After months of meticulous restoration, the pipe organ at Our Lady of Refuge Church, Flatbush, was returned June 17 to the parish for re-installation.

Movers carry the restored Our Lady of Refuge’s pipe organ’s main console up the parish stairs and into the church building. It took the entire crew to carry the largest piece into the church safely. Two trucks were unloaded the morning of June 17, and the anticipated goal for complete re-installation is mid-September, just in time for French organist Olivier Latry’s rededication conert on Oct. 18. (Photo by Jim Mancari)

Movers carried parts of the organ piece-by-piece off two trucks and into the church building. Over the next two weeks, the crew will assemble as much of the organ as possible and will then return Aug. 1 to complete the process. The goal is to have the organ completely rebuilt and properly tuned by mid-September.

The organ was built in 1933 by George Kilgen & Son of St. Louis. At one time, 900 pipe organs graced churches in Brooklyn, but now only about 70 remain in use, with less than 10 in excellent working condition.

Grassroots Movement

The restoration of the organ at Our Lady of Refuge started as a grassroots movement six years ago. The organ had been silenced for about a decade prior to that, but it was then restored to working order.

However, the exterior pointing of the church was leaking, which allowed water to seep into the organ chamber. Also, plaster was peeling off of the walls and getting into the pipes, causing further damage.

At that point, Father Michael Perry, pastor, and Joe Vitacco, chairman of the organ restoration committee, decided that while renovations to the parish were ongoing, it would be the optimal time to restore the organ.

Most of the 1,800 pipes – ranging from 18 feet to one inch in length – were restored at the A.R. Schopp Company of Alliance, Ohio, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of organ pipes. The three-manual organ console was sent to Quimby Pipe Organs in Warrensburg, Mo., one of the best builders of organ pipes in the U.S.

Vitacco attended first and second grade at Our Lady of Refuge Elementary School in the mid-1970s. His grandparents had moved into the parish in 1960, so Vitacco remembers going to the parish with his family.

“As a little kid, I fell in love with the pipe organ,” Vitacco said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but it entirely changed my life.”

Vitacco works in business, finance and accounting in Washington, D.C., where he is a parishioner at St. Mary Mother of God Church, yet he always felt a special connection to his first parish and the organ.

Fundraising Campaign

He asked Father Perry if he could lead the charge in restoring the organ, and the pastor responded with a resounding “Yes.”

“Pope Benedict said that the organ is the main instrument for the Church,” Father Perry said. “This is an instrument that needed to be preserved and restored.”

Through social media, Vitacco and Father Perry sought donations for the organ restoration process. The parish held soup dinners, concerts and even a pig roast to help finance the campaign. Parishioners were also given the opportunity to “Sponsor a Pipe” with donations anywhere from $10 to $200.

However, the majority of the 1,400 individual donations, which helped raise more than $250,000, did not come from the parish but instead came from organ enthusiasts abroad.

“The response has been rather incredible from all around the world,” Vitacco said. “Most of the people that donated to this have never been to New York or Brooklyn and have never even been to this church.”

Vitacco kept all interested parties updated via the pipe organ’s own Facebook page (Facebook.com/kilgen5163). As donors saw the progress, many were compelled to provide additional funding, Vitacco said.

“It’s an amazing tribute of people’s love for God and people’s love for organ music,” Father Perry said. “The organ adds to the solemnity and the spirituality of every liturgical act that we do here. It provides an oral context for worship, and that oral context lifts up the soul.”

On Friday, Oct. 18, Auxiliary Bishop Frank Caggiano will bless the restored pipe organ followed by a concert by famous French organist Olivier Latry, one of the titulaire organists of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

For more information on the pipe organ and the concert see the parish website: www.olrbrooklyn.org.

Click here to view NET-TV’s coverage of the unloading of the trucks on Currents.

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Each player had the name of an area affected by Hurricane Sandy on their backs in place of their own name.

See photos below:

Shortstop Gavin Cecchini

Infielder Ismael Tijerina

Second baseman L.J. Mazzilli

Manager Rich Donnelly

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Nothing we do is private. In a world where our every movement is tracked, it’s best to assume that anything we do can be known by anybody at the touch of a button.

Recently, many have expressed concern about the news that the government required a certain company to provide records of customer phone calls and has made efforts to track e-mail, video and voice chats, file transfers and other personal information.

Some people are in an uproar, complaining about the invasion of privacy. Others are more realistic and realize we gave up our privacy long ago.

If you use a Global Positioning System to get from here to there, you’re using multiple satellites that track your movement. When you use the Internet, your service provider is sharing your location with the website you’re visiting. If you’re using an app to track your jogging route, it’s not only keeping your statistics, in many cases the app is sharing the route.

If this doesn’t concern you at least a little, it should.

Common sense indicates we have nothing to worry about. Law enforcement officers have no reason to care about our online habits as long as we’re not significantly breaking the law. To be safe, follow two rules: Don’t do anything that appears illegal and don’t do anything stupid.

