Jews vs. Catholic Basketball Game (10 Years Ago This Weekend) This weekend is the 10th anniversary of the Jews vs. Catholics basketball game that Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm and I started as chaplains of University of Colorado in Boulder. (You can see how young I looked in my first year of my priesthood  in 2011.) Catholic News Agency covered the story 10 years ago in Boulder: Although the idea began as a joke, and still elicits laughter from students, an April 17 “Jews versus Catholics” basketball game has a serious purpose for the priest and the rabbi who organized it as a form of outreach to their communities' non-practicing members. “These are the two main religions of the West, and there are a lot of people who left them,” said Fr. Dave Nix, parochial vicar at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center [...]

Resurrection Grace Just before my diaconate ordination about 12 years ago, I went with a seminary professor and about 50 older adults to the Holy Land.  I was just a layman and I paid for myself via donors, not the seminary.  My seminary professor wanted nothing to do with me (yes, even back then!) so I ended up wandering the streets of Jerusalem one evening.  (Earlier that week, I had hoped for really cool graces at the location where Jesus was executed, but felt little consolation.) However, that evening of wandering old Jerususalem, I came into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and inside that Church is both the location where Christ died and where he rose.  Where Christ rose is a now a chapel inside a Church (as seen in the above photo.)  I went in there as the [...]

When my father was only 10 months old, on the 9th of February 1942, my grandfather wrote him a letter that I found and saved to my Evernote.  It begins: Just how to begin this, I do not know, but perhaps if I just write down the thought in my heart you shall see what I have in mind. To begin with, this idea of putting every day events into a sort of letter to you, our children, occured to me long before your Mother and I were married, for I did know that some day with Gods wish we would have you, and I your mother. Therefore I shall try to relate to you those events of this day that interest us now…As this is being written we are at war with Japan, Germany and Italy. Your history books [...]

Changing My Habits This is what I looked like in a Roman Collar for most of my priesthood: Here's an example of the vestments I wore when I was doing Mass in English (and other languages) in 2015: After Holy Mass in the Basilica of St. James of Campostella in Santiago, Spain after finishing the Camino in 2015. Here's an example of the vestments I wore after switching to the Traditional Latin Mass: After Holy Mass at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Jacksonville, Florida. This was my last active assignment (2018) before becoming a diocesan hermit. My first religious habit as a hermit was this.  (A habit is worn under Mass vestments at Mass, but the habit is supposed to be worn all day.) A "habit" is what I wear in my hermitage [...]