Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

I, along with several other sisters, have been invited to participate in a Study Circle with the newest member of the Congregation.  The next topic for our study is the history of the Congregation.  Study materials for each of our topics have been skillfully prepared by the Relationship for Mission team.  In addition to the prepared materials, the facilitator of the history session suggested each person in the group learn about the experiences of two sisters in the Congregation from their historical points of view – one sister currently alive within the Congregation and one sister who has passed to eternal life.  During my study of the materials providing a “high-level” overview of the history of the Congregation, I could perceive that throughout the nearly 170 years of the Congregation’s history, the sisters have always “set out anew together” responding to the needs of those to be served in each particular time in history.   I again saw this when I studie...

This is my second attempt at blogging and I wish to share today a very special experience I had over the Easter weekend.  My brother, John, is a priest for the Sioux City Diocese and has always worked in small parishes in rural Iowa.  After 46 years of ministry, he will be retiring.  Saturday, I drove to Wall Lake, Iowa where my family gathered to celebrate this occasion.  John and I are less than a year apart in age and we grew up like Irish Twins. There were six children in our family and we were blessed with loving parents and a marvelous education by the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters.  Both John and I began our religious vocations right after high school and I celebrated my final vows at his first Mass. The prayer card that we created for this occasion expressed our hopes. Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now. The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; the thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood, the upst...