A Few Days in Assisi

January 2, 2011

Peace and Good,

Well, the meetings are over for the holidays, so I spent the past week in Assisi for some prayer and relaxation. I had not had a chance to have a retreat this year, so this time served as a bit of that. Assisi is beautiful at any time of the year. I arrived there on December 26th, and was able to visit with Fr. Lanfranco Sierini who is one of our previous ministers general. He is showing his age, but he is still vitally interested in what the friars are doing. I visited the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Assisi whose mother house is there. Over the years, I have given conferences and retreats to them on three different continents.

Friday, a few of us took a trip up to La Verna where St. Francis received the Stigmata, the wounds that Jesus had. This happened two years before his death, and typical of authentic revelations, he didn't quite know to make of it. He hid it from others, and most of the friars only found out about it after he died. He is the first knows saint to have had the stigmata.

Yesterday I returned to Rome and had some surpise business to take care of. Two of our benefactors were visiting from the States, and they wanted to talk about the friars applying for grants to help finance their missionary and charitable efforts. They are very generous in time and talent and have already helped us enormously in Zambia. We are hoping to get something more going over the next year.

Tomorrow I will be heading to Canterbury, England, to give a retreat to a group of men in formation there.

As usual, I finished a couple of books. One was a Robert Ludlum book called the Moscor Vector. He is usually good, but this book only really measured OK on the scale. It was about a new president of Russia who hatches a plot to take over the old soviet republics that once formed the Soviet Union. His secret weapon is a virus that kills only the person for whom it is specifically genetically designed.

A second book was The Treasure of the Incas by GA Henty. I have read a couple of other books by Henty. They were written around 1900 for British young people showing the heroism of the British and the failure to measure up of anyone else. Some of the expressions would certainly be considered to be racist today, but in his time he was probably thought of as enlightened. The plot in general is good and there is always pleanty of action.

Keep well and
Shalom
fr. Jude