/
RSS Feed
Episode Description
The TCA team talks about a rise in young Catholic women wearing veils at Mass, whether to show “reverence for the Eucharist” or to emulate the Blessed Mother or to simply feel more dressy and feminine at church. The practice of veiling fell out of favor after the Second Vatican Council, but is seeing a resurgence in recent years in what Father Roger Landry, Catholic Chaplain of Columbia University, calls “an attempt to be maximally reverent to God at Mass and in receiving Holy Communion.”
We also catch up with Tom Carroll on his Catholic Talent Project as he continues to spearhead a renaissance of Catholic education. The project was launched to counter the alarming percentage of youth who walk away from the Catholic faith despite years of parochial education. The initiative seeks to cultivate faithful Catholic witnesses to serve in Catholic schools across the nation and mentor future educators and students to live out their faith in the classroom and beyond.
Father Roger Landry offers an inspiring homily to prepare us for this Sunday’s Gospel.
Bios
Tom Carroll is President and Founder of the Catholic Talent Project. He previously served as the Secretary of Education and Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Archdiocese of Boston, overseeing nearly 100 schools, 4,000 staff and 32,000 students. He is a Consultor to the USCCB Committee on Education, a former President of the Invest in Education Foundation, and the founder of the Brighter Choice Foundation. He earned his Masters in Political Science from the University at Albany and his Certificate in Strategy Execution from Harvard Online Business School. He was named a Hall of Fame Inductee by the Catholic Education Foundation.
Father Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. He writes for numerous Father Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. Father Landry recently completed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage, an event that coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 280 Transcript
| Grazie | Hello friends, and welcome to Conversations with Consequences. And we are the radio show and podcast of the Catholic Association where we aim to change the culture one conversation at a time. You can listen to conversations with consequences on the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network Saturday mornings at 7 a.m. Eastern, or catch the encore at 5 p.m.. We are also on Sirius XM Channel 130. Of course, our radio show is always podcast. Go to the Catholic Association, Dawgs podcasts or directly to wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm your host, Dr. Gracie Christie. And joining me today as co-host is is Ashley McGuire. Welcome, Ashley. Gracie And we have a special guest today and his name is Tom Carroll, and he's the former superintendent of Boston Archdiocese Catholic Schools who has a new venture. He's been on the show before. He's an old friend and he's always right in the right where he where where Catholic education ought to be. That's where Tom Carroll is. Welcome to the show, Tom. |
| Tom Carroll | Thanks. Glad to be on with both of you. |
| Grazie | So you had a you had a big job as superintendent of Boston Archdiocese Catholic schools. And I feel like you moved on to a bigger job, which is it embraces the entire country and the entire country. And Catholic schooling, which you're on conversations with consequences. And at the Catholic Association is a very big a very big deal for us. So tell us about your new project and what you're hoping to achieve. |
| Tom Carroll | Sure. First of all, just a little backdrop on my five years in Boston, because that really gave birth to this idea as I came in, as I'm a Catholic convert. I converted about 20 years ago, so I never attended Catholic schools myself. So and never taught in them. Or was a principal Weiner ever worked for a guy Dioceses, they say. Joseph I had worked for the church, state worlds, all this bureaucracy before. I probably wouldn't have applied for the job, but but at any rate, when I came to it with a fresh set of eyes, I had run very successful urban charter schools in Albany, New York. But when I came in and looked at a lot of the schools, there were a couple of things that struck me as one, that a lot of the people in the Catholic Church believe they're playing a losing hand and they act that way. And I don't think if you're trying again, I don't think you draw people to yourself having a hangdog face. I think optimism and joy is a lot more appealing. And it's one of the reasons the joy of Catholicism is one of the reasons I converted. I think it's a naturally joyful faith. So first I had to show that there was a way forward and that it was not as Cardinal Dolan once called it, Using a can be dark Irish sense of humor is that Catholic education has become hospice care. We know the patients dying. We're just trying to manage the pain on the way out. |
| Grazie | that's dark and right. |
| Tom Carroll | And so you have to know, is that to your mind, that's not the desired state. He was just trying to make a point. So that's what I encounter, which is a lot of people just thought they were playing out the kind of a final death scene of a very long opera. So one, I wanted to show that you can actually start the fall of enrollment. So you had from 1965 four all across the country with the exception of Miami, because of immigration and Lincoln, Nebraska, which is the most Catholic place in the United States. And the reason I came to believe that it was going down was that that the Catholic schools had lost their way. And I concluded that my job needed to become putting the Catholic back in Catholic schools. And it had to start with putting the right team on the field. And it's the goal is if you believe that the goal of a Catholic school is to evangelize children and to bring put God back at the center of their life and then set them on a path to eternal salvation that affects everything you do in terms of the design of the school. But most particularly the people you put in front of them. And this has been so great a way is found in the Catholic Talent Project. So Saint Paul, the six in 1975, said Modern Man more willingly listens to witnesses than to teachers. And if he listens to teachers, it's because they're witnesses. So I came to the conclusion that, one, he was completely