Holy Cross - September 14

No Cross, No Crown.

When I was a pastor at Visitation Parish in Philadelphia, our Vietnamese Community celebrated a great feast by inviting a Vietnamese Archbishop. I concelebrated the Mass and afterward joined the parishioners for a grand dinner at a fine Vietnamese restaurant in South Philadelphia. I was seated with the Archbishop and enjoyed my conversation with him.

I was taken by this man. There was something about him that drew me. Something almost "mystical". I became fixed on his pectoral cross and chain. All bishops wear a pectoral cross over their heart. In most cases they appear to be fine jewelry. The one I was looking at was quite crude and imperfect. The chain actually looked like something kids might make at summer camp. Anyway, I finally worked up enough courage to ask the bishop about it. When I did, he turned red and I knew I had intruded into a private area. But he obliged me.

Archbishop Francis X. Nguyen had been a prisoner in a communist camp in Vietnam for many years. he told me that to pass the time he would gather pieces of thread and wire and gradually he fashioned what I was looking at and inquiring about.

Here was a man who had carried a cross. Here was a man who had cried as Jesus, in the solitary life of a prisoner My God, My God, why have you abandoned me! He knew isolation. The heartache of not being able to exercise his ministry as priest and bishop.

He never told me any details of his imprisonment but I learned of them later in books and periodicals and from Vietnamese priests.

...and we complain about our crosses, don't we?
Sadly we do.
...being stuck in traffic.
...having to curb our life style by a down turn in the economy.
...adjusting schedules to care for aging parents.
...impatient with our own personal aging and weakness

We complain about these crosses. Forgetting, that if there is no cross there will be no crown.
No Cross! No Glory!

Let us examine our Crosses more closely.
Pray for the grace to carry them as Christ did.
And look to victory by "Lifting high the Cross we are given".

Pax et bonum.

(I am going silent for two weeks - R&R time. Pray for me until then)

September 4, 2009 - The Year of the Priest
...and more or less an anniversary of mine

I am writing early this week about a day that, in my own odd way, I have always remembered and cherished. It's an anniversary day in my life. A day that I will never forget.
Forty-six years ago on September 4, 1963 I entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary to begin my studies for the priesthood.

Some might say it is a strange day to remember. Naturally one remembers an ordination date, a wedding anniversary, the day of death of a dear one. True!
But September 4 always presents itself to me as a day when a new and important chapter in my life began. I chose to follow the route my life has taken at the age of sixteen. They look at you today, sneer a bit, ask how a 16 year old could possible make a choice such as I did (and others did as well), joke about all that one missed in the last two years of high school and sometimes even dismiss the choice as immature. I put my hand to the plow and I never looked back. I am happy that I did what I did. I have been happy with the choice that I made and I seem to get happier as the years roll on.

I remember the day as though it were yesterday. My parents drove me up the Boulevard from Bucks County, over City Line Avenue and through the front gates of the Diocesan Seminary. I had this old footlocker with a bullet hole in it and it contained what possesions I was permitted to bring with me. We had to report by 4:00 P.M.. It was the Wednesday after Labor Day. I still remember the two deans of men waiting on the front steps. Father Harry Degnan and Father Joseph Daley (who would soon become the bishop of Harrisburg). I was scared a bit when I heard the one priest say to the other "there's the Deliman boy". Did they really know us that well!

At 4:00 P.M. a bell rang which meant our parents had to leave. It also meant that we immediately, i.e., new men and veteran seminarians, fell into a routine - a routine that we basically would follow each day at 4:00 P.M. It became a schedule we would follow for some years before the Vatican II allowed a relaxing of the daily regimen.

I lived in an open dormitory with 78 other young guys. The open dorm (while I would find it difficult today) was a rather unique experience for a 16 year old kid. Let me just say that I quickly shed whatever inhibitions I had. Privacy was pretty much non existent and a thing called a bell, the Vox Dei (voice of God) ruled our lives and called us to chapel, to class, to the refectory, to recreation.

I look back at all that and thank God for his Grace. I did it and I guess it never seemed tooooo
difficult because it was what God wanted me to do. I rose at 5:00 am and learned to get ready in fifteen minutes because at 5:15 we recited the Angelus and we did it in Latin. Chapel at 5:30, Mass at 6:00 and breakast at 7:00. Breakfast, by the way, was usually in silence.
In this Year of the Priest I find myself thinking of many of these things, thanking God for my priesthood and the many folks whose lives I have touched in these years of serving as an Alter Christus - other Christ.

I am sure there are some I have offended either because I have had to make an unpopular decision, was having a bad day myself (that happens you know, even to a priest) or some one simply has not learned to agree to disagree.

I love being a priest and being with priests. Just the other night I had dinner with four other classmates and we laughed and talked and even shared matters of declining health and vigor as we approach the mid-sixties. You know - aches in places you never even knew existed.

Pray for me on my anniversary. I would appreciate a Hail Mary. And then pray for some seminarians that are very close to my heart. I look forward to the day when I can stand at the altar with them and celebrate that supreme sacrifice that is regularly celebrated from the rising of the sun until its setting.

Pax et Bonum !