Fifty years ago, on Nov. 30, 1969, the Catholic Church marked the First Sunday of Advent with the universal implementation of the revised Roman Rite of the Mass, approved by Pope Paul VI in response to the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

November 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the peaceful breach of the Berlin Wall — the symbolic high point of the Revolution of 1989, which would be completed seven weeks later by the fall of the Czechoslovak communist regime and Vaclav Havel’s election as Czech’s president.

One of the gifts summer brings is all but finished: the diocese-wide Summer Mission Appeals made by missionaries who come from around the globe. You may remember a missionary priest, sister or layperson who spoke at your parish earlier this year. There is one more appeal left to be made — at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, Ridgewood, on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1.

by Peter J. Purpura Sr.

Ordained June 1, 1957, Msgr. William (Bill) Flood is now in his 63rd year as a priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn. His vocation can be traced back to growing up in Blessed Sacrament Parish in Jackson Heights, followed by Bishop Loughlin H.S. in Fort Greene. 

During the 2001 Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who’d suffered through a lot of synodal speechifying and small-group discussions over the years, made a trenchant observation: “Jesus Christ didn’t intend his Church to be governed by a committee.” Indeed.

In November, we commemorate the Holy Souls in purgatory. The existence of purgatory — where all those souls who die in the state of sanctifying grace and yet still have to undergo a period of purgation before entering the kingdom of God, because according to Scriptures nothing sin tainted will enter heaven — is a dogma of our Catholic faith. 

Ordained June 1, 1957, Msgr. William (Bill) Flood is now in his 63rd year as a priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn. His vocation can be traced back to growing up in Blessed Sacrament Parish in Jackson Heights, followed by Bishop Loughlin H.S. in Fort Greene. 

I once knew a Congregationalist minister — Yale Divinity School graduate, decorated World War II chaplain, veteran campaigner for then-unpopular liberal causes — of whom it was said (sometimes by himself) that “David Colwell so fears God that he fears no one else.” It was a striking statement, redolent, perhaps, of the Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) School of American Protestant Homiletics. But the source of this man’s fearlessness was rather different than that of a man I was just coming to know when David Colwell and I were friendly jousting partners on questions theological and political.

ROME — Even the greatest enthusiasts of the present pontificate might not assert that Pope Francis has an inspiring liturgical style. Like the old-school Jesuit he resembles in many ways, the Holy Father is rather flat liturgically: typically expressionless, sometimes downright dour, he gets through the business at hand in a workmanlike way. Yet at the consistory for the creation of new cardinals on October 5, Pope Francis showed real emotion when, after bestowing the red biretta and cardinalatial ring on the emeritus archbishop of Kaunus, Lithuania, Sigitas Tamkevicius, S.J., the Pope seemed to shed a tear or two as he drew the new prince of the Church into a prolonged embrace and shared a few words with him.