Assisi - Rome - Valletta (Malta) - Rabat (Malta) - Bumarrat (Malta)

July 4, 2015 Happy Independence Day, As you can see from the cities mentioned above, I am in Malta. This is a small island south of Sicily, an independent country. It is a limestone island with a little vegetation, 30 by 40 miles. There are around 400,000 people on the island, with the vast majority Catholic. I am doing the visitation of the province here, which is relatively small, around 40 friars. Even though it is a small province, they have a tremendous history of mission work. They worked in England, Australia, Zambia and they founded the province of India Right now they have recently opened a new friary in Calcutta as a joint venture with the Indian Province. They have their chapter in September, and I am producing the report on how things are going in the province. Many of the structures on the island date back to the 1500's. The island suffered from three serious sieges during its history: the Turks, the French under Napoleon, and the Nazi's. During World War II, they suffered terribly from bombardment. Churchill called it the unsinkable aircraft carrier. It played a significant role in intercepting the supplies that were being shipped to Rommel, and thus insured his defeat. The weather is very hot right now. I am finally over my cold/bronchitis, but the heat is getting to me a bit. Oh well, as Rosanna Danna said, it's always something. The cathedral in Valletta is magnificent. It was built by the Knights of Malta which is divided into national groups. Each group took a part of the cathedral and tried to outdo its rivals. It also has two Caravaggio paintings for he spent the last two years of his life here. I am travelling from one friary to another. The internet contact is a bit tenuous, so I am writing this while I have good internet coverage. Hope you have a good celebration today and a good week. I have finished the following books: The Moghul by Thomas Hoover This is a saga about an English sea captain who travels to India during the 17th century to try to establish trading relations with that country. He encounters many strange and exotic situations. He falls in love with a beautiful Persian woman who had been the wife to the moghul. He is part of a battle of one of the moghul’s sons to take over the empire. There is a lot of reflection on the sharing of cultures and learning from one another. Overall, the book is quite good. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid This is a very interesting book. The action takes place at a restaurant in Pakistan, and it consists of a dialog (although we never hear one side of it) between an American and a Pakistani professor. The Pakistani had been educated in the States and worked there for a major company, but he lost heart over a love interest who drifted away from him into a psychological breakdown and also through the fact that he was collaborating in the oppression of people for profit. (His company evaluated the success of companies and recommended ways to save money which often led to the loss of jobs for employees.) Furthermore, he saw his homeland drifting into an almost inevitable war with India that would probably have resulted in disaster. While the professor is always extravagantly polite, there is a current of tension just below the surface. One is never quite clear whether the American is there to assassinate him, or he is plotting to have the American killed. April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America by Michael Eric Dyson Dyson presents the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and also of the aftermath in the civil rights movement. He speaks of two dangers in speaking of King. There are those who would like to demonize him for bigoted reasons, and there are his followers who have a tendency to canonize him, ignoring his very real humanity. He speaks of his successors, especially Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. He deals with the question of how much has really been accomplished in the battle for equality, stating that the upper and middle class blacks have benefited most from the civil rights movement, but the poor have been left behind in many ways. The presentation is a bit polemic, but it is good to hear certain things from a different point of view. Conspirata by Robert Harris A couple of years ago I read a book by Harris called Imperium. That was the story of how Cicero rose to power in Rome. This is the book of his rule and his difficulties both during his year long reign and especially in the period immediately afterward. The book is very, very well written. The presenter is Tiro, who was a slave and secretary to Cicero. One gets a very good picture of the terrible machinations and very flawed people at the end of the Republic period, just before everything fell apart and Julius Caesar ended up as dictator of Rome. Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson This is the story of the period of time right before the entrance of the United States into World War II. Great Britain was lobbying for the US to assist it, whether by arms or possibly even by joining the battle. There was a huge movement of isolationists in the States who wanted nothing to do with the war. Charles Lindbergh was one of the main proponents of this point of view. The book covers the personality and actions of Lindbergh and his wife Anne. It deals with Franklin Roosevelt’s tendency to equivocate and procrastinate as much as he could. The book gives a good portrait of this very vocal, very contentious debate. Shalom fr. Jude

