My family and I have spent a beautiful weekend on a working “vacation farm” in rural New York. Growing up as I did in a almost-entirely agricultural region, the idea that city dwellers would pay good money to drive several hours out of the urban bustle so they can wake up early and feed some …
Mapping the Diocese of Today: Parochial Structures
Since a diocese is required to be “divided into distinct parts or parishes” (c. 374, §1), it seems to follow that, as one distinguished canonist put it to me in conversation, “Every square inch of a diocese has to be part of a parish.” Given the peculiar history of the Catholic Church in the United …
Until the music stops
There will be no way of knowing when my heart will stop working. But it will: I am quite sure of that. Not soon, don’t worry. I imagine I have a solid twenty years left that I can more or less count on. After that, though, I will be foolish not to regard each day …
Beginning to sit again
I still remember my first stories. Not every detail, not at all. But I remember that they happened, the circumstances, and how it felt to tell them, and that is the important part. I was quite young, seven or so. I had already dropped out of school, thanks to my perceptive and supportive parents, and …
The Nature of Parishes
The parish is “the place where all the faithful can be gathered together for the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. The parish initiates the Christian people into the ordinary expression of the liturgical life: it gathers them together in this celebration; it teaches Christ’s saving doctrine; it practices the charity of the Lord in good …
Ordinariate: the word itself
It is not exactly a new word in the Catholic Church, but since Anglicanorum coetibus was promulgated nearly two years ago, ordinariate has been slung around in speech in print at an exponentially higher rate than at any point previous. But what, when you stop and look at it, does it really mean? It’s kind …
Is all lost?
Things aren’t quite as they should be around the country. Many of us are angry. Many of us are fearful for our safety, or that of our children. Many of us are worried about what the future will hold. Many of us are missing and mourning loved ones. Many of us are dead. I initially wrote …
Casting about
I have been in the early throes of what feels like a sort of crisis here at The Floating Egg lately, and it is finally spilling out of the closed-up capsule that is my soul into something resembling the public view. At the core of this crisis is the indisputable fact that I have not …
A bit of a breakthrough
I felt I made a bit of a breakthrough yesterday. Not so much an epiphany, which to me at least seems limited to consciousness and insight; no, this was an actual “I did it!” experience that made me feel all giddy for at least eight or nine minutes. (Well, maybe it was only seven, but …
Parish Councils
The term “parish council” is certainly a familiar enough element of parochial life for most contemporary Catholics, at least in the United States. But what is the role of such councils, really? Why are there two different councils in many parishes? We will try to at least scratch the surface of these questions. Parish Pastoral Council …
