The Stained Glass Buffalo: January 2012

20 January 2012

A boy chained his bike to a tree and went off to war...

AA

Priest’s legacy of tolerance is all-embracing

The Buffalo News: Donn Esmonde

They put Father Bill in the ground Wednesday. It was cold January earth. But I would like to think — no, I know — that easing his way down was the warmth and the gratitude of the countless “invisible” people to whom he opened the church doors. Many were God-loving Catholics who were not sure that God loved them back. Father Bill, by word and deed, let them know that He did.

Prostitutes, the homeless, the poor, immigrants, homosexuals — Monsignor William Schwinger welcomed all of them to St. Louis Church. From 1979 to 1995, he presided over a mixed flock on the edge of Allentown.

It was, especially, not an easy time to be homosexual. The epidemic of AIDS cut down friends and lovers, even as society’s cold eye prompted many gays to live a closeted lie. No matter. Everyone was wrapped in his spiritual embrace...

more:
http://www.buffalonews.com/city/columns/donn-esmonde/article714554.ece

16 January 2012

Stand Tall

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.