Ellicott City - Mt. St. Francis (Louisville) - Rome - Assisi

June 27, 2015 Peace and Good, I finished off my many appointments at Ellicott City. I came out of them pretty well. I just have a touch of carpal tunnel in my left hand (I am right handed) so I am wearing a wrist brace for the next couple of weeks. It is not all that big a deal, but had drawn tons of comments from the Europeans who ask whether it is a type of boxing glove or whether I am trying to be a Ninja Friar. From Ellicott City I flew out to Louisville. There I conducted a day of recollection for the definitory of the Midwest province on the topic of Franciscan leadership. It was a nice relaxed day. The day after we had the jubilee celebrations for profession of vows and priesthood. Counting up all the years in religious life and the priesthood, there was more than 1,000 years of service in the room. The day after the celebration it was off to Rome. I had come down with a heavy cold and bronchitis, so the flight back was not all that much fun. I am just now recovering from it. We had a one day definitory meeting on last Saturday. We were not able to finish all the business, so that meeting has continued all throughout this week. We also had our annual meeting of the presidents of the various federations of the Order. We divide the Order up into seven geographic regions, and each one is called a federation. Each federation has a provincial or custos who is the president to organize the federation along with the Assistant General. The president of our federation is fr. Jim Kent from the Midwest province. So all day long we have been meeting with them, and in the breaks meeting as a definitory to finish our business. It had been very busy. Today we finish and we head back to Rome. I have finished some books: The Moghul by Thomas Hoover This is a saga about an English sea captain who travels to India during the 17th century to try to establish trading relations with that country. He encounters many strange and exotic situations. He falls in love with a beautiful Persian woman who had been the wife to the moghul. He is part of a battle of one of the Moghul’s sons to take over the empire. There is a lot of reflection on the sharing of cultures and learning from one another. Overall, the book is quite good. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid This is a very interesting book. The action takes place at a restaurant in Pakistan, and it consists of a dialog (although we never hear one side of it) between an American and a Pakistani professor. The Pakistani had been educated in the States and worked there for a major company, but he lost heart over a love interest who drifted away from him into a psychological breakdown and also through the fact that he was collaborating in the oppression of people for profit. (His company evaluated the success of companies and recommended ways to save money which often led to the loss of jobs for employees.) Furthermore, he saw his homeland drifting into an almost inevitable war with India that would probably have resulted in disaster. While the professor is always extravagantly polite, there is a current of tension just below the surface. One is never quite clear whether the American is there to assassinate him, or he is plotting to have the American killed. April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America by Michael Eric Dyson Dyson presents the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and also of the aftermath in the civil rights movement. He speaks of two dangers in speaking of King. There are those who would like to demonize him for bigoted reasons, and there are his followers who have a tendency to canonize him, ignoring his very real humanity. He speaks of his successors, especially Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. He deals with the question of how much has really been accomplished in the battle for equality, stating that the upper and middle class blacks have benefited most from the civil rights movement, but the poor have been left behind in many ways. The presentation is a bit polemic, but it is good to hear certain things from a different point of view. Conspirata by Robert Harris A couple of years ago I read a book by Harris called Imperium. That was the story of how Cicero rose to power in Rome. This is the book of his rule and his difficulties both during his year long reign and especially in the period immediately afterward. The book is very, very well written. The presenter is Tiro, who was a slave and secretary to Cicero. One gets a very good picture of the terrible machinations and very flawed people at the end of the Republic period, just before everything fell apart and Julius Caesar ended up as dictator of Rome. Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson This is the story of the period of time right before the entrance of the United States into World War II. Great Britain was lobbying for the US to assist it, whether by arms or possibly even by joining the battle. There was a huge movement of isolationists in the States who wanted nothing to do with the war. Charles Lindbergh was one of the main proponents of this point of view. The book covers the personality and actions of Lindbergh and his wife Anne. It deals with Franklin Roosevelt’s tendency to equivocate and procrastinate as much as he could. The book gives a good portrait of this very vocal, very contentious debate. I hope you have a good week and a great July 4th. Shalom fr. Jude

Rome - Bacau (Romania) - Rome - Ellicott City (Mayland)

