That word—“codependence”—is a boogeyman, a Halloween ghoul that lurks in the shadows of every friendship. “Is my friend edging into a codependent relationship with me?” we worry. “Is she using me, manipulating my freedom, abusing my generosity, controlling me?”

The magazine Psychology Today defines “codependency” as “a dysfunctional relationship dynamic where one person assumes the role of ‘the giver,’ sacrificing their own needs and well-being for the sake of the other, ‘the taker.’” Hmmmm. That sounds a lot like motherhood to me, or caring for an elderly parent, or for that matter God’s relationship with me….

To be fair, Psychology Today clarifies further: “Healthy relationships are mutually beneficial, providing love and support to both parties.” That is usually true, but there are situations where, at least for a time, one party simply cannot contribute anything to the other party. What can a newborn provide for his mother? What can an infant give to anyone, except the simple gift of his or her own being? God puts into parents a love for their completely dependent child, such that the newborn’s sheer act of existence is more than enough to provide Psychology Today’s “mutually beneficial” requirement. So it is with God and the creature: I can provide nothing for God, but He loves me simply for what I am rather than what I do.

Leah Libresco has a new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, in which she argues that dependence on another is fundamental to our humanity. To be absolutely independent is not only inhuman but impossible, when you think about it. Females generally understand this better than men, and women naturally engage the great good of—I don’t say “co-dependence,” but--mutual dependence. We call this mutual dependency a relationship. Most women are more “relational” than men, understanding and delighting in interpersonal dynamics, human emotions, and self-giving. The female body and the female psyche are wired to engage and help others flourish, from their own children to an orphaned kitten. Parish priests, who work closely with thousands of people over their lives, see women doing this kind of thing day in and day out. It is the women of the parish who cook meals for others, who drive the elderly to Mass and doctors’ appointments, who babysit others’ children so their parents can go to the symphony, who listen patiently to young people’s problems, who bandage a child’s scraped knee or clean up after a homeless person has an accident in church. Men, on the other hand, have other gifts….

The Catholic Church, in her 3000 years’ experience in human and divine relationships, understands how mutual dependency works. Catholic “logos” or “trademarks” communicate this. The Church’s primary symbol is the cross, which is the intersection of a vertical and a horizontal bar, heaven and earth, God and man. The point of contact between these two independent bars, the vertical and the horizontal, marks the heart of Christ, his love for humanity. But the Church uses another symbol of human co-dependency, more immediately obvious and heartwarming than the cross: Mother and Child. The most compelling and consoling image of the interpersonal dependency of love is that of Mary with her little Boy. To the secular world, which prizes and strives for absolute independence and free choice, the Church holds up the Mother and Child: Jesus depending on Mary, and Mary depending on Jesus. Ultimately, this will become the pietà, a woman cradling her dead son beneath the Cross. Only the Mother and Child fully portrays an accurate anthropology: that we are made for relationship with others, in mutual dependency. Solitary confinement is the worst of all punishments, as every prison warden will tell you.
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​Next week my parish will hold a “Eucharistic Rosary Conference,” spending eight days in prayer with Jesus and Mary. The centerpiece will be a Eucharistic Procession from the San Francisco Cathedral to Star of the Sea Church, praying the rosary along the way. The Archbishop will offer a Solemn High Pontifical Mass upon our arrival at the parish, uniting heaven and earth, Jesus and Mary, in one sacrifice of praise. The procession and Mass will be the highest and fullest expression of our humanity, in relationship to God and each other, Jesus and Mary.

Ten years ago I got into hot water for arguing that Catholic altar server programs can be restricted to boys only. I was excoriated for excluding girls from altar service, even for “hating” the female sex, and I replied with the Vatican statement itself that first permitted girls to serve the Mass. The 1994 document from the Congregation for Divine Worship allows altar girls, but then says “at the same time, however, the Holy See wishes to recall that it will always be very appropriate to follow the noble tradition of having boys serve at the altar. As is well known, this has led to a reassuring development of priestly vocations. Thus the obligation to support such groups of altar boys will always continue.” This vague statement is a lamentable example of more recent “Vaticanspeak:” communicating uncertainty, at best unclear and at worst maintaining two contradictory positions to keep everybody happy. Should we reserve altar service to boys or not? Are boys-only programs good or bad? This document clearly says, even while allowing altar girls, that the Church is also obligated to support altar boy-only programs because it is “a noble tradition” and “as is well known” fosters priestly vocations. But if a priest actually does what the Vatican recommends, he will be marginalized by most of the Church, which has been my experience and that of many other priests.

