By Sr. Mary Garascia, C.P.P.S.
Not long ago I saw the movie “Hidden Figures.” Besides the main storyline in this film about the men and women working for NASA to put our man on the moon, a noteworthy subtext was the sense of community and purpose the characters all had.
By Sr. Mary Garascia
Scottsdale, Arizona is an upper-class suburb of Phoenix, and in the 1970’s I was teaching there. One year just before Christmas I went to the post office, crowded with the usual pre-Christmas mailing crowd. In front of me was a woman with a little blond boy, about three years old. In the line next to us was a black man, tall and distinguished looking, with a neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard. Spying him the boy called out in that loud, piercing voice some young children have: “Mommy, Mommy, look!” We all held our breath because Scottsdale in those days had virtually no black residents, and this man was surely the first black person the boy had ever seen. What was he going to say?
By Sister Mary Garascia
The curse of faith! A French theologian, name long forgotten, used this phrase repeatedly in a course on ecclesiology I once took at Fordham University. By faith he did not mean faith in God. He meant faith in the Catholic Church. A good Catholic, he said, always has one foot in and one foot out!
By Sr. Mary Garascia, C.P.P.S.
When I was a little girl, our family had great parents and lots of kids but not much money. And so my creative parents, who could not afford to buy us a Christmas tree, invented the story of the orphan tree. It went like this:
By Sr. Mary Garascia
It was Monday before Thanksgiving. I was a parish faith formation director, but also a part time student in theology.
Now within the larger University, the school of theology had many resident students and a family like atmosphere. It had been the custom on Mondays that each of the professors took a turn having their class sponsor “entertainment” at a community lunch in the great hall.
