Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

I don’t know about you, but this time of the year tends to be exceptionally intense for me.  Keeping the “wheels on” in everyday life in addition to preparing for Christmas leads me down the path of overwhelming.  During my daily commute to the Mound, morning reflection time, and before I go to sleep each night I am praying, “God, let me serve with joy, and let me know your peace.”  Fortunately, our good and gracious God, in infinite kindness has bestowed peace and patience upon me.   In addition, God has used both ordinary and exceptional events during Advent to remind me of what is really important.  One of those exceptional events occurred yesterday on Gaudete Sunday.  We were blessed with the perpetual profession ceremony of our Sr. Kathy Flynn.  What joy, peace, and excitement we experienced through the music, Word of God, preaching, and words of commitment during that ritual! In the program distribut...

This past weekend, I participated in a special Mass and reception to mark the closing of one of our community’s high schools in the Chicago area.  Queen of Peace High School opened fifty-five years ago and about 15,000 young women were educated there.  Due to declining enrollment and related financial challenges, it is not feasible to continue to operate the school. The closing event was bittersweet: alumnae were saddened to see the school close but grateful for all that the school had meant in their lives. One of the many aspects of life at Queen of Peace High School that touched me most was the deliberate effort to empower each student become a “Woman of Peace”. The school environment emphasized “being peace” and “bringing peace”. An annual award was given to the student who best exemplified this quality. I was inspired as I read the words and phrases used to describe those students awarded in this final year: dedicated to building community; treating others with ...

I enjoy going to the movies and have several friends that do as well.   With each of them I know their movie ‘tastes’ and who to ask to join me depending on the film.   My tastes run from Star Wars (I want to be the first nun in space!) to the most recent one I saw: Loving . Loving is a true story of an interracial couple who decided to get married but living in the state of Virginia in the 1950s, this was seen as a criminal act.   For some, the movie would seem slow moving, but the tension that happens because of the pace and the discipline of the actors playing their parts brings the reality of the horror of how people have been and continue to be treated in our country. The irony is that the film title is the last name of this couple and yet so very fitting for the love they had for each other.   Films like Loving provide much more than mere entertainment.   They are teachable moments of how we are meant to be with each other as c...