Anyway, we developed a flourishing altar boy program at Star of the Sea parish, while also providing other programs for girls. And, “as is well known,” many priestly vocations have come from the parish since then (most of them going into religious orders). Until we opened a Classical Catholic School at the parish, most of my servers were young men rather than boys, many of them tech professionals looking for a more traditional parish. With the opening of a Classical school, however, many more young boys are serving at the altar. Some of them even serve the 7am Mass, making Latin responses in cassock and surplice before most of their classmates have even made it out of bed. God bless them.

As I watch these young boys, I begin to understand why putting boys at the altar from the third grade leads many to the priesthood. There is narrow window, say between the ages of eight and ten, when boys are full of wonder. They want to know everything, captivated by every mystery life presents. This wonder is the essence of the priestly vocation: to peer into infinity through finite sacramentals, to glimpse eternity in a half hour Mass. Boys of this age want to see everything that I’m doing with the chalice, the books, the wine, the water, and the incense. If I purify a ciborium near the sacrarium, the boys will rush over and stand on tip toes to see how I do it. When I set colored ribbons in the missal before Mass, they are right beside me asking why. If I bless the incense in Latin they want to know what the words mean. If I choose one chasuble over another they inspect the other colors and ask why gold and not green. I am filled with wonder at how these boys begin to grasp the intricacies of liturgical splendor. Their fascination for the Holy Mass will lead those who are called to the priesthood. For those who are not called to the priesthood, altar service gives them an irrevocable love for the Eucharist as fathers of families.

​Good fathers are in short supply these days, and service at the altar is exceptional training for fatherhood. The boys need this fraternity, this focus on higher things, to become the men God that has called them to be. It is the wonder in these boys’ faces that convinces me of the necessity to continue the “noble tradition of having boys serve at the altar.”

Pets are a big thing these days, especially in lonely cities. Lots of people live alone, unmarried, with no children and not many or any real friends, stacked like cordwood in multi-story apartment blocks, keeping doors triple locked and greeting no one along the way. An otherwise nice Filipino woman that moved from Manhattan to my parish in San Francisco once told me that, the day after she arrived in the City of St. Francis, someone greeted her on the street. She scowled in return, barking out “shut up!” No one would presume to say hello to a stranger in Manhattan, she explained sweetly.
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People keep pets so that someone or something will greet them as they return to their lonely apartment. If animals are too much trouble, people can buy smart speakers that can be programmed to “greet” them on demand. Folks used to leave their television sets bawling all day, but now smartphones and earbuds can provide the desired background noise, all the time and everywhere.

Still, there’s nothing like Man’s Best Friend to wag an excited greeting when you get back from work. Even cats and goldfish provide some feeling of life in an empty apartment. I myself like plants: they require very little attention and always greet you with a smile. I was particularly fond of my Spider Plants in college, lavishly draping their green runners throughout my dorm room like loving arms.

Today the Catholic Church celebrates something different: the Guardian Angels. Many like to think of angels as cute pets, someone always there for us, always ready to affirm and comfort, helpful in so many ways. We like to think that our good angel would never condemn us. We imagine that they are to soften God’s demanding precepts when necessary, going to bat for us with the Almighty if we find it necessary to indulge in some small sin.

The first reading for the Mass of the Angels disabuses us of that illusion. It is from Exodus 23, the Bible’s first mention of a “guardian angel,” he who has been sent to help the Israelites through the seas, deserts, and rivers between them and the Promised Land. “See,” God says, “I am sending an angel before you, to guard you on the way…. Heed his voice … for he will not forgive your sin.”

My Guardian Angel is not my pet. He answers to God, not to me. If I rebel against the Almighty, my angel will discipline me. He will not forgive my sins, because he cannot—only God and his priests can forgive sins. But neither will he wink at my sins—that would be a derelict of duty. The angels have been given an intellect and will far superior to ours, and they do not fail in their task. God has commanded them to protect us from evil, and most of the evil in our lives comes from our weaknesses. My angel does not find my peccadillos amusing. He speaks to my conscience when I err, and in his great love for me does not water down the truth. It is mine to listen carefully, to trust, and to obey my angel in all things.

In reading and writing about Our Lady’s apparitions over the last three months, I have discovered many gemlike treasures. One of my favorites is the spontaneous response Fernande Voisin made to an artist in 1932. She and four other children had been receiving visits from the Queen of Heaven in Beauraing, Belgium, and the artist offered to paint the Lady for her. Without hesitation, Ferdinande replied, Non, monsieur, vous ne pouvez pas, “No, sir, you cannot.” She didn’t have to explain why he could not paint Our Lady. She did not have to tell him that the Queen of Heaven was too beautiful, that the transforming graces pouring from her could never be reduced to oil on canvas.