June 15, 2015 Hope you are all well. This blog covers a couple of weeks. The first week started out in Rome. I had just arrived in from Canada and the United States. The first couple of days, as always, were spent getting over jet lag. I was also able to catch up on a few things. When I have jet lag, it is very difficult for me to do anything that requires a lot of thinking, but I am able to do some mindless projects (and there are always plenty of them). On Tuesday I flew out to Romania with the Minister General and one of the other Assistants. The friars there were celebrating the 120th anniversary of the founding of the province and the 25h anniversary of the re-founding after the fall of communism. They had a great celebration without over-doing it. Sometimes at these celebrations it goes on forever and the meals are a real waste of food. This was well done and it was great to visit some of the sites in Roman (the town where the seminary is located). We especially went to a social service center for the Gypsies run by the friars. They offer tutorial programs for the children (and adults) and they help to find regular jobs for the adults. It is very well run. Thursday we flew back to Rome. We went through Fiumacino Airport in Rome. You can still smell the smoke from the fire they had there at the beginning of May. Saturday I was back at the airport to fly out to Baltimore. This week has been a series of doctor and dentist appointments. These are just normal check ups with the inevitable referrals. Everything went well, and the only result is another visit to the dentist in August for a tooth extraction and a brace on my wrist (due to some swelling of one of the muscles). Given my age, I came out of this quite well. Yesterday I concelebrated up at the big house at Ellicott City for the feast of St. Anthony. There were a ton of people. What impressed me most was how ethnically diverse the crowd was. There were East Asians, Indians, Philippinos, Hispanics, African Americans, Africans, Whites, etc. It just goes to show you how popular St. Anthony is all over the world. Tomorrow I fly out to Louisville for a day long meeting and a celebration. Hope you have a good week. Here are some of the books I have finished: Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King Ross King has done a series of books on famous artists and the works that made them famous. This one is about how Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper on the refectory wall of a friary in Milan. It deals with Leonardo and his life and the fact that the Last Supper is one of relatively few works that Leonardo actually finished. It deals with the complicated politics of the time involving Milan, papal Rome, Venice, Naples, France and the Holy Roman Empire. It covers the history of the painting and its gradual degradation from humidity, mold, inept restoration, bombing, etc. King’s books are always quite enjoyable and informative. A Country of Vast Desights: James K Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert Merry This book is about President Polk, a one term president, who oversaw the negotiations with Britain over the border between the State of Washington and that of British Columbia, and who engaged the United States in a mixmatched battle with Mexico. It goes through the very messy politics around the war, charges of imperialism, hidden agendas such as slavery expansion, etc. It also deals with the corrupt and inept Mexican government which, although beaten, found it difficult to surrender for no one seemed to be in charge. This is a very good account of a bit of history that is often overlooked in our history classes because the U.S. doesn’t really come out looking all that good. The Constant Gardener: A Novel by John le Carre As he has grown older, the spy novelist John le Carre has become more and more conspiratorial, not trusting in any institution whatsoever. This book is about a pharmaceutic company that has coopted the British government as they use Africans as human guinea pigs for their new medications. An activist and doctor are murdered to hide all of this, and the woman’s husband, a type of Harvey Milktoast, turns out to be more courageous and enterprising than anyone expected in sorting out the plot. The Pentateuch edited by John Barton and John Muddiman This is a well written, very long commentary on the first five books of the Bible. It is not for the casual reader, but I always find these types of books interesting because I always pick up a detail or two in each chapter that I had never heard before. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill This is a long saga about a man who harvests children and takes them to a place in his mind called Christmasland. He envisions it as a place of delight, but it is all fun without any responsibility or even conscience. The children become vampire like and prey on others. There is a girl who stumbles across this man named Manx and escapes from him. Later, as a mother, she must try to save her son who has been kidnapped by him and his evil counterpart, Bing. Shalom fr. Jude

