BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( 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 Linc

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Provincial Superior, La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for today’s readings ) (Note: I have chosen the readings from Sirach and Colossians) It is my custom on the feast of the Holy Family to offer “words of wisdom” for family life. Underlying them is what I call the Snowflake Principle : People are like snowflakes, no two are alike. Clearly, God loves variety. We need to respect God’s variety, respecting one another, “bearing with one another,” as St. Paul writes. We need to minimize our faults and capitalize on our strengths. Other principles: 2. Elbows and Toes.  You can’t rub elbows with the same people day in and day out without sometimes stepping on each other’s toes. We need to be realistic about family life, learn to say “of course,” and “I’m sorry,” and “I forgive you.” Tensions inevitable. What happens after is what really matters. 3. I’m nobody, who are you? (from a poem by Emily Dic

The Roman Martyrology includes these twin brother martyrs for October 25th. Saint Crispin was a Roman noble and brother of Saint Crispinian with whom he evangelized Gaul in the middle of the 3rd century. They worked from Soissons, preached in the streets by day and made shoes by night. The group's charity, piety and contempt of material things impressed the locals, and many converted in the years of their ministry. They were martyred in Rome in 286 by torture and beheading, under emperor Maximian Herculeus, being tried by Rictus Varus, governor of Belgic Gaul and an enemy of Christianity. A great church was built at Soissons in the 6th century in their honor; Saint Eligius ornamented their shrine. This feast was immortalized by Shakespeare in his play Henry V, (Act 4, Scene 3). The king gave a rousing speech (called "Saint Crispin's Day) extolling his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, fought on this day in 1415: This story shall the good man teach his s

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( 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

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Provincial Superior, La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut (In many dioceses the Solemnity of the Ascension  was celebrated on Thursday. This homily is based on the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.) ( Click here for today’s readings ) There is a saying you may have heard, which goes, “If you were accused of being a Christian, would they find enough evidence to convict you?” I don’t much like it, actually, because of its accusatory tone, but it certainly fits the context of today’s second reading from 1 Peter, which reflects a time when believers were in fact being punished for the crime of being Christians. There are not a lot of reliable statistics about the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, but there is ample evidence of the fact. For example, Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor in what is now northern Turkey, wrote the following to the Emperor Trajan around the year 111 AD: “In the case of th

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Provincial Superior, La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for today’s readings ) We are faced today with such an embarrassment of riches in the readings, one hardly knows where to begin. It would be interesting to ask each of you what struck you in particular. Let me share what struck me. I begin with... the Responsorial Psalm! “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” The Psalmist certainly had his fair share of the experience of “the depths.” Many Psalms have a similar theme: “I cry aloud to God, cry aloud to God that he may hear me” (Ps. 77). Perhaps the bleakest of all ends with the words, “My only friend is darkness” (Ps. 88). Virtually everyone knows what it is like to be swallowed up by that ocean, drowning in what Shakespeare calls “a sea of troubles.” It can be the boundless depths of grief, the remorseless depths of misery, the hideous depths of rage, the black depths of fear, the pathless depths o

Detail, The Death of Caesar , Vincenzo Camuccini, 1798. The Ides of March corresponds to the date on the ancient Roman calendar of March 15th. The idea of the Ides of March and the expression"Beware the Ides of March", were popularized by William Shakespeare in his play  Julius Caesar . In the play, a soothsayer ominously declares to Emperor Caesar: "Beware the Ides of March." To which Caesar unmoved replies: "He is a Dreamer, let us leave him." The Romans of Caesar's day imbued the "Ides," i.e: the 15th and 13th of various months with almost mystical power as consequential periods of time. The word Ides derives from the Latin word meaning "to divide." The Ides originally marked the full moon, but due to calendar months and lunar months each being different lengths, they quickly grew unsynchronized. March 15th, became a Roman holiday of sorts occasioned by various festivals and both official and private observances. H