I have been thinking about St. Eusebia all day. Her dad murdered, her mom sent her to a monastery, the girl gets elected an abbess at 12.
An abbess. And even though things start out pretty rough, she ends up leading her monastery through a period of growth and holiness.
When I was 12, I was elected patrol leader in my Boy Scout troop, and it was a disaster. So the 12 year old abbess really impresses me.
Basically, his grace is sufficient, and that's the lesson of St. Eusebia.
By the way, an abbess isn't just in charge at the monastery. She also exercises some spiritual and temporal authority in the vicinity of the monastery. At 12.
I'm really glad God surprised me with her.
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Other things my dad told us:
- that 'Green Chromosomes' are stronger than other genes, so if you are a bit Irish, the green chromosomes will overpower everything until you're all Irish.
- that on St. Patrick's Day, I had to write Seamus on my school papers or I would get a zero.
So the Prince of Wales shows up in the U.S. and we say "Hey, this freakin coffin couldn't hold George Washington. You remember that guy, right? Anyway, here's some wood."
I wonder if they focus grouped the “can and cannot do” language. I suspect it won’t play well with people who are skeptical, who seem to be an important audience for the speech.
Nor will the bit about the 4th of July.
On the whole I think this speech will be celebrated by people who support Biden and be criticized as scolding by those who think the federal government has been overbearing.
A nice enough speech, but I don’t see it moving any needles for anybody.
There have long been divisions among American Catholics between the sociopolitical “left” and “right” and roughly correspondent theological worldviews.
But the way in which the last four years has deeply fractured “conservative” Catholics is seriously underappreciated.
cont
I used to think this was just a phenomenon among the very online, but it’s not. I hear from a lot of practicing Catholic families who have been seriously fractured over Trump, Vigano, and now vaccines, etc. I hear from campus ministers who say students are confused by that.
What I spent my 20s and early 30s thinking of as kind of the “JP2 coalition” of apostolates, movements, organizations, institutions are now often internally divided.
My impression of bishops is that many of them don’t really see or appreciate this, or its significance.
I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now, we have to have peace. d go home in peace.
We have to have law and order, we have to respect our great...people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.
(cont)
It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country.