Boston-area resident Cameron D’Ambrosio, 18, an aspiring rap artist who gravitates toward profane lyrics, broke both rules. In May, after the Boston Marathon bombings, he posted lyrics on his Facebook page where he not only claimed what he planned would be far worse than the bombings, he also implied he might “go insane” and attack the White House.

Law enforcement became involved, not because of high-tech surveillance, but because his classmates reported what he said to school administrators, who called the police. Authorities arrested the teen and charged him with “communicating terroristic threats.”

Some were outraged. Over 90,000 people signed a petition demanding his release. Others thought the charges were justified.

As with most situations, right and wrong are nowhere near as obvious as those on the extremes would have you believe. We should have the freedom to post lyrics we’ve written online without fear of prosecution, no matter how offensive those lyrics may be. But, freedom comes with responsibility.

If you claim you are going to be violent, it’s reasonable to expect law enforcement agencies to assume you’re planning violence. It’s also reasonable to assume that you’ll be freed once investigators realize you’re at no risk of harm to anyone but yourself.

That’s not what happened with D’Ambrosio. A judge kept him in jail, where he stayed until June when a grand jury refused to indict him. In the end, D’Ambrosio is free and authorities are slightly embarrassed.

What about us? Are we happy with the privacy we have? They aren’t easy questions, but they’re ones we should ask every time we pick up a cell phone or go online. If not, anything said could make us the next D’Ambrosio.

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A few weeks ago, I came upon the odd fact that, before and during World War II, the Royal Navy (RN) built battleships with 14-inch main battery guns, whereas Britain’s principal naval rivals, Germany and Japan, were building ships with 15- and 18-inch main batteries; moreover, the RN’s chief ally, the United States, had been building battleships mounting 16-inch guns for decades.

When I queried a friend with long military and government experience about this curiosity, he sent a suggestive answer:

“Given the cultures and the times, I’d guess that after the bureaucracy-committee-administration reached a decision, change would have been virtually impossible, and they would keep cranking out anything in its original configuration because you could never get agreement on change, absent a crisis. [It] took a lot of losses in bombing raids to spur the U.S. Army Air Corps to improve bomber protection and work on increasing fighter escort range – ‘the bomber will always get through’ was the bumper sticker that sold airpower … and bumper sticker gospel is very hard to displace.”

And so, by way of Robin Hood’s barn and a cautionary tale about self-serving bureaucracies, we come to Pope Francis’ repeated criticism of a “self-referential” Church, the pope’s strictures against clerical ambition and careerism, and clergy personnel policy in too many dioceses.

Giving Operational Meaning

Priests’ councils and clergy personnel boards were set up after Vatican II to give operational meaning to the Council’s teaching that priests form a kind of presbyteral college around the local bishop and share with him in the governance of the diocese; such bodies were also intended to provide some protection for priests against the whims and crotchets of arbitrary or authoritarian bishops. Both were laudable goals.

Yet, when you try to fit those goals into the mind-set of institutional-maintenance Catholicism (Pope Francis’ “self-referential” Church), the result, too often, is to intensify, not diminish, clerical careerism and ambition.

That is surely what’s happening when priests’ councils or clergy personnel boards, composed of priests working under the bishop, treat parishes as square holes into which pastors are fitted like interchangeable pegs. There are “good parishes” and “tough parishes;” good parishes are given out as rewards; tough parishes are assigned as a matter of sharing burdens within a presbyterate (or worse, as warnings or punishments); and all of this happens according to a fixed timetable in which pastors have specific terms of office.

It may seem like diocesan collegiality in action. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything further removed from the New Evangelization.

Building the Church of the New Evangelization takes time and patience in a parish. The time involved will vary from situation to situation, and it certainly can’t be measured in unrenewable terms of office for pastors.

Moreover, once Evangelical Catholicism has taken hold in a parish, i.e., the Gospel is being preached with conviction, the liturgy is being celebrated with dignity, the parish is attracting many new Catholics, religious and priestly vocations and solid Catholic marriages are being nurtured, the works of charity and service are flourishing, and the parish finances are in order, moving a pastor out because “his term is up” is about as old Church, as institutional-maintenance Church, as you can get.

Aside from the vanities of a clericalism that Pope Francis is urging the Church to shed, there is no reason to let clergy personnel policy be shaped by anything other than the demands of the New Evangelization in a challenging cultural moment.

Thus a priority task for the local bishop as agent of the New Evangelization is the re-evangelization of his priests, especially in long-established dioceses where the mindset of institutional-maintenance Catholicism and the habits of clerical careerism and ambition are most likely to be deeply entrenched. For priests, too, can be tempted to think of each other as interchangeable parts, some of those parts more popular than others. As long as they do, clergy personnel policy will be an obstacle, not an asset, to the New Evangelization.

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This year’s run was held in memory of Louisa McGregor.