This morning I went out the eastern door or my little Irish farmhouse to greet the day. The dawn had begun stretching her rosy fingers westward over a field of lush grasses in which twenty-five cows grazed contentedly. Even as I raced back inside for my phone, I knew it would be futile to “capture the shot” on my little device. But I took it anyway, which you can see below.
In a limited way, an earthly sunrise reflects the glory of what we imagine heaven to be. There are many reasons we think of heaven as brilliant and beauteous light. Those who undergo “near death” experiences testify to “a wondrous light,” and those who see apparitions of Our Lady describe a woman “clothed with the sun.” The magnificent colors of a sunrise, the precise textures a rising sun projects onto clouds, the warmth with which it clothes the earth, and the sun’s bursting over a dark horizon all portray infinite beauty, heart-warming goodness, and eternal truth. A good sunrise goes a long way to make one’s whole day beautiful and instill hope in one day seeing God’s undying day.

All of this I sought to capture on my cellphone this morning. But even if the phone gets the colors right, how can a two-dimensional image convey the breadth and width and height of all that surrounds a sunrise? What of the husky ravens calling  to each other, or the twittering sparrows diving and climbing through the brightening air? And what of Mr. Fox, loping through tall grass, not bothered at all by towering cattle grazing through the green? What of the tussling grasses, and the warming breezes, and the woodsmoke curling from the neighbor’s chimney? What of my own wondrous gratitude for another day newly begun? We must go outside to rejoice in these graces. We must go outside of our own little digital worlds to find them.
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Nevertheless, you have my little screenshot below. It’s a tiny image, but it is “sacramental,” a small thing pointing to a great thing. Even a pixilated image can help us see God, but we must not become pixilated ourselves. We must not be reduced to the technology we use. Our newest saint, Carlo Acutis, found much pleasure in video games, but he resolved to spend no more than one hour a week on them. He saw more of God’s great universe in fifteen years than most of us because he looked up much more than he looked down. That’s why we call him a saint, and that’s why his very healthy approach to digital technology is worth imitating.

​We don’t think about September 11th much anymore, but I woke up rather early today, as I did on that morning 24 years ago. I had pushed my bed up against the open window on that hot California evening, and at 5:45am the next morning a blast of wind blew the venetian blinds forward with a great clatter. I sprang from bed and went outside. The sky was aflame with bulbous clouds, like so many blooms of orange fire. There was no wind outside, and I couldn’t imagine what might have caused that single blast of air at 5:45. I went inside to get ready for holy hour and Mass. It was only as I approached the church two hours later for Mass that my parishioners, dazed and almost in tears, told me about the attacks on New York and Washington.
 
Today I awoke naturally at 5:45 and went outside. All was quiet, and all was bright. A nearly full moon shone over pale fields, while Orion’s belt stretched over the eastern sky. Two planets looked down as well: Jupiter high above and Venus lower on the horizon, in all her shining precision. Rather than a blast of wind from flaming clouds, a gentle breeze deftly rustled the tall field grasses. Three months in rural Ireland has put a blessed distance between me and our anxious coastal cities.
 
How nearly perfect has been my sojourn in the Irish countryside! How healing it has been to live quietly among the sheep and the cows, to greet my friend the red fox with her full white-tipped tail patrolling the field every morning before sunrise, and to give the farmyard dogs a run for their money on my red bike. How bracing to range through tall grasses in high boots, crossing streams and rivulets without fear of snakes or garbage. Ireland is like a jungle, at least in the summer, a land of gentle rain and strong wind, fields and hedgerows overflowing with flora and fauna. The world has been at war since 9-11, but not here in rural Ireland.
 
The bible describes heaven as a city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. But I wonder if more like a village than a city like New York or Beijing? The other day I went into the village to pick up some milk and to make a visit at the parish church. It was about 5pm, and many were going home after a day at the lumber mill, the village school, or the dairy plant. The light was turning golden and the air crisp on this late September afternoon in one of  ten thousand Irish villages. A deeply satisfying sense of community swept over me, and I realized what kind of “city” God has in mind for us. In most Irish villages there is only one main street, the road between townlands along which most of the villagers have built their homes. There are no “developments” or apartment complexes but only a row of brightly-colored houses with their chimneys and flowerpots. I know many of these people by now, having talked to them in the one village grocery store, worshipped God with them in their only parish church, and dropped off my laundry with Mrs. Mayberry in the only village dry cleaners. I’ve talked about cows and weather with them in the village pubs (not one but three of them in my village).
 
