Montreal - London

May 26, 2015 Peace and Good, In finished off my two weeks in Montreal and flew out to London on Saturday evening. The second session of the chapter went well and we actually finished it early. It gave me a couple of days to do some projects and get caught up on things that were on the back burner. Here in London I had a couple of meetings with two friars from Malta yesterday. This is part of the visitation to their province that I will be conducting in Malta in July. I am heading out to Canterbury for a couple of days where I will have some more meetings with one of the friars stationed there. We have a school of theology there which has been having some rough times lately. Fr. Tom Reist (originally from Buffalo) has been working to help the school make a come back. I am going there to see how things are going. I have finished some books: Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving This is a saga of an author whose widowed father is a cook for a lumber camp in the woods of New England. He accidentally murders the wife of the local sheriff who is cheating with his father. They have to run away and hide their identities to protect them from the sheriff who is a very violent man. He has a wife who has no sense of integrity or fidelity, even to their son. His son dies in a horrible accident, and that all but kills the father and grandfather. The story is well written, but very long and winding. Stopping Napoleon: War and Intrigue in the Mediterranean by Tom Pocock Usually when one speaks of Napoleon, one deals with the great land battles of central Europe and even of his invasion of Russia which ended in disaster. This book deals with what could easily be considered to be a minor theater of the war, the Mediterranean. Yet, by keeping up the pressure in this area, the British and their allies were able to drain forces from Napoleon’s armies and navies that might have reinforces his efforts elsewhere. Come the Dark Stranger by Jack Higgins A stranger comes into town a number of years after the Korean War. He is looking for a number of his comrades, one of whom betrayed them all to the Communists. Higgins always presents a good adventure story, and this is one of them. He eventually tracks down the culprit, but it is certainly not the person whom he suspected. The Holy Land: Oxford Archaeological Guide by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor and Barry Cunliffe This is a very thorough archaeological study of all of the major and many of the minor archaeological sites in the Holy Land. It is not for the casual tourist, although the account does present information about rest rooms and other accommodations at various sites. I read a book like this every couple of years just to keep up on what I studied many years ago at the Biblicum but also to learn facts and tidbits here and there that make the whole story more understandable. The Obedient Assasin by John Davidson Leon Trotsky was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by Ramon Mercader, a Spanish born Communist, under orders from Stalin. This is the story of Ramon’s call from Spain by his Communist mother to go first to France and eventually to Mexico to kill Trotsky whom Stalin hated. Ramon is pictured as a hen pecked mommy’s boy who kills Trotsky even when he recognizes that he has no more power and that he certainly wasn’t behind many of the difficulties that the left experienced during the Spanish Civil War. This is a fictionalized account of what happened. Have a good week. Shalom fr. Jude