Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

As a Dominican I am growing in awareness that I am called to witness to a community of faith and love.  This week I was home alone.  One member of our household was at the White Privilege Conference in Kansas City and another was the dog sitter a few miles away at our friend's house.   In a way it was nice to leave dirty dishes in the sink, have TV on or off completely at my own choice and eat whenever I felt like it.  We did pray together and for one another by phone at 7 am each day.   There will be joy when we are all together once again.  We will listen to each other’s adventures and rejoice in what each of us learned while away. Jesus calls us to love one another and to even wash each other’s feet when needed.   We believe He is risen, indeed, and has sent God’s spirit to walk with us in the way of faith and love. What a blessing it is to witness to the world by being community of faith and love. How can we grow in awareness that faith calls each t

Feast day of Catherine of Siena, April 29th I humbly admit to my simple Catholic background; I went to public schools, Sunday and Holy day mass, and rudimentary catechism classes in our rural church on Saturday mornings.  I never opened a Bible until I went to a Catholic college – and even then I slept through a lot of that class!  So when I entered the Congregation I was in left field when it came to knowing my roots.  That was especially true when it came to learning about Catherine of Siena.  A) I’d never heard of her and B) after hearing of her all I could think was “What was she thinking?” – all that solitude and crazy fasting and extreme self-denial and dialogues with Jesus and…I could go on.  So here we are on her feast day all these years later and thanks to great contemporary scholarship by Dominican women and others, I have new and deeper insights into Catherine’s life of faith, her intense and loving service to the Church and compassion for the peopl