In a week I return to the city, which has a different kind of beauty born of the concentrated energy of large numbers of people. I think heaven will be more like a village than either the splendid isolation of the farmhouse or the exciting density of the city. Heaven will be, I think, a natural community of those who know and love each other, who have built their homes not far from the village tabernacle and along the road that links one village with the next. And the Lamb of God will be the light, and the tabernacle, of that City.
 
After the bad guys destroyed our thousand-foot towers in New York, we built an even taller tower for a city that never sleeps. Exciting stuff, but as I grow older the city holds less fascination for me. The village is the thing for me now, a place in which everyone has a home, and with which terrorists do not think to bother.

Today is the day Mother Teresa died in Calcutta twenty-eight years ago, and so today is the day the Church celebrates her dies natalis, the day she was born into eternity. The same Church canonized her on September 4, 2016, declaring with certitude that God took her from Calcutta straight to heaven. If one fully engages grace in that city, Calcutta is certainly a purgatory on earth. But as Mother pointed out frequently, one can find the immense love she found in Calcutta in every city and village. “Go home and find Calcutta where you live,” she would encourage those who wanted to prolong their stay at Motherhouse on Lower Circular Road (now A.J.C. Bose Road). In three weeks at Motherhouse in April 1997, I found a great love of God in that city. Mother Teresa was in a wheelchair by then, parked against the back wall of the chapel, along with a hundred sisters and a hundred lay volunteers as the deafening roar of A.J.C. Bose Road came through the open windows. I found Jesus himself—I held Him in my arms—when I carried a naked man back from his bath at the Home for Dying Destitutes. I knew he was Jesus, and I knew that I had never done anything remotely Christian before He allowed me to carry His frail body back from the washroom that morning.
 
God gave me another grace in the sacristy after Mass one morning. Having been raised in Sacred Heart Parish in Skopje, Mother Teresa installed a kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above the vesting table to remind her priests of Christ’s divine and human heart. Mother Teresa usually wheeled herself into the sacristy after Mass to thank the priest and ask about his day. She sat there that morning, looking at me, and the kitschy print of the Sacred Heart above her head looked at me too. The picture of Jesus that I had seen thousands of times without giving it a second thought came alive for me that morning, and I knew that I had a Savior. Being close to a saint—especially an extraordinary saint—opens one’s mind and heart to the invisible realities in which that saint holds daily converse. To be close to a living saint is wonderful, but to be close to a “dead” saint is good too, which explains the Church’s veneration of relics. A relic of Mother Teresa (my breviary which she signed with “God Bless You, M [aria]. Teresa, MC”) was kissed by a dying friend, and a week later Stanford Medical Center could find no trace of the intestinal cancer that had spread throughout her body.
 
I am not in the deafening city of Calcutta today but in the quiet fields of West Cork, where I have only two weeks left of my three-month sabbatical. The Archbishop kindly afforded me ninety days away from my bustling parish to write two books, both of which I have finished (at least the first drafts). One is the history of Star of the Sea parish, at one point the westernmost Catholic Church on the American Continent, and so the book is entitled Star of the West. The other book is a high-level look at 18 Marian apparitions entitled Mother of the Light. I had to distance myself from the parish to gain the perspective needed to write a full and balanced history of that parish, from 1776 to 2026 (in time for the Church’s 250th anniversary in San Francisco next year). I had to distance myself from my Marian shrine in San Francisco to write a thoughtful summary of all the apparitions of Our Lady throughout history. To more fully understand the world, one must get away from and above the world at times. History, literature (especially poetry), philosophy and theology, art and music—all of these “big picture” disciplines that education so painfully lacks these days—are vital to a meaningful life.
 
Unfortunately, the big picture and creation’s multiple dimensions have been reduced to a tiny flat screen much of the time. Last week I went to England, both to confer with an author and to visit a former parishioner at the Birmingham Oratory. The author had written a book like mine, and the parishioner wanted me to see Cardinal Newman's vast library before he is named the thirty-eighth doctor of the Church. To get through London and Birmingham, I felt it necessary to bring my little screen. It’s GPS directed me through complicated city streets and twisting English byways, for which I am grateful. At the same time, my eyes were torn between beholding the green countryside of “Mary’s Dowry” (the fields and copses around Walsingham are particularly lovely) and fixating on the tiny screen. My cellphone reduced the glories of England to a flat and colorless series of lines and numbers (the M25, the A1065, and the B1355, for example). It was a necessary evil, I suppose, to get from London to Nottingham, but how dismal merry England appeared on my little screen. Here in Ireland my eyes were glued to my little screen for the first three weeks as I found my way around Cork City and the farmlands further west. What a sense of relief when I knew the roads well enough to put my phone aside and look out the window for myself!
 
