Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

"Called forth by God's expansive love and mercy for all creation...we commit ourselves to the urgent summons of Laudato Si to care for Earth, our home."  These words taken from our Direction Statement 2016-2021 will be my inspiration this week as beginning today at Dominican Wellspring, I host a camp for kids.  This will be the second year for the camp that has as its main aim to introduce the children and their families to our responsibility as earth dwellers to become better caretakers of all of God's creation.   The children will be immersed in activities which will model caring for creation, from reducing consumption and waste to being thoughtful about reuse and recycling.   I feel very happy to have this opportunity to raise awareness in children, of the need to care for our planet, and I am grateful that I belong to a congregation that extends its ministry of mercy to include all of God's creation.   What are you doing to care for Earth, o...

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...