Archive: January 2011

The Tax Man Cometh

The Tax Man Cometh

Every year about this time most of us look forward to spending some quality time with a pile of tax forms and instructions. The length of the federal income tax code itself has been the topic of many discussions. The income tax code and its...

Beatitude Vision

A critic once challenged me by declaring that my homilies were preaching a message of failure to a bunch of losers. He was suggesting that the Good News of Jesus Christ is directed at losers, not at winners. Today’s Gospel account in which we find...

Remembering Dachau

I stood in the gas chamber and ran my hands across the low smooth ceiling.  It had many recessed holes in the ceiling that were supposed to contain shower heads.  Instead they were lined with metal.  By the time the occupants realized this, the...

Fly Me To The Car?

Fly Me To The Car?

If you haven’t flown in a while, an entire new reality awaits you. I recently flew with a friend of mine to Florida for a 10-day vacation.  So surprised was I from the “experience” that I have come to believe that the airline...

First Musings

In this first blog, I’d like to give you a bit of information about myself. First of all, I’m a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Currently, I am the Academic Dean at SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan. For the past 125...

Valuing the Moment

Imagine, if you will, that one second after midnight this morning, a bank account was opened in your name with $86,400 in it.  The money in that bank account is all yours and you can do whatever you want to with it.  You can spend it, invest it or...

Sharing our Faith

A Christian baroness, after her noble husband died, moved from Europe to Nairobi, the capital of the African nation of Kenya.  In setting up her household there, she hired a young Kenyan to be her houseboy.  For three months he gave her excellent...

He’s a Good Father?

At the pregnancy center where I volunteer, I recently sat down with a twenty-three-year-old woman who had come in for a pregnancy test. Aside from the biological questions we ask (symptoms, last period, etc.), we also ask something about her...