I brought my pretty red bike to Ireland, and I ride it every day past well-kept farms and seaside villages. Because the roads here are narrow, twisting, and enclosed by tall hedgerows, I installed a little mirror at the bottom of my right handlebar. But I found myself glancing down a bit too often at that little picture. It’s tempting to fixate on the screens “for safety” and for a sense of control. They are helpful, to be sure, but how much better to look around us, to see and think freely, to behold the vast horizons God spreads before us.
 
Mother Teresa left her Albanian village in 1928 for Dublin, to become a Loretto Sister. “Put your hand in Our Lady’s hand,” her mother told her as she got on the train. “Don’t look back, because if you look back you will go back.” Young Agnes (who would take the name “Teresa”) did not look back. She looked forward, even to the vast horizons of the Indian subcontinent, to which she had been assigned. She found a brilliance in Calcutta's darkness, and from that city she taught the entire world to look up, not down. Look down at your little screen only as much as is absolutely necessary, but look up into the sky, to the sun and the clouds and the stars, as much as you can.

Today is St. Clare’s Day, one of history’s great “monks.” She became the contemplative that her dear friend, St. Francis, always wanted to be. Francis had “church building” projects to work on, but Clare was free to pray long hours before the Blessed Sacrament with her sisters. To gain that freedom, she surrendered her considerable material wealth. It was a price certainly worth paying.
 
Last week I did my “canonical retreat,” so-called because canon [Church] law requires priests to spend at least five days a year “retreating” from noise to gain the one thing necessary. For a fruitful retreat, one must first till the soil, and the soil is silence. Only by sitting quietly in the garden of God, listening and looking about, can one draw near to the supreme Good. For starters, the gift of silence costs us our “devices.” It is a price certainly worth paying, at least for a week. This means leaving devices behind or at least removing their “power” over us (by means of the off switch helpfully provided by your device’s manufacturer).
 
The best place to do a retreat, in my experience, is a Benedictine monastery. I did mine at a priory four hours north of my little farmhouse here in West Cork, so I brought my phone along for directions. Not many years ago I would have used a map and a brain (helpfully provided by my Creator) to find my way around, but paper maps are in short supply these days, and my brain has been addled by my phone. So I arrived at the monastery with phone in tow. Upon settling into my cell (not the phone, but the little room assigned by the monks), I turned my phone on to turn it off and noticed two “urgent” messages. “How am I going to resist the impulse to check messages?” I wondered. “People will think I’m avoiding them.” Then I remembered: I am avoiding them! I powered down the phone and hoped people would understand. The good news is that within 24 hours I wasn’t even thinking about my phone, and when I used my phone (on airplane mode) as an alarm, I had not the slightest desire to check messages. Detox can happen very quickly in a monastery.
 
Why so quickly? Because the joy of communal prayer quickly replaces the phone’s isolated dopamine hits. Which do I want: singing Gregorian Chant with a chapel full of brothers, or a few squeaky hits of “virtual” music from a little plastic device? There’s really no contest. One’s first immersion in monastic chant (if you are with people who know how to sing and know how to pray) simply floods the mind and soul. It drowns the temptation to look at merely virtual stuff. The trick, however, is persevere with the monks in their long prayers after the initial, other-worldly euphoria wears off.
 
The first night I sat on my little bed and looked at my alarm clock, which doubles as a smart phone. I was no longer tempted to look at digital media, but I was tempted to sleep through Matins until Lauds at 6am. But the monks start their day at 5am, so I sighed a little and set the alarm for 4:30. One wonders if one can really get up at 4:30, find one’s way to the chapel in the dark, and chant in Latin for 90 minutes, even for five days. But it gets easier each day.
 
I’ve done retreats at many monasteries, and each one delivers treasures. I received at least two this time. First, for priests, committing to the full monastic discipline means “hearing” a Mass before celebrating one yourself. This particular monastery uses the older form of the divine liturgy, which is broader, deeper, and fuller than more recent versions. In particular, Mass in the older usage does not have “concelebration,” so each priest offers his own Mass every day rather than simply joining another priest at Mass. But before the monks trundle off to find an altar for their individual Masses, the Prior offers a Sung Mass with all the monks around him “hearing” it. This opens up all sorts of treasures, as the priest need not concern himself with rubrics and “doing the Mass right.” He can simply pray the Mass, fully appreciating the texts, and joining his brothers in soaring chant before he will “say” his own Mass. It made me realize why older Catholics would talk of “hearing a Mass,” and how that is not a bad thing, as we were taught in the 1980s.
 
