“This Place is JUMPING”
That is just it!
The Church, the building houses our FAMILY. The Church is my home. I am there meeting, praying, adoring several hours a week. Our church is not locked during the day. It is never locked during the day.
Mass begins at 7am and the church is open. It is locked after 9pm, but the Adorers who are in Chapel, open the door for the next hourly adorer and that goes on round the clock until 7am the next morning.
Yeah, it’s a weird day when I don’t make the 20 mile haul to my parish for something or other.
We don’t have “perpetual” adoration yet. We do one stretch from 8:00 Wed to 1700 Thu every week and we have adoration from Ash Wednesday to the Triduum Sacrum. But we’re not there yet.
God willing, I’m making life promises as a Dominican this January and there may be a move in my future. I’d like to spend some time helping sow and strengthen chapters of Lay Dominicans, especially in diocese with liberal bishops. We need to provide refuges for people who want to worship Jesus, and bases from which good teaching can be spread.
But if I DO move, I’m going to miss this place. We are building the first priory built in the US in 40+ years! At a large university! This could turn out to be important.
I went to Catholic school in the Northeast. Neighborhoods changed from Irish Catholic or Italian Catholic & like a poster posted earlier, they were packed on Sunday’s, standing room only. Plus all the kids went to Catholic school. The jobs left and neighbors moved out.
It’s not unsimilar to ethnic cleaning. Over the course of a decade, one neighborhood after another fell.
Section 8 housing put the ethnic cleansing on the fast course.
Most of these neighborhoods now are complete cesspools. Make no mistake many elderly black and white are prisoners in their own homes. It’s really pitiful.