by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on November 16, 2011 · 16 comments
. . . From an analysis of typical comments in Catholic media, it might appear that a lot of people have ongoing and extremely negative views about Catholic priests. That may not be the case. What’s really going on is that a relatively small number of crusaders are “seeding” the Internet with their comments. If you take the time – and have the stomach for it – to track comments throughout the catholic on-line world, and at mainstream media articles about the Catholic scandal, you’ll see the same few screen names over and over. They seem to be everywhere, and Chris Tressa ran into one of them. They are on a very personal crusade, but what makes this so personal for them? As Chris Tressa asked, “Who does that?” . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on December 2, 2009 · 16 comments
. . . Then the other prisoner was back! “This was in the book,” he said as he propped a photograph against my small TV screen. It was the photo of my mother and Frances that I had lost four years earlier – the photo I searched for in vain when my mother died. Just as Mass began on my mother’s birthday – at the very moment I was offering the Mass for her and her sister – their last photograph together found me. An accident? Mere coincidence? It’s a greater leap of faith to dismiss such events as coincidence than to accept them for what they are: personally miraculous gifts of actual grace. When I looked at the photograph, it was as though someone had lifted a tiny corner of the veil between life and death. I saw something in the photo I hadn’t noticed before. The two sisters stood side by side – my mother on the right – on the shore of a new life, being prepared for the Presence of God. I never saw my mother look happier. I never saw more contentment and hope in her eyes. I never felt so happy for her, so filled with promise that her journey is near its end: Home, her New Found Land. . . .