London - Canterbury - London - Rome

June 1, 2015 Peace and Good, I spent most of last week in England. When I arrived on Sunday, I arranged to meet with two Maltese friars who are working there and living at our friary at Waterloo. This was in preparation for their provincial chapter which will take place in September of this year. The friars are recently arrived. Malta is a small island, and they cannot afford to have many of the specialized medicines available on the island itself. Thus, the government sends those who need special care to London. There are about 60 per month, and almost all of the Maltese are Catholics. Therefore, the government also pays for two Catholic chaplains to address the spiritual need of these people while they are in treatment in London. The OFM friars (who wear the brown habit) were the chaplains until last year. As of the new year, we were asked to take over this responsibility. The two friars who are doing this are young and energetic. It is great to see them so involved in this good work. I also took a trip to Canterbury to visit our Franciscan International Study Centre there. I taught there for a number of terms before I was transferred to Rome. fr. Tom Reist from my province has been the president of the study centre for the past few years. When he took over, it was dying quickly. He has managed to direct a turn around and it is now quite healthy. It offers three certificate programs: spiritual direction, Franciscan Studies and Franciscan Formation. I am hopeful that it now will have a chance. On Friday I flew back to Rome. I am here for a few days and then will scoot over to Romania for an anniversary celebration of their province. I taught in their theology institute when it was first opened after Communism ended there, and so I know almost all the friars in the province. Then this coming Sunday it is back to the States for my annual 50,000 check up with doctors and the dentist. I finished some books: The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming There were five young men who studied at Cambridge during the 30’s who acquired important positions in the British government during and after the war who turned out to be Soviet spies. This book proposes that there was actually a sixth who was a British double agent. Furthermore, this leads an academic investigator to a secret that neither the British Secret Service nor the Russian Secret Service want revealed – that the present Russian prime minister had tried to defect to the West during the Cold War. People get killed to keep this secret and the investigator is in serious danger (as is his family). It is a good book. The Silent Man by Alex Berenson John Wells, a CIA agent, must work to uncover a mystery which includes an attempted assassination against him and his girl friend, and the theft of two atomic warheads in Russia. It turns out that this is an Islamic plot to bring the war to US territory. There is a lot of action, and the characters are well plotted out. The ending is a bit abrupt, but other than that, it is a good read. Navajo Autumn by R. Allen Chappell This story takes place on the Navaho reservation. Thomas Begay is arrested when he is found dead drunk under a bridge and the body of a Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator is found nearby. Charles Yazzi, Thomas’ friend, helps him out and investigates the whole affair, eventually coming to the conclusion that there is much more going on than originally suspected. The book is well written and gives one a good sense of some of the aspects of Navaho culture. The Vatican Pimpernel by Brian Fleming This is the story of Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish monsiegnor who works at the Vatican during World War II. Being Irish, he does not want to take sides. Then he witnesses the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazi’s, and from then on he aids whoever is running away (allied soldiers and airmen, Jews, foreign labor patrols, etc.). At the end of the war he even treats Nazi war criminals with human respect. He comes across as incredibly heroic, almost foolhardy. He was credited with saving thousands of people during the war. A Stroke of Good Fortune by Flannery O’Connor The setting of this short story in incredibly simple. A woman is climbing a staircase in her apartment building. She is winded and ends up resting on the landing. A busybody opens her door and speaks with her. The woman on the staircase thinks that she is having difficulty because of an undiagnosed heart condition, but the busybody suggests that maybe she is just pregnant. She doesn’t want to be pregnant for she has lost other pregnancies and a child, but this is her grace moment: to accept what God has sent her way. I hope you have a good week. Shalom fr. Jude

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

Montreal

May 17, 2015 Peace and Good, It is so good to be able to write just one city in the title of this blog. I have been here in Montreal for the past week for the custodial chapter of the friars up here. So far it has gone quite well. A custody is a type of baby province, and the provincial, fr. Jan from Gdansk in Poland, is the one who is actually running the chapter. I get to sit back and listen to the translations (for most of the business is in Polish) and make a comment every once in a while. This time here has helped me to catch up on daily reflections. My next chore will be to write a few articles for the Messenger magazine from Padua. Then I will be pretty much caught up. I have finished some books: Halloween Party by Agatha Christie A young girl is murdered at a Halloween party, drowned in the apple dunk basin. The story follows the investigation by Hercule Poirot as he tries to discover who could possibly have sneaked into the house where the party was being held and killed the girl. He also has to try to discover the why of the murder, although there is a major clue right from the start: that the girl bragged in front of a mystery author at the party that she, too, had seen a murder. A Temple of the Holy Spirit by Flannery O’Connor This is the story of a young girl whose two slightly older cousins visit their home from religious boarding school. The young girl thinks of herself as a genious and of the cousins as nitwits, and she cannot stand the fact that they get to go on a date with two boys to the carnival. Typical of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, there is a moment when she has to decide to be a better person or not, and she seems to fail in her commitment. Young J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Scare by Kenneth Ackerman Following World War I and the Communist revolution, there was an outbreak of violence in the States instigated by anarchists and communist radicals. This book outlines how J. Edgar Hoover worked to stop these dangers, but in a way that trashed the value of the constitution (illegal arrests and detainments, cruel imprisonment conditions, deportation without due process). His boss, the Attorney General was blamed for most of went on and J. Edgar Hoover got away with it, being named the head of the newly founded FBI shortly afterward. When one studies his career, though, and how he kept secret files and conducted illegal searches and wiretapings, one can see how the pattern began early. The Last Cato by Matilda Asensi Even since the DeVinci Code, there have been a series of conspiratorial books involving the Vatican. This one is about a society that dates to the Middle Ages which has sworn to defend the true cross from all dangers. They have made their task into a religion in itself. Supposedly, they set up a secret perfect society in the middle of a mountain in Ethiopia. The action concerns a nun who works in the secret archives of the Vatican, a ruthless Vatican Swiss Guard and an Egyptian Coptic scholar who go through a series of rigorous tests so that they might infiltrate the secret society and find out why they are stealing relics of the cross from all over the world. The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic by Robert O’Connell This is the story of how Hannibal invaded Italy during the Second Punic War. He won almost all of the battles, and nevertheless lost the war. One of his victories became synonymous with tremendous crushing victory: Cannae. Yet, the Romans dogedly held on. Those soldiers who survived Cannae were treated as if they were ghosts, sent to Sicily and not even allowed to live in town. Yet, they were the core of the force that eventually defeated the Catheginians definitively. This book is well reasoned and well written. Hope you have a good week. Shalom fr. Jude

