future Alvin Brooks Center for Faith-Justice is named; his life and inspiring words encourage us to lay rock-solid foundations in our society […]
