Rome

November 20, 2012 Peace and Good, This week has been glorious. I have been home, sleeping in the same bed for more than a few days. It is great to get back to a routine and not have to improvise every day depending on where one is and what one is expected to do. This past week I have working up to catch up on some projects and get ahead. Next week I will be given an extensive number of pages to translate from Italian to English for the General Chapter. I will be doing this translation because I was present at the meeting in which this material was developed so I know the nuances of the phrases used. I think it will be around 150 pages in all. Most of it is rather straight forward, but it is still a lot of work to do. So I have been writing my articles for the Messenger of St. Anthony in Padua. I am up to date up to the August edition. I finished some articles for the Crusader Magazine in England. I sent them the articles up to the February edition. Today I finished off the daily reflections up to Christmas eve. We have had some visitors from my province as well. One of the friars came in from England to refresh his Italian for a month, and another came in to attend a workshop here in Rome. It is good to have them around. Our provincial, fr. James, is arriving this evening. We’ll have a good sized group for Thanksgiving. We have been having fall weather. Some days are quite nice, while others are quite rainy. It is cool, not yet cold. The Tiber River has been very, very high due to rains they received in the north of Italy. Hope you have a good holiday. I have finished these books: A World on Fire by Amanda Forman This is a history of the relationship between the United States (northern and southern states) during the civil war and Great Britain. It was not an easy relationship. Great Britain had its reasons to be angry at the US after the way that it had treated Great Britain during various wars of its own (e.g. a rebellion in Canada, the Crimean War, etc.). Ironically, some of the things about which the north complained most bitterly were exactly things that the US had done to Great Britain. Shortly after the beginning of the rebellion, Great Britain declared its neutrality and more or less stuck to this commitment throughout the war. One of the things that truly complicated this relationship was the fact that Seward was our secretary of state. He was a very political man, and he used the opposition card to rally support for his and Lincoln’s policies. He would rail against Great Britain, even threatening to go to war against it in order to avoid having to respond to problems that the administration did not want to face. There were also a large number of volunteers and also men who were drafted (legally and illegally) into the armies of the north and the south during the war. The book tells the stories of many of them. The book is really an excellent, honest portrayal of a complicated issue. The Secret Agent: a Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad I love Conrad’s writing. The other books that I have read of his had to do with far off places (Africa, the South Seas). This one takes place in England. An agent of an imperial power is told to place a bomb in Greenwich in order to shake the confidence of the English people. The agent gives the bomb to his brother in law who is mentally slow, and it blows up. The investigation demonstrates the pettiness of the British police force. The spy himself is a pitiful character living a pitiful life. There is none of the heroics and action of a Bourne episode. It sounds a lot more like a group of moderately talented people pretending to be something they clearly are not. There is deception by people who claim to be working for the betterment of humanity (the agent who treats his wife with little or no regard, even after he is responsible for the death of her brother, the revolutionary who steals the wife’s money and sends her off to her suicide, etc.) One is left with a sense of sadness at how people act and live. Chopin: the Man and his Music by James Huneker This was one of the free books that I received from Kindle. It gives a short biography of Chopin, and then goes on at length considering the various aspects of his music. For me, the biography was the most important point, although if someone was really into music, I am sure the second part of the book would be more interesting. The biography, unfortunately, was less informative than I would have liked. This Polish musician lived a short but interesting life, dying in what he considered to be exile in Paris. God bless and Shalom Fr. Jude