The second treasure I received from the monastery was the daunting night office, called “Matins,” which contains two “nocturnes.” In my monastery, Lauds followed immediately after Matins, so we were in the chapel from 5:00 to 6:30 each morning chanting the psalms, hymns, responses, and readings. The night and the morning offices, if combined, normally take an hour and a half, although at feast days it can take over two hours.
 
The only way to get through this (which includes constant posture changes, from standing to kneeling to bowing to sitting) is to surrender. You allow yourself to be carried along by the rhythms of scripture and tradition, drifting down the well-worn waterways traveled by so many before you. Pretty soon an hour or two has gone by, during which time you’ve seen some truly beautiful landscapes float by. Admittedly, it’s hard to get going at that hour of the morning, but after about 20 minutes I found myself in the “zone.” In fact, on the last day, even though I’m not that proficient in Latin, I was easily grasping every word for long stretches, almost as an infused knowledge. I know many of these psalms by heart after forty years of praying them in English, but I was still surprised and delighted to be chanting the same words Jews and Christians have been chanting for 3000 years, in an ancient language and in deeply-felt communion with them.
 
These long psalms describe Israel’s hopes and disappointments, her victories and defeats, her faith and her perfidy. Repeating them several times a week, one is lifted above the earth, transcending our own brief moment in history, seeing things from heaven’s perspective. One begins to see that life, as God so gives it, has its ups and downs, but that He is always with us. The monastic discipline, in my experience, leads one into a kind of ecstasy. It is not an irrational ecstasy, but a moving out of oneself into the logic of the Word Himself. Truly remarkable!
 
This particular monastery, like all communities, is not perfect. In all monasteries, saints and sinners, angels and demons, live within their hallowed walls. But thank God for them. Most people have never even visited a monastery, and few appreciate the inestimable good they do for all of us. Every young man or woman that assumes the monastic habit is trying to love God with all they have. The world, the flesh, and the devil pit themselves squarely against these men and women. Many persevere, and many do not. God bless them for trying to overcome evil with good, and for providing houses of deep prayer for all of us. The visible Church certainly depends on the invisible monastics more than we can ever know. St. Clare, pray for us!

Today is the remarkable feast of an unremarkable man, at least unremarkable in those things we normally consider important. For starters, John Vianney was a man “of average intelligence,” which means he should not have been much of an “influencer.” But, by God’s grace—and this is what makes today remarkable—he influenced all of Europe from his tiny country parish in southern France. After his death, he influenced the whole world, and in 2010, at what I think was the largest concelebrated Mass in history—16,000 priests with Pope Benedict in St. Peter’s Square—St. John Vianney was named “exemplar of parish priests across the universe.” If he were a girl, he might have been Miss Universe, and if parish priests ever run parishes on Mars or further afield in our galactic cluster, he will be their gold standard.
 
While studying for the priesthood in Rome, I lived with a religious community, the Oblates of the Virgin Mary. Every other Saturday night we would watch a movie together, and one Saturday an American brother told me we would be watching Tutti Insieme Appassionatamente. I looked a bit flummoxed, so he explained, with a wry smile, “that’s what the Italians call The Sound of Music.” Indeed, all the brothers were excited to watch this beloved movie together appassionatamente, and for those not yet conversant in Italian, the title could be translated “All Together Passionately!” That is a pretty good description of The Sound of Music. If you haven’t seen the movie in a few years, I recommend watching it again. It was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre; my mother took all of us kids to see it, saying something like “you children have to see this movie. It’s the best one ever made.”
 
And perhaps that was the beginning of my vocation to the diocesan priesthood. I love big families, and the movie awakened in me a love for big religious communities as well. Maria von Trapp goes from sisterhood to nannyhood to marriage with seven children. All of these relationships are “tutti insieme appasionatamente,” and it is being together that makes us happy. Of course, "being together" can be mighty hard at times, but human relationships are worth the price of admission.
 
A parish priest helps Jesus build human relationships into communities through God’s passionate love for all of us, together. A parish, like a family, can be a real community, if we work hard at it, with God’s grace. St. John Vianney turned out to be a remarkable parish priest in many aspects, but at the core was his burning love for Le Bon Dieu and God's people. The collect, or opening prayer for his Mass today, points this out:
 
Almighty and merciful God,
who made the Priest St. John Vianney wonderful in his pastoral zeal,
grant, we pray,
that through his intercession and example,
we may in charity win brothers and sisters for Christ
and attain with them eternal glory.
Through Christ Our Lord, your Son, in the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 
St. John didn’t want just to get to heaven alone. He wanted to attain eternal glory with them. He would spend 16 hours a day in the confessional to bring everybody into eternity with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A parish priest is a father, who will do anything to get every one of his children into eternal happiness. What would heaven be without even one of these children? 

