Genocidal infection

Time will tell whether Pope Francis’ declaration of “genocide” is an existential threat to the Church. His admission, however, was an “existential” challenge to me. Francis’ penitential pilgrimage forced me to examine those remote, ignored and unacknowledged “reserves” in my soul that nurture the concealed attitudes and forbidden affections that are insidious infections from which “genocide” spreads.

Following Pope Francis’ peripatetic apology this summer, and as the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation looms at September’s end, it’s safe to foresee increases in Indigenous “adaptations” of Catholic liturgy.

When my husband recently went on a work trip for four days, our daughter started to act out more at the same time. Or perhaps she was just being her regular three-year-old self and I noticed it more. I called a friend through tears.

The Vatican Museums comprise 54 galleries of which the Sistine Chapel is undoubtedly the most famous. They exhibit more than 20,000 significant pieces of art, a mere fraction of the works in the collection of over 70,000. These include sculptures, paintings, maps and more, with the pièce de resistance being Michelangelo’s Volta della Cappella Sistina, a High Renaissance art masterpiece painted in only four years by the 33-year-old prodigy.

A war veteran, recovering from PTSD and a brain injury, approaches a Veteran Affairs Canada service agent to seek a treatment plan that would continue the progress he was making.

I come from a family of lead-foots. I think we have black-and-white checkered genes. Nunhood made no dent in my “need for speed” heritage. So here are a few of my encounters with law enforcement on the roadways of North America. (Be it known that I’m always dressed as a nun. I don’t really have any other clothes.)

I teach it and I preach it, but every so often I am reminded how difficult it is to live it. I am talking about laying our expectations on others.

Tone deafness

My heart sank to read an article as well as a letter to the editor in the July 24-31 Catholic Register. In both, the writers told Indigenous peoples they should extend forgiveness once our Holy Father presents an apology on Canadian soil.

Since 2020 while our attention has been fixed on living through the COVID pandemic, it seems an “end-demic” of medically delivered death has been raging around us almost unnoticed.

Mess is a theme in my life, and therefore also in my barefoot preaching. I think I return to the theme because mess challenges me so deeply. While I grew, I found relief in order, comfort in control, rest in simplicity. And I wandered into a world with a tendency toward disorder, a resistance to control and more complexity than I could have imagined. I tried and failed to eliminate the mess, and I crawled out of rock bottom (more than once) to make peace with the reality of mess.