For complete race results, visit: http://nycruns.com/good-shepherd-sports-program-14th-annual-5k-run-615/

Below are photos from the race.

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Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino, who founded and directed Georgetown University’s Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics and was a former president of The Catholic University of America, died June 13. He was 92.

Considered one of the most prominent founders of the field of bioethics and an early pioneer in teaching humanities in medical schools, he was the author of more than 600 published articles in medical science, philosophy and ethics and author or co-author of 23 books.

Pellegrino, who would have turned 93 on June 22, was a former director of Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He also founded and directed the university’s Center for Clinical Bioethics, which just this year was renamed the Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics.

He received his bachelor’s of science degree from St. John’s University, Jamaica, and his medical degree from N.Y.U. He served residencies in medicine at Bellevue, Goldwater Memorial and Homer Folks Tuberculosis Hospitals.

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She entered the congregation in 1935 from Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Red Hook.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from St. John’s University in Jamaica, and a master’s degree in Spanish from Middlebury College, Vt.

She taught locally at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, Sunset Park, 1937-39; St. Pascal Baylon, St. Albans, 1939-43; St. Stanislaus Kostka, Maspeth, 1943-46; St. James, Downtown Brooklyn, 1946-49; Our Lady of Lourdes, Bushwick, 1949-50; and St. Brendan Elementary, Midwood, 1950-55.

After serving at Colegio San Conrado, Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1955-60; she returned to the diocese and taught at Our Lady of Perpetual Help H.S., Sunset Park, 1960-62; Stella Maris H.S., Rockaway Park, 1962-68; Holy Family H.S., South Huntington, L.I., 1968-72; Sacred Heart Chapel, Cobble Hill (Spanish Apostolate), 1972-80; and St. Mary Mother of Jesus School Library, Bath Beach, 1980-88.

Prior to retiring, she taught English as a Second Language classes at Community Coalition Inc., Brooklyn, 1988-91, and at the Prospect Park YMCA, 1991-94.

Interment was in Calvary Cemetery, Brentwood.

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She entered the congregation in 1938 from Our Lady of Angels parish, Bay Ridge.

Her background in history began when she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History/Modern European History from St. John’s University, Jamaica. A doctorate in U.S. History followed along with grants in politics of Africa from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and archives administration from Long Island University C.W. Post, Brookville, L.I.

As an archivist and historian she published several articles on the key founders of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph and was honored by the Catholic Daughters of the Americas with the Heritage Award in 1982.

She taught at St. Augustine, Park Slope, 1940-41; St. Mary Star of the Sea, Far Rockaway, 1942-43; Holy Cross, Flatbush, 1943-44; Visitation B.V.M., Red Hook, 1944-47; and St. Brendan Elementary School, Midwood, 1947-50.

She also taught at Bishop McDonnell H.S., Crown Heights, 1950-51; St. Angela Hall Academy H.S., Clinton Hill, 1951-60; and St. Joseph Commercial H.S., Downtown Brooklyn, 1960-62.

Her later ministries included Brentwood College, Brentwood, 1965-71; C.S.J. Director of Personnel, Brentwood, 1969-74; Suffolk Community College, Selden, L.I., 1974-78; St. Joseph College, Patchogue, L.I., and Brooklyn, 1974-83; St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, 1975-77; and Archivist/Historian, Brentwood, 1977-94.

In 1994, she retired to Sacred Heart Convent, Hempstead, L.I., and later moved to Maria Regina Residence.

A Mass of Christian Burial was held in Sacred Heart Chapel, Brentwood, where she had instructed many visitors about its history. Interment followed in Calvary Cemetery, Brentwood.

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Born in Manhattan, he attended Regis H.S. and his life as a Jesuit priest revolved around Regis.

In 1958, he began his long, unbroken association with Regis until his retirement in 2002. He taught Latin, English and religion, 1958-69, as well as assisted in student counseling. He also served in alumni affairs, as director of development and moderator of the Regis Alumni Association.

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Born in Brooklyn as John D. Smith, he attended St. Patrick’s elementary school, Bay Ridge, and St. Francis Prep, Brooklyn.

He entered the Franciscan Novitiate in 1947 and was first professed in 1948. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Fordham University; his master’s at St. John’s University; and an honorary doctorate from St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights.

Between 1949 and 1955, he taught at various elementary schools, and then was assigned to St. Francis Prep as a teacher and later as assistant principal until 1961. From 1961 to 1963, he was an instructor at St. Francis College.

He was elected to the superior general’s council of the Franciscan Brothers in 1961 and continued as a general consultor until June, 2003. He also served as director of Camp Alvernia, 1956; master of scholastics, 1961-64; treasurer general, 1962-76; and secretary general, 1985-88.

A member of St. Francis College’s board of trustees, 1961-2005, he also served as a member of the boards at St. Francis Prep, Fresh Meadows, and St. Anthony’s H.S., Huntington, L.I.

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