May 2004

I am in Ottawa today, visiting my family, and in the afternoon I decided to pop in to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to visit a friend of mine, Msgr. Mario Paquette. Msgr. Paquette is a priest of the Archdiocese of Montreal, but since March he has been working at the CCCB as the General Secretary (sorta the “chief operating officer” of the Conference).

I received a rather unusual compliment after my homily today:

“Fr. Tom, your homilies are like a baseball bat. They just demolish everything we believe in!”

Excuse me?

What she meant was, the homily that day tackled head-on some of the uncritical assumptions people have about religion in our post-modern society, and that it confronted those assumptions with the truths found in scripture.

That’s better!

I’ve mentioned in the past how I am the clergy liaison for the healing ministry for our diocese, and today we had a meeting of those interested in re-booting that ministry in our diocese.

We began by putting Christ is the centre of our vision, by recognizing that when we visit the sick and pray with them, it is really Christ we are visiting. Our service to the sick is a ministry to the suffering Christ.

Being a blogger means that I sometimes get email from the most interesting people, and I must say I really enjoy meeting people that way — it has been part of the joy of blogging, at least for me. But a few weeks ago I received a most unusual request.

We had a meeting this evening of our Baptism Steering Committee, to try and plan how we want to improve what it is we are doing here at the parish. We love baptism itself, of course — no one want to try and improve on God’s sacraments — but the things surrounding the sacrament are within our control: things like the preparation, the follow-up, and even the quality of the celebration itself.

Yesterday was my 3rd anniversary of ordination to the deaconate. On that day I accepted to become a “servant,” in obedience to my bishop and his successors. I also made a formal promise to remain celibate for the rest of my life.

Elections Canada has posted a special page regarding the upcoming federal election. If you are looking for information regarding your riding, or even just want to know what your riding is, you should check this out. As for the riding of Lac-St-Louis, where I live, to date the candidates are (in alphabetical order by party):

We live in an era of increasing globalization, driven by an economic movement that promotes international free trade in an effort to reduce costs. However, this has the effect of sometimes driving down the value of people’s work (especially in the Third World) to a point where they live in virtual slavery and cannot see any hope for bettering their condition. Enter the Fair Trade movement.

A discussion I recently had with a parishioner eventually turned to the question of malevolence, because of things that were being experienced. I firmly believe that there exist malevolent personalities out there. I also think that many of us are poorly equipped to deal with such persons when we encounter them.

My friend Fr. Stephen Otvos attended the March for Life in Ottawa May 13, 2004. While there another participant overheard him mention that he was a priest from Montreal, and she asked him “Are you Fr. Tom Dowd?” Apparently Fr. Stephen had run into one of the readers of my blog! That is really neat. Message received, Fed!

I’ve decided that, as part of my vacation, I want to “honeymoon with the Lord” by staying for a week (at least) in a monastery. People sometimes find it strange that I would want to spend part of my vacation in a monastery, but if the Lord really is my beloved, I don’t see why this is so hard to understand.

We had our second Saturday of confirmations here at the parish, this time presided by Bishop André Rivest. I just love this man. I would follow him to the edge of the pit of hell, if he told me it was necessary for the glory of God. But I digress….

In my dealings with Evangelicals and Pentecostals, I have found they can be largely grouped into two categories: those whose fundamental self-definition is what they believe, and those who define themselves according to what they do *not* believe. And the second category often has to do with contrasting their faith with Catholicism — or, more accurately, what they *think* is Catholicism.

The other night I had the pleasure of having dinner with my good friend Paul Robichaud and his wife Isabelle Lafortune. (In case you were wondering, the law here in Quebec is that women do not take their husband’s name when they marry — hence the different last names).

I went on a 25 km bike trip today (25 km = 15 miles, approx.). I decided to bike around Île Bizard, which is part of my parish. While 25 km is a bit ambitious for only my second bike trip this year, there are two lovely parks that I like to stop at while touring the island. The first is a part of Parc Cap-St-Jacques, which has a marshy area teeming with life — turtles, tadpoles, small fish, and so on. If you are quiet, you can see quite a bit. But the real treat this time was the next rest stop.

Today we had our Episcopal Vicar, Msgr. Sean Harty, come to offer the sacrament of Confirmation to the children of our parish. The two celebrations we had were well-attended, and a reverent atmosphere prevailed throughout. I think our kids got a lot out of it, so my only real hope now is that it doesn’t become their graduation ceremony from the Catholic Church.

Our parish has been engaged in a stewardship initiative, in which we are trying to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit for various areas of parish pastoral life. We are doing this through a series of “town hall meetings,” each with a theme derived from our Parish Pastoral Action Plan. The most recent was family ministry.

No, I don’t mean Bush vs. Kerry…..I’m *Canadian*, remember? But here in Canada we are also expecting to have a federal election sometime in June or July. The Canadian bishops have therefore decided to publish a very interesting document, one that I think our American friends might also enjoy, setting forth principles to help Catholic voters make their prudential judgement when they vote on election day. It’s worth checking out.

I went out for coffee last night with one of my parishioners. He is a psychology major at Concordia University, and was one of my students a while ago. Our conversation was somewhat freewheeling, taking in (in no particular order) the proper way to make a cappuccino, the weakness of the Euro vs. the American Dollar, and the strengths and weaknesses of Quebec public policy regarding education.