right and that we needed to put a witness in every single classroom. And we also needed to witness in every school leader position and broadly across the country that you need to have a witness in all the different superintendent jobs around the country. Because if you have a lukewarm superintendent, they then appoint lukewarm principals. The principals hire lukewarm teachers. You then have a lukewarm school and it attracts people and actually going to create with Catholic teaching. And then you end up running basically a secular school that charges private tuition. So I proved in Boston, I started the first time enrollment was stabilized since 1965 for almost the entire five years that I was there. And I turned over 75% of the school leaders and then started an initiative called the same Thomas Moore Teaching Fellowship, which is continuing into my new venture. So I basically, if you're familiar with the Federalist Society, they basically they've developed a talent pyramid. The first the foundation is on the district court judge appointments, and then whoever is, you know, trustworthy as a district court appointment, also again put forward for a circuit court of appeals. And the people are really trustworthy, get put forward and create the Supreme Court. The most amazing kind of turnaround of an institution where, as you noted, the fall of Roe v Wade, for example, and a court that now is solidly Catholic, but also very fervent in its defense of religious freedom. So in a different context, we're taking that same strategy. The bottom and the talent pyramid is the teachers. That's the front line experience that every child has. And then out of that, I will identify people that have the potential to become school leaders, and then I will train them up over time. And then out of that, I will grow people that I think will be spectacular superintendents. And so after I left, I came in five years ago. I knew when I took the job that Cardinal O'Malley was going to turn 80 this past June and then would be retired. It's a normal retirement age for a bishop. They have to offer their resignation when they're 75, but they pretty much have to leave when they're 80. So he's leaving in October. And as a joke to me, I guess we're going off into the sunset together time. So he's going off to do whatever, which hasn't been announced yet. And so I left in June and July. I launched the Catholic Talent Project, and the goal is to cultivate educators who are fully Catholic and of faith is alive and to put in these witnesses in all the different positions, all the way up the food chain, if you will, the talent pyramid of Catholic schools. And and the backdrop to this, which is really important, is, as you know, there's been a lot of articles on disaffiliation, people walking away from all major religions. But other Catholics say the numbers which the Cara group at Georgetown puts out every year, by the time kids who are raised in Catholic families, not the general public, but explicitly Catholic families, 50% of them lose their faith by age 13, a staggering 86% lose their faith by the time they're 18. So we have in Catholic schools, we have kids from preschool through 12th grade, literally for 16,000 waking hours when to maybe a couple of math classes. They may be occasionally snoozing and but but that's a maximum. It's more waking hours than parents have their kids if they send their kids to school. I mean home schooling parents would be different. So the question is, how could we take a church that's offering a religion, that's offering infinite mercy and it turns picture and has a joyful disposition to it and not be able to sell that in 16000 hours and we create it. And by the way, along the way, we created Western civilization and we have a Catholic, you know, the Catholic intellectual tradition rivals any other intellectual tradition since the dawn of mankind. So and we have the largest global footprint of service to the poor and the dispossessed, the marginalized. So we have a lot to work with there. And I think the reason we're not we're not selling it is most school don't believe in evangelization. They think that's kind of what Mormons do. Evangelical Protestants and Catholics don't do that. They're dead wrong. And that led to me being very careful about everybody. I hired four principal jobs to get people with the right frame of mind. And it's just people that we have. It's messy. And any diocesan school, not everybody agrees with what the church teaches and not everybody lives the life of virtue. And so the kids watch this and when they're little, they may be short, but they're not stupid. They see the hypocrisy and it's not always compelling. And so I think we have to basically reboot the whole system. And it all starts with getting the talent. And so I've dedicated the balance of my working life to finding the talent around the country, starting with two dioceses, Boston and San Francisco, and then eventually adding two major dioceses every year. |
| Grazie | We're talking to Tom Carroll. He's a former superintendent of Boston Catholic Schools, out with a new venture called the Catholic Talent Project to improve Catholic schooling across the United States. |
| Ashley | What you're saying resonates so much with me. We have five kids and, you know, they are a mix of Catholic independent schools and Catholic parochial schools. And it's I was just so amazed to see the way that the parochial schools handled the COVID pandemic. And I know that that was something that you were, you know, neck deep in and I think really showed the public the difference between a Catholic education and everything else, because they were the ones that opened up even before that, the fancy private, the church, you know, $70,000 a year. And they just the commitment to education just was so different. And and it's been really sad to me to see, you know, what you're talking about these the kind of diluting of that culture. And it's it's really costing the schools. And I'm seeing just in my own community the way that people are kind of peeling away the faithful Catholic families from parochial schools in many cases for some of these Catholic independent schools. But there's you know, there's room. The world is wide enough. We need both. And so I think what you're doing is so important. How are you vetting the talent? You know what? What's the profile you're looking for? What are the key characteristics that you're looking for in in these Catholic educational leaders? |