Rome - Chicago - Lexington - Rockford - Algonquin - Montreal

May 10, 2015 Peace and Good, I finished off my first week of definitory on May 2. The next day I flew out to Chicago, arriving the evening of Sunday. Monday I and a couple of other friars drove to Lexington, Kentucky, for the episcopal ordination of fr. John Stowe, one of the friars of Our Lady of Consolation Province, who was being ordained as a bishop for the diocese of Lexington. John is the third bishop of this relatively new diocese. The ceremony was incredibly well planned and beautiful. Wednesday we headed back to Chicago (a six and a half hour drive). Thursday and Friday I visited two friaries in the Rockford diocese that are run by the friars from Poland, the Cracow diocese. They are a good group of friars. They run three different parishes, one Polish, one Mexican and one American. Saturday I flew up to Montreal for the custodial chapter that will be held here the next couple of weeks. The friars here are of Polish origin, and they serve Polish immigrants here in Canada and in three parishes in the United States. I will be here until the 23rd. This is an easy week for me for the chapter is run in Polish and I only have to listen to the translation as much as I can. I finished a few books this week: Indignation by Philip Roth This is the story of a young Jewish man who is the son of a Kosher butcher. He, himself, is a non-believer. When the son goes off the college, the father becomes unreasonable protective, driving the son to seek a college in Ohio. There a series of unfortunate incidents lead him to be thrown out of college, and he is drafted into the Korean War where he is killed, fulfilling the worst fears of the father and leading to his own death. St. Francis of Assisi by Wyatt North North write short biographies of various saintly people and then tells about their importance for our modern days. This is that type of presentation. It is not especially deep, but it is good to reread the story every once in a while to remind oneself of what is really important. Third Degree by Greg Iles A doctor finds out his wife is cheating on her husband and he holds first her and then their children hostage. In the meantime, the doctor has been doing illegal things for profit with his partner. The authorities are getting ready to raid their clinic. The police show up and try to end the hostage situation which is complicated when they find out that the doctor is actually suffering from an inoperable tumor. A lot of action and good characterization, but some unlikely situation nevertheless. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes This is a long and frustrating account of the battle that marines faced during the Vietnam War. They were often used for political purposes and to foster the promotion of their superiors. They were told to do one thing one day, and then the opposite the next. They built up fortifications only to have to leave them to the enemy, and then have to retake them later on. Matterhorn, is in fact, a mountain fortress that was controlling the infiltration of the North Vietnamese into that part of the highlands of Vietnam, and it is the center of the story. Eenie Meenie by Willow Rose This is another of those horror stories written by a Danish author. She tells of a prison for young male offenders. Someone, and one doesn’t come to know who until the end of the story, is angry because the offenders get off so easily. He takes it into his mind to make sure that they are punished severely for their crimes, castrating one, blinding another, etc. This author doesn’t hesitate to use gruesome scenes to make the point. I hope you have a good week. Shalom fr. Jude