News - September 2017 RSS Feed

When I returned for my second year at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., everyone was talking about the death of Father Stanley Rother, an Oklahoma priest who had been killed at his mission parish in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. He was a “Mount” alumnus. It was big news; in all of the newspapers. It captured my attention and fired my imagination. From that time on I have always been eager to learn all that I could about the life of this heroic parish priest.

It has been a few weeks since violent confrontations in Charlottesville, Va., drew our attention with renewed urgency to the troubling fact of racism in our society. These ugly events have been the latest manifestation of an age-old wound in our national consciousness caused by the sin of racism.