Grab Bag

I'll soon be heading home to Rhode Island for Thanksgiving break! But first, a few news items worth mentioning.

The latest from Diane, via my mother:

...we went to Decastro's for a few things and then proceeded home along Middle Road, a route we seldom take. Shortly after we turned, she proclaimed, "This is Hedly Street!" So I said, "Diane, you have quite a memory! You are something else." And she said, "I AM DIANE! BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!!!!!"

Congratulations to Grace Wells who was received into full communion with the Church last weekend in California. And who recently got engaged!

Congratulations also to former roomie Neal Holtschulte for his 2nd place finish in the X-C Division III Nationals.

And finally a quote from the saint of the day, St. Columban, Irish monk and missionary (d. 615) affirming the allegiance of the Irish Church to Rome. It is the source of the inscription in the chapel of Our Lady Queen of Ireland in the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

I shall not be dismayed; it is praiseworthy to be dismayed for God's sake before men. If I am heard, all shall share the profit; if I am set at naught, mine shall be the reward. For I shall speak as a friend, disciple, and close follower of yours, not as a stranger; therefore I shall speak out freely, saying to those that are our masters and helmsmen of the spiritual ship and mystic sentinels, Watch, for the sea is stormy and whipped up by fatal blasts, for it is not a solitary threatening wave such as, even across a silent ocean, is raised to overweening heights from the ever-foaming eddies of a hollow rock, though it swells from afar, and drives the sails before it while Death walks the waves, but it is a tempest of the entire element, surging indeed and swollen upon every side, that threatens shipwreck of the mystic vessel; thus do I, a fearful sailor, dare to cry, Watch, for water has now entered the vessel of the Church, and the vessel is in perilous straits. For all we Irish, inhabitants of the world's edge, are disciples of Saints Peter and Paul and of all the disciples who wrote the sacred canon by the Holy Ghost, and we accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching... For we, as I have said before, are bound to St. Peter's chair; for though Rome be great and famous, among us it is only on that chair that her greatness and her fame depend.

(from a letter to Pope Boniface IV)