It is said of an Irishman—a true Irishman—that he proposes to his intended in these words: “Would ye like to be buried with my people?” I thought of that as a joke until I came to live, even briefly, among them. The Irish—the true Irish—appreciation of death is remarkable. The Italian Francesco Bernardone called death his sister, but the Irishman might well call death his spouse. Death in Ireland is as natural as its grass-fed milk cows, and as supernatural as the rock-hewn chapels on its windswept islands. Death in Ireland is as familiar as a few hours with neighbors in the corner pub.
 
I lost my fear of death in France, at St. Thérèse’s tomb in Lisieux. As she lay dying at age 24, Thérèse had written je ne meurs pas; j’entre dans la vie: “I am not dying; I’m entering into life.” Suddenly sensing the scent of roses at her tomb in 1997, I knew that she was there. I knew that she was very much alive, and that she was telling me personally that she had not “died.” I lost my fear of death that day.
 
I gained a new respect for death in Italy, at Mother Teresa’s convent in Piombino, where I gave her sisters a weeklong retreat in 2010. The Contemplative Missionaries of Charity lived in the house given to them, which was the cemetery caretaker’s residence. They attended Mass, did their prayers, confessed their sins, and heard retreat talks all in a small funerary chapel, surrounded by the tombs of the rich and the poor. Hearing confessions atop the bones of those who had made their living in that fishing village centuries ago, I came to respect these people whom I had never known in life. I understood the nobility of death that week.
 
I came to love death in Ireland, among the people of this green land. Last week I did two village funerals, laying both to rest in the rich soil prepared by relatives. In America, where we have places to go and people to see, a funeral is a matter of two hours. In traditional Ireland, Christian burial takes three days. People stop what they are doing, and work is set aside in respect for the dead. The Irish, by the way, have a marvelous relationship with time. “When God made time,” the sacristan told me yesterday, “He made enough of it.”
 
On the first day, the body is laid out in the living room, and all spend four or five hours together as Uncle Anthony rests among them, hands folded over his rosary. We visit, we pray the rosary, and we visit some more, eating and drinking, telling stories and singing songs. Uncle Anthony's body stayed at home overnight, with his wife and children, as the Irish are not afraid to sleep with the dead. The Second day is a more formal rosary at the funeral home, but again, the people arrive two or three hours before the prayers and spend a few hours back at the house after the rosary. On the third day people come to the church for holy Mass, with a procession to the grave, which is usually just outside the church. We pray another rosary at the grave, and people spend another hour or two milling about, perhaps returning to the house for the afternoon.
 
My second funeral this week was for a stillborn child, and the third day took all day. Because the family had been up quite late visiting with friends and family on the second day, all slept rather later than usual on the third day. By late morning, however, all were preparing for the requiem at the church, which brought in great numbers from the village. No good Irishman wants to miss a funeral. After the requiem we took Avila Marie’s tiny body to St. Bartholomew’s cemetery in Kinneigh. The family have a small piece of ground at St. Bartholomew's where “their people” await the resurrection.
 
Amid graves and a round tower going back a thousand years, the father of the child, his father, and two brothers had dug the grave the day before. The father’s uncle had been laid in that ancestral grave sixty years before, and the diggers had found bits of his bones as they dug down. The child would sleep amid the relics of her great uncle in that rich soil.
 
After four men had lowered the tiny casket into the earth, we all went back to the house for dinner. The child’s father had given up drink when the doctors told his wife, two weeks previously, that the baby’s heart had stopped. He fasted as well, begging God for a miracle. But now that his daughter was safely back with God, he handed me a cup of tea soaked with Irish Whiskey, taking one for himself with a big smile. I spent an hour trying to understand local farm jokes through an impenetrable brogue before returning to my house for the evening. But the day was not done. The child’s father called me an hour later. “Would you like to come for the burial?”
 
A late afternoon sun was casting longer shadows and golden light through the green grass when we returned to Kinneigh cemetery. I said some more prayers, we lit a candle, and the father handed me a spade. He and I carefully placed the first shovelfuls of earth beside his daughter’s casket, and then everyone had their turn helping bury the dead. The aforementioned relics of Uncle Jeremiah went into the grave with the black earth, and when all were cozily packed in together, several “flags” (flat stones) were tamped down atop the ground. We prayed a final prayer, sang a final song, and departed.
 
But the day was not over. The minivans reassembled, by unspoken agreement, at the village fish-and-chips takeout. As we waited for curry chips and potato pies to be prepared, the children raced between family vehicles and played tag in the street. Then, toting our hot supper in thick brown paper bags, we returned to the house for another hour or two of eating, talking, and giving thanks.
 