| Tom Carroll | I think that's a really good question, because what I'm looking for is completely different and what everybody else is looking for. And so I never run into people competing with me for talent because nobody else is looking in the same way. But the reason is what what people traditionally do. They say, I need a teacher, so where's the obvious place to go? Well, I go to a teacher's college and then even people who know that many higher education institutions have gone stark raving mad, well, in education, school is also a higher education institution, and often they're the most vocal part of the higher education institution. But they're teaching things like how do you do lesson plans and how do you, you know, align your curriculum as all of that stuff is important. That's actually the easiest part of it, because I was I was in Boston, We had 3000 teachers. I had plenty of people who could teach. They got somebody spanking fresh out of college, a four year degree. I had plenty people to teach them that stuff, and it wouldn't take two years to teach them that either. Right. And so I've always been a fan of the Teach for America model, which is stripped down to what you really need to teach and do it over the summer and then put them in a classroom because you learn a lot of it. You have to learn by actually doing much in the way as you're learning carpentry. It's not just all like reading textbooks. You actually have to you get that you refine your craft over time by actually performing it. So when I started to look for the characteristics that not be taught. So number one is I'm looking for people who believe in God right now. That sounds funny for like a Catholic superintendent to say they get so obvious, but we have lots of people who have been hired who either are not religious or if they're Catholic, they they disagree with everything from Humanae Vitae forward and increasingly people that have come out of the ED schools in the last few years don't agree with Genesis. God created man and woman. So if you take my view is, is you take the viewpoint that you as an individual get to decide what is divinely revealed spirit, then you basically made yourself God, which is a very, Catholic way of looking at, right? So you either believe in the whole thing or you don't believe in it, right? You can't believe in some and not the others. You know, you could be basically like a congregational private thing and do that, but you can't be a Catholic and take that approach. So I'm looking for people who are all in people believe that agree with the moral teachings of the Catholic Church, including the top stuff and the things that sometimes make you squirm because it all hangs together in an intellectually coherent way. And then I'm looking for people who are intellectually curious and I joke, I'm looking for somebody who's got three or four books on their nightstand, which they may never finish what they an independent bookstore by another three or four books that they may not say. That's like the only addiction I'm into. But because I think that that thirst for knowledge and reading whatever you're reading is contagious. And when kids see that, I think it's a good quality in parents to always read in front of their kid because they see how much joy you get from reading it becomes contagious. And so I think that's really important. You have to have a certain personality. I guess Winston Churchill came back to life. I would listen to him for 7 hours a day for 180 days a year because it's what we ask of teachers that keep people to be so compelling that they can keep the attention of students at a very young age for a really long period of time, requires somebody that has a lot of charisma with no disrespect to library science people, but I'm not working for library science personalities. Right. And I say that with all respect. My mom used to work in a library and she didn't have that kind of personality. But so I'm looking for somebody who has a I mean, I'm talking to a guy like I'm looking for somebody who looks like they can play rugby even if they don't. Right? So I'm looking for, you know, that kind of personality and I'm looking for work ethic, which again, like 20, 30 years ago not sound like, you know. really? Right. But you wouldn't have to ask that question. So but I'm looking for people that ever since they could work, depending on the state, 14, 15 or 16 for it, that they've had a job and the gravity of the job that that I mean literally if they were picking cigaret out of a urinal, more likely to hire them. And if they were a tennis coach in a country club that their mom or dad lined up for them. Right. I'm not looking for a spoiled rich kid. I'm looking for people with some great because going into high school in which most of the people don't agree with you, like how fervent you are and just being a first year teacher no matter what the circumstance are, it's really, really tough. I mean, it can bring you to your knees on certain days. So what I'm telling people, when a recruiter might strap on your cross, I mean, that's what this is going to be like. And you have to say for the sake of saving the souls of the children, I don't actually care about saving schools. People got annoyed when I said that it Superintendent, our job is to save souls. Any way we can. And so that's the focus of the joy that you'll get as a teacher. The first time you bring a child newly to God is just completely exhilarating. And all the sleepless nights and all the aggravation from overbearing parents from time to time will all just fade away in the distance if you're able to pull that off. And then I am looking for somebody who I think has the personality where they can lead a child through conversion. And that means you have to have the ability for children to know that you love and care deeply about them. Because if you don't, kids can sense it and then you'll you will not be able to get out of what you need to get out of them. So that's that's a tall order. But those things are really if I can't teach somebody, if somebody doesn't pick up a book or has an in a while and they're 22 years old, they went all the way to college and they're not excited about learning, I can't fix that. Somebody never had a job, somehow got coddled all the way to 22. I'm not taking a bet on a person like that. So anyway, that's what I look for and I find there's an unlimited supply of people who are missionary oriented, who are looking for something to do. They often and I don't think this is a knock on them. It's very difficult to say what you want to do for your entire life. Right? So there are a lot of kids I chose. I'm going to become the full employment act for unemployed little arts majors. There'll be nobody living in their parents basement. Once this program gets fully launched, because nobody will have. |
