BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  I wonder how long I will be remembered after I die. I wonder, too, what I will be remembered for. Shakespeare wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” What would you like to be remembered for? What do you think you will actually be remembered for? You might have to write your memoirs to ensure that the answer to both questions is the same. What will guarantee that remembrance? Photos? Mementos? The day will surely come when someone will look at those pictures and say, “They should have written the names on the back.” And the mementos will end up in a box and someone for whom they no longer have meaning will one day discard them. A monument would be nice! The Statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial was sculpted by Daniel Chester French. It’s a “memorial” precisely because it guarantees that Linco...

  Fr.  René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings ) There is a stained-glass window in Blessed Trinity Church in Orlando, Florida, designed by James Piercey. It represents the Trinity, but is not easy to make out the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With a little effort one can find the head of a dove near the center, and a hand above and behind it. They represent respectively the Spirit and the Father. It’s much harder to find the Son, a man’s face. Eventually you find the eyes, and the nose, mustache, and lips. But when you see the dove, you lose the face; when you see the face, you lose the hand, and none of them is completely delineated. All three are lost when you focus on colorful rays, which represent the one divine essence of all three Persons and fill the whole image. This image may not suit everyone’s taste, but I find it fascinating. I use it to illustrate the fact that although we attribute ce...

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  Has it ever struck you as strange that the disciples were gathered “when the time for Pentecost was fulfilled,” i.e., on a Christian feast,? There couldn’t have been any Christian feasts yet, so soon after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. The explanation is simple. The feast we celebrate today already existed long before the time of Jesus. It was not unlike our Thanksgiving, a harvest celebration, celebrated fifty days (seven weeks) after Passover. In the Old Testament it is called the Feast of Weeks. Be that as it may, for us Pentecost means only one thing: the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord. The Spirit’s first appearance in the Bible is in the second verse of the the first book: “The earth was formless and void... and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The Spirit’s last appearance in the Bible is ...