Every culture has its own genius when it comes to death. I may be pardoned for being partial to Christian cultures, but I must say that Irish Catholic traditions around death are particularly remarkable. The Irish intuition of and love for human nature is extraordinary, and it does not end with death. More than most, the Irish move naturally among the communion of saints, both here and hereafter. Uncle Jeremiah and baby Avila Marie sleep in the same grave, no longer separated by sixty years and two continents.
 
The baby’s cousins, still on this side of the grave, were taught not to fear death. They saw their kinswoman’s body laid out for three days, not afraid to touch her tiny limbs as they dried up, slowly returning to the earth. They were not afraid to look upon Uncle Jeremiah's occasional vertebrae mixed with the dark soil of their native land. Yesterday they saw how we return to the soil, from which we were taken. But they also saw that the men and women in that soil are more than earth. The celtic crosses atop their tombs testify to their hope beyond this life, and beyond death.

Recently I heard an interview with Clare Morell about her book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. The essential problem with “screens,” she said, is that they stimulate excitement (dopamine) without joy (oxytocin). The body releases the “feel-good” neurotransmitter dopamine when one sees exciting images or hears thrilling sounds. The body releases the “bonding” neurotransmitter oxytocin when one makes eye contact or touches another person. Screens cannot provide oxytocin.
 
What’s a “neurotransmitter?” It’s a hormone, meaning it’s a chemical or a drug, like adrenaline or endorphins, that the body releases in needful situations. Oxytocin helps bond people and is released, for example, when a mother nurses her child or two spouses come together. Without God’s gift of oxytocin, there would be a lot more divorces—it gives parents sufficient feelings of bonding to stay together when the going gets rough. Without oxytocin, it would be much harder to take joy in any close human relationship, because our annoyance would outweigh our delight in that other person. Smartphones can provide dopamine hits (excited pleasure) but not oxytocin (long lasting joy) because the latter requires eye-to-eye contact and/or physical touch.
 
If used indiscriminately, screens are not only addicting but rather joyless. If you are staring at a phone instead of making eye contact with people, you will not get enough oxytocin to keep existential loneliness at bay. Young people, especially, tend to use machines incorrectly if not given adequate training. No one puts a 15-year-old behind a steering wheel without training them, and no one should put a phone in a 15-year-old's hand without training. The studies show that we are not giving our children adequate training or age-specific support. Young people are getting sadder and more isolated the more we leave them alone with their phones. It’s worth noting that “smart” countries, like France, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands, have banned smartphones from schools.
 
When I was fourteen, Mom banished TV from our home. Before that we were allowed to watch four primetime TV shows a week, plus Saturday morning cartoons. Little House and the Prairie was one of those four shows, but TV was becoming too prurient for Mom and Dad. He especially deplored televised violence, so Mom did away with the cathode ray tube altogether. Dad had long been advocating for that, turning off the TV every time he heard gunshots from the box.
 
In disobedience to Mom’s new rule, I hid a little TV under my bed. I continued watching Little House on the Prairie on Wednesday nights, but at low volume and from a little mirror placed opposite the bed. If Mom unexpectedly came into the room, I would yank a string tied to the wall switch. Besides being a mortal sin (Commandment Number Four), this innovation made everything appear backwards: the mirror reversed the TV image. So instead of Mr. Ingalls riding from left to right through the prairie, his horse went from right to left. I thought I was pretty smart, and I dreamed of someday inventing a radio with a little tv screen in it, so I could take my favorite shows with me wherever I went.
 
My dream has come true. I carry a little radio with me that has a screen with unlimited TV shows, movies, and music at the tap of a finger. Since the 1970s, however, New York and Los Angeles have amped up the prurience. It’s up to Dads and Moms to do what mine did forty-five years ago: écrasez l'infâme. It can be done, and it is being done. That’s the good news in Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit book. Maybe I can coin the word texit to describe how families are doing the needful. They are getting rid of the screens and bravely enduring the 30-day withdrawal period. Some young people even suffer the delirium tremens, or at least pretend to, as they withdraw, but on the other side they are stronger, smarter, and more loving than before their addiction. Like France and the Netherlands, I’ve banished cell phones from my school. When parents see the results, they get serious about keeping their children safe from screens at home. “I can talk with my daughter again!” they tell me with joy. “She can do her homework in half the time now! She is so much happier, and the whole family is more peaceful!”
 
The French government and Fr. Illo have banned “smart” phones from our schools. But that’s only 40 hours a week, when school is in session. What about the other 128 hours of your child’s life? Or your life, for that matter? “Only you, dear parents, can prevent forest fires.” So do the needful, and get rid of the problem.