By Matthew D. Ruhl, SJ
Wednesday/February 7, 2018/Belize City, Belize
Last week Angie and I were at the Central and Southern Province Pastoral meeting in Dallas, Texas, with all 18 parish pastors and associates. The theme was Reconciliation, not the Confession-type, but reconciliation amongst persons and groups of persons, a very poignant theme given the nefarious divisions in the world today and the horrible pain and death caused by them. Perhaps the primary impulse coming out of this meeting was the dire need to train parishioners as Jesuit Colleagues, an enterprise suffering great, if benign, neglect in any parishes, St. Martin’s topping the list.
On Wednesday night under the cover of darkness, rain, and belief that nobody was in the rectory, four young men tried to break in. They jimmied three locks at two different doors, then kicked and kicked, but deadbolts, barricades, and barking dogs prevented the gentlemen from gaining entrance. Nonetheless, after such events we always evaluate our security measures and make necessary fixes.
The Springfield-Cape Girardeau Diocese has sent St. Martin’s 125 much-needed desks and chairs. Our students are very hard on the furniture and the wooden Mennonite-crafted desks that normally fill so many of the country’s primary classrooms are of degraded quality these days. I only wish I could afford the shipping costs of lots and lots of desks as there are plenty of Catholic school desks in storage in the USA.
And January 31st was a beautiful blue moon. Belize City was cloudy and rainy, but I was in Dallas and saw the gorgeous red spectacle rising over Lewisville Lake. Lunar events in January have been very auspicious and bode well for 2018!
