Easter always brings with it the joyous celebration of ordination season here in the Archdiocese, along with the immense scramble to remember who I have to text/call/write to wish them a happy anniversary. This year I won’t be able to wish my friend Fr. Earl Fernandes a happy twentieth anniversary because he will be on his canonical retreat before his ordination as a bishop. I guess that’s another anniversary to remember. At any rate, because of all these ordinations, I found myself looking at numbers for vocational health in different dioceses around the country. There is an organization that categorizes dioceses as healthy, borderline healthy, maintaining, and unhealthy when it comes to vocations. They run numbers based on number of ordinations per capita, parishes without a resident priest, percentage of priests that are temporarily serving in the diocese, etc. I imagined that I would see Cincinnati in the “healthy” or at least “borderline healthy” category, but I was surprised to see that we were listed as simply “maintaining.” It is a bit disheartening to think about the fact that one of our strengths over the last fifteen years is still not enough to earn us the rank of “borderline healthy.” Click on title for full column.

Happy Easter, friends. I have long said that priests are evaluated on silly grounds like whether they tell stories in their homilies or if they preach with or without notes. It doesn’t mean that those things aren’t significant, but they shouldn’t be the final litmus test on someone’s ministry. We like that priest because he’s X. We don’t like that priest because he’s Y. It’s just not terribly helpful in the long run if we view our mission as working together towards holiness. I submit to you, on this beautiful feast of God’s Mercy, that there are in fact two qualities we should use to evaluate a priest’s ministry that answer the question of whether he’s living out his vocation. Does he strive for holiness, and is he merciful? Click on title for full column.

Happy Easter, friends. Year after year, century after century, we return to the same great feasts of the Church, and you’d think that we would grow tired of them, but I, for one, never do. How is it possible that we hold the same fasts and feasts and yet continue to find new paths of grace by them? The cynic’s answer is that we have short memories and also have a hard time finding an insufficient reason to party. But the answer from the Heart of the Church is that God’s love is infinite, and we, as finite beings, can never exhaust the font of love that pours forth for us. Click on title for full column.

Having lived through the worldwide transition from manual to digital, I remember well being excited at getting an email because of how rare they were, and how dismissive we were of physical mail. Just one email rivaled the excitement of ten handwritten notes in the mail at one point in time. Nowadays, it will probably not surprise you to hear that I get disproportionately excited when I get something real in the mail, and every email I receive moves me one step closer to flinging all my electronics off a cliff and disappearing off the grid entirely. Click on title for full column.

I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on tv, but I do know that one of the balances to be struck in healing people is finding the sweet spot between allowing illness to hurt people and overmedicating them to the point that the cure itself hurts them. I have a priest friend that goes nuclear every time he feels a cold coming on, and in order to get ahead of it, he drinks an entire bottle of Nyquil and goes to sleep for ten hours. I do not recommend this. Similarly, when people with cancer undergo treatment, oftentimes the doctors are trying to set the most aggressive treatment possible to get rid of the cancer, even if the body itself is collateral damage. Click on title for full column.