Rome - Chicago - Rome

May 20, 2012 Peace and Good, This past week I had a quick trip to Chicago and back. We had an extraordinary chapter of St. Bonaventure Province in Chicago. Every four years we have an ordinary chapter. That is a gathering of the friars to elect the new provincial and his team for the four year period. In between these chapters, we can also have an extraordinary chapter for matters of importance. In this case, the province in Chicago was being asked to take responsibility for the jurisdiction in Australia. There are 15 friars there, and they were directly under the authority of the Minister General in Rome. The difficulty was that the general and his staff (including myself) did not have the time to properly accompany those friars. We have found that provinces do a much better job of being there to help these smaller jurisdictions to get their act together. For the past year, we have been talking about this transfer of responsibility, and this past Tuesday the friars in Chicago voted overwhelmingly to take upon themselves this call. There are only two small steps remaining in this transfer, and it should be done by the middle of June. I came back to Rome on Thursday, and the past couple days have been slow, trying to get over the jet lag. Today, my sister-in-law Mary is arriving in Rome with a few of her friends, and I will be hosting them a bit as they see Rome. This is one of the few opportunities that I have to explore this city – when I have guests come in from out of town. The earthquake you heard about in Italy did not really affect Rome. It was much farther north. I have finished a few books: Kidnapped by Robert Lewis Stevenson This is one of those books which I know I should have read long before this, but now is my chance to catch up on some of those “must reads.” I remember there was even a Walt Disney version of this story, but I never got to see it. The book is quite good, blending adventure with self-discovery. There is, of course, a happy ending, but there are so many twists and turns in arriving at it that it comes across as not being too serendipity. The story is one of a young man who is cheated out of an inheritance and kidnapped out to sea, but who finds an unusual friend among a highland Scott and who travels with him to come home again. The Gospel of Mark, The Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture by Mary Healy This is part of a new set of commentaries on Sacred Scripture. At this point, I only found two of the Gospels, this and Matthew which I read last year. Healy has some very good insights upon the Gospel. The commentary is solid, and there were some discoveries that I have been wondering about for quite some time. I was pleased reading this commentary, and I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to know more about the Gospel of Mark. Victory by Joseph Conrad Conrad is a remarkable author. This not my favorite of his stories, but it was still a far shot better than many other authors. It takes place in the south Pacific, with a band of strange and even dangerous characters. There is a taciturn Swede, a devoted poor English woman whom the Swede rescues from the advances for a lecherous German, two Englishmen who are card sharks among other felonious conduct, and an ape like Columbian. The victory is not anything of which one would expect. The speeches are a bit too long and tedious, but the story is still strong and surprising. Have a good week. Shalom Fr. Jude

Jonesboro, GA - Jacksonville, FL - Ellicott City, MD - Dublin, Ireland

February 12, 2012

Peace and Good,

This has been a good week. I began it in Atlanta. From there I drove down to Jacksonville on Monday along with two other friars to a retreat house where I would be preaching a retreat for the friars of the two eastern provinces (Immaculate Conception and St. Anthony). The theme of the retreat was that God was making all things new. This retreat and four others I will be preaching this year were part of a spiritual preparation for the joining of the provinces in 2014. The main purpose of the retreat was to make sure that the union was not simply a superficial joining of two groups of friars, but was rather an opportunity to take a look at our lives and see what needs to be changed. I compared it to moving to a new friary. One has two choices: one can simply pack everything in a moving van (thus needing a bigger one each time someone moves) or one can get rid of what wasn’t really necessary and pack light.

The talks were based on transitional moments in Sacred Scripture: Abraham; Moses; The exile in Babylon; After the Exile; the call to be disciples; the early Church; and the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation.

It is never easy to preach to the friars of one’s own community. They know you a little too well. But the friars could not have been more gracious. They entered into the spirit of the retreat wonderfully, and we had some really good conversations.


On a hunch, I also spent ten minutes or so before each of the conferences to talk about things that are going on in the order. Being the Assistant General, I get to see the order at a much wider level than most of the friars, and it is part of my job to let them know what is happening. A number of friars told me how much they appreciated that.

On Friday I flew back to Ellicott City, and then on Saturday night I headed out to Dublin. I will be participating in a series of assemblies (here, in Liverpool, and in London) over this next week. Then I will be heading back to Rome.

I finished a few books.

A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer

This book tells of a young working man from London who is falsely accused and convicted of killing his best friend when a band of four rich professionals (one of whom committed the murder) testify against him. He is befriended by a man in prison who belongs to the Scottish nobility who becomes his tutor in school and also in how to comport himself in the world. When the noble is murdered in prison, the young man takes the identity of the noble (for he looks remarkably like him – e.g. The Pauper and the Prince) in order to be released so that he might prove his innocence. This particular detail is a bit unlikely, but the book is quite good overall. I wouldn’t mind reading some more of Archer’s writing.

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

In this novella, Conrad tells of a captain transporting a group of Chinese coolies to their home city. His ship runs into a terrible typhoon, and they just barely survive. The great thing in the story is that the captain is remarkable dull witted. He never seems to be able to understand the nuances of anything that is said or done. Yet, it is his very slowness that ends up saving the ship from destruction both from the storm and from a rebellion of the Chinese. Once again, Conrad is a great author, and I could easily read anything that he has written. I just cannot believe that English was not his mother tongue. French was, and Polish was his second language. English was his third language, and yet his writing is remarkably good.

Imperium by Robert Harris

This is a historic novel about the rise of the famous orator Cicero to the imperium, the office of Council in the Roman Republic in the early days of Julius Caesar. It is written from the point of view of his private secretary, a slave. (Remember, in Roman times, many of the slaves were educated and quite respected for their expertise.) We hear about the plots and counterplots, the corruption of the later republican era of Rome, etc. Harris has done an incredibly good job in this book. I listened to the abridged version of it, and some day I would love to listen to the longer version of it, something that I could only rarely say for the books that I listen to on my MP3.

Have a good week.

Shalom
fr. Jude