In his youth, Jesuit Father Patrick Conroy pictured himself as a lawyer and a senator, working in the deep recesses of Washington's U.S. Capitol building. In a way, he's doing just that but not in the way he imagined.
Ordinary lives, however quiet or unnoticed, are a sequence of miracles, tragedies and triumphs. Everyone stumbles into hell and is repeatedly resurrected into ultimate beauty.
As a Twin Cities lawyer for 30 years, Anne Krisnik channeled her passion for social justice issues into her volunteer activities, among them, two decades of cooking once a month at the Catholic Charities Family Service Center in Maplewood. She planned upon retirement to devote more time to fight systemic poverty, which she hasn’t been able to do with a full-time job.
Ken Hackett, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, is gearing up to try retirement for the second time. The retired president of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops' overseas aid agency, is leaving his ambassadorial post three years and three months after presenting his credentials to Pope Francis.
A bigger challenge than distance awaited Evon and Charles Wells-Ellis in their decision to have Evon’s mother, Grace Wells, move into their St. Paul home. Wells, 83, from Omaha, Nebraska, needed wheelchair access and other physical adaptations to live at Wells-Ellis’ Aurora-St. Anthony neighborhood home near St. Peter Claver. The cost of the changes looked daunting at $40,000-$50,000.
After graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1966, Tom Foley didn’t want to dive into the corporate world right away. Instead, he wanted to give of himself to those most in need.
If you flipped on the television around this time last year, you may have caught a glimpse of Stacey Jackson alongside religious sisters in an episode of "The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns," a Lifetime network reality series following five women as they discerned the religious life.
Almost every day Terry Adamson takes a Metro Mobility bus from her New Hope apartment to St. Joseph in West St. Paul. When she arrives, fellow parishioners are drawn to her joyful, loving presence.
