Understandably, many of you asked me to keep you posted about my new assignment. It is, after all, a strange one for a diocesan priest! One of you (you know who you are!) asked me to start a blog. I read some blogs but I have never written one before, unless you count bulletin articles as blogs. Even with the blogs I read, I have no idea where the writers post their articles so that they come across the way they do. Maybe they all post on some Catholic blog site of which I am not aware. If you know how this works, fill me in! But I do know that Google offers what they call BlogSpot for free, so I decided to try it, at least until someone tells me of a better place.
I also don't know how one can get the word out that a particular blog exists, let alone is worth reading. I suppose that being famous helps. I am not famous. I suppose that being controversial helps. I am controversial only in that I believe what Holy Mother Church teaches, I love being a priest, and I regard highly the traditions and teachings I discovered only after being asked to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass and celebrate the other sacraments according to the old ritual books. Certainly, none of that should be at all controversial in Catholic circles! Many priests have had the same experience so there is nothing to set me apart from any other. At least with my bulletin articles, I had a captive audience who had nothing better to do during my sermons than to read the bulletin!
So what else does it take to let people know that a blog exists? Paid advertising? Ha! I wouldn't pay to read what I write, let alone pay to get others to read it! That said, this blog site is run by Google, so I suppose that ads over which I have no say will be part and parcel of the blog. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, here is a blog from a mediocre priest (compare me to any priest-Saint whose Mass we celebrate if you think I am just being self-deprecating) from a great diocese who is writing a blog that perhaps nobody will read. So be it.
I am a simple parish priest from the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida, who is just starting a new assignment as Chaplain to the Filiae Laboris Mariae Augustinian Sisters in Redfield, Kansas. You caught the strangeness of that, right? I am not an Augustinian priest, nor any kind of Religious priest. I am what is called a secular or diocesan priest. In good standing, I might add, although that no longer seems to be a guarantee that a priest holds the true Catholic Faith!
If you do not already know, the typical life of a Religious priest and the life of a diocesan priest are worlds apart. Notably, diocesan priests do not take vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. We also don't live in community, even if multiple priests live in the same rectory. We don't have a particular charism but are rather the jack of all trades in the priest world. We don't chant the office together as a rule. We don't report to or need to get our superior's permission to go anywhere or do anything, or even to borrow the common car. One way of life is not necessarily better than the other (although all of the old books rightly say that Religious Life is a more sure way to get to Heaven), but they are certainly different.
I did not get my seminary formation in a Religious community. But somehow (you have to stick with the blog to eventually--maybe--find out how and why) I have been assigned to be chaplain to a Religious order of Traditional Sisters. If what I write peaks your interest, feel free to pass it on to others.
Let me begin at the end. The end of my last assignment, that is. Sunday, August 31. My last Mass at Epiphany and the final farewells were done. I headed back to the rectory with Canons O'Connor (the new priest) and Talarico (his superior). Everything I owned was already packed in my Pilot except for the slacks and cassocks still hanging in my closet. (How liberating the last few weeks had been as I was getting rid of so much...stuff! I haven't been able to fit everything I own into my car since seminary days.) My wardrobe now having been stretched out on top of the rest of my things, we priests said our goodbyes, blessings, etc., and off I went to begin my new journey.
It wasn't a far drive. I stopped at mom's, about two miles away. (You didn't think I was driving all the way to Kansas that first afternoon, did you?) The Sisters' current chaplain (a Religious priest, of course!) had a morning flight out of Kansas City on the 17th, on the way to his new assignment in Massachusetts (the poor guy). I was asked to come on the 16th and spend the night at Fr. Anthony Pillari's rectory down the road a piece. He is the chaplain at St. Martin's Academy, the Catholic boy's boarding school not too far away, with whom I had stayed on my previous visit. (Fr. Pillari has some great YouTube videos, including the daily rosary, if you care to check him out. The Academy seems top-notch, too.) The next day I was to go to St. Joseph's Convent and celebrate my first Mass for the Sisters at 7:30 am. and, after they cleaned the chaplain's little cell, I would be able to move in. Subtract three days of driving and I was left with a little less than two weeks to spend with family. I made the best of it. Of course, that part's all mushy, so I'll skip to the actual road trip!
Waze, the phone maps app I was using for driving directions and traffic conditions, let me down even before I got out of Florida. I asked it for gas prices up ahead on my route, a simple task, or so it should be. It moved the map to Memphis, Tennessee and showed the prices there. Nothing in between. I tried sorting, not by price but by distance. Same result. I shut it down and restarted. Memphis. Only Memphis. I wonder how much that city pays Waze to route people there?
I decided to just get off at the next exit with multiple gas stations and pulled into a Shell station. After pumping gas at $2.89 per gallon, I turned to Waze again to see if it would find the gas station where I was currently sitting. Nope. Although I could see three other stations, Waze showed only one, a non-existent station, claiming it to be in an empty field about thirty-one feet from me. Waze said that this invisible station had gas at $9.00/gallon. I'm certainly glad I didn't find it!
I switched to Google Maps for the rest of the day. I'm not sure that was such a good idea...
