SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS ago last month, Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christian Probst were executed by guillotine at Munich’s Stadelheim Prison for high treason. Their crime? They were the leaders of an anti-Nazi student organization, the White Rose, and had been caught distributing leaflets at their university in the Bavarian capital; the leaflets condemned the Third Reich, its genocide of the Jews and its futile war.
It was the weekend of Dec. 4, 1959 and my Giants were playing the Cleveland Browns for the Division title that Sunday. My father had season tickets and I could have gone except that my senior homeroom at Brooklyn Prep had a mandatory retreat.
As a young boy I had some very powerful statements I could use under many different circumstances. One of the most powerful was, “Do-over.”
It is 1957 and my first week of school at St. Teresa School in Woodside. I had turned six in June and so was probably the oldest in the first grade. Sister Margaret Agnes had asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I had responded, “I want to be a priest.”
Days apart, clinics offering in vitro fertilization in Cleveland, Ohio, and San Francisco, Calif., had malfunctions in their storage tanks, endangering thousands of frozen eggs and embryos.
Our greatest spiritual teachers can be our nearest and dearest. The familiar ones with whom we share sinks and sheets and silverware.
IN HER 1971 collection of poetry entitled “A Grain of Mustard Seed,” the late poet, novelist and journal-writer May Sarton wrote:
ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO, a friend took her son with her when she went to a beauty shop to get her hair cut. The hairdresser was snipping away and the boy was engrossed in reading on his Kindle when another mother came into the shop with her daughter in tow. The daughter was carrying an American Girl doll, and the mother announced to the entire beauty shop, “We’re here to get the doll’s hair cut. We’re transgendering her!”
by Brendon Harfmann
A brother seminarian recently sent greetings from Rome and spoke of the excitement building up within as our ordinations to the transitional diaconate and priesthood draw closer.
POPE FRANCIS WAS elected five years ago on March 13, 2013. Two firsts about him captured people’s imaginations: the first Jesuit and the first Latin American ever elected pope.