| Grazie | To time you. You're very you're very descriptive when it comes to the person sitting in the classroom, the teacher in the classroom, and and and really, it makes so much sense to me. I also have five children like like Ashley. And I've been and my children have been in Catholic, all types of different Catholic schools always, as I'm also a Catholic school product. What I notice is that you can have great teachers in the classroom, but if the leadership of the school doesn't have that mentality of these children are ours because we're going to make sure that they get to heaven. And if the mentality is, you know, we're going to have the best academic program and the best fields and we're going to attract we're going to have a long list of of parents on the waiting list, trying to get their children in that are competitive, like they're competing with the many times competing with secular private schools for that for the same pool of parents. How do you get the right person in the right people in leadership positions with the right with the right with the right? I'm sorry. I was going to say with with the proper idea of Catholic education and like, what's it for? |
| Tom Carroll | Yeah, it's very challenging. But first you have to decide what the goal is, right? So so I have a very clear vision of what I think the school should be. And so I need so out of the people that applied for principal jobs in my five years, I excluded 85% of the candidates, almost solely on a religious litmus test. Right after I went in as superintendent, conveniently, the Supreme Court issued a case called Our Lady of Guadalupe in the name of a child being any of our Lady, Guadalupe is the name of a school in California. And they basically took the proposition that a or reaffirmed the proposition that a religious institution is allowed to discriminate based on religion. No discrimination is a bad word, but it means to make distinctions. Right. So, for example, if your are Muslim, you can't become a Catholic priest. You have to be Catholic to be a Catholic priest. So the Supreme Court took that and basically said the same applies to teachers because teachers have a central role in in being the evangelizing force for the for the Catholic Church. And the schools exist for that purpose. And they said that generically for religious institutions. And so as a result of that, because the Supreme Court and very direct language said you're allowed to make distinctions on the basis of religion based on the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment, our lawyers, who are very cautious, said, I can ask any question that related to Catholic teachings, including the moral teachings. So I went through I asked people every question you could possibly imagine about what they believed in, what they didn't believe, what their faith practice was. How often do they go to confession? Do they go to adoration? You know, where do they go to church? You know, what's their interior life like and so forth. And a lot of people looked at me like he just committed five or six felonies by asking those questions. And then I back up and explain the court decision and the reasoning and, you know, and all that stuff to them. Because in a corporate setting where your religious beliefs should have nothing to do with whether you get a job or not, it should be a legal, but in a religious setting, it's completely appropriate to make sure that the person carrying the message to the church actually believes in it. And because if they if they're not that they're an inauthentic witness, they're not really a witness at all. So that's what I did. And so and then I traveled all across the country almost everybody I had met, I find out anyone I had met in education, I basically got them knowing it was like secretly in my mind, interviewing them to see if they were the right kind of person. Sometimes I don't think people principal jobs. Over lunch, I had a case, a person, a charter school, a girl in seventh or eighth grade became pregnant and principal in the other faculty of a charter school in Boston were suggesting she go to Planned Parenthood to have an abortion. And then the person I was having lunch with was telling me that he was told he could not have a conversation with the girl about adoption options because that was religious, which it is. But I mean, obviously Catholic Church is pro adoption, but is that you can have that position without being a Catholic. And so I got him to become a Catholic school leader because he did not want to cooperate with moral evil anymore. And so I made him a principal of the school. We did a spectacular job. So like literally everywhere I go and teachers, anytime I find any parent or grandparent that has a college kid, I end up I've met people and I met people just at lunch. I just I could be at a charity event anywhere. I'm always quizzing people the age of the kids, what they're studying and so forth. And then just and I just meet an unbelievable number of kids who are freshmen all the way through senior year and then sometimes work on them for like two or three years to get to become a teacher. So there's literally nobody else doing this. And because the superintendent jobs are many, it's very hard to do while you're doing everything else you're supposed to do. So that's why I stayed with the Catholic Talent Project since I had an interest in a passion for cultivating talent by identifying people, I think I have a really good eye for talent, but also cultivating. And so people that I brought in at different levels, I've made people at very young ages. I've moved them along into an apprentice principal, then assistant principal at a principal job. I've hired like three or four people and their mid-twenties to be principal, which is very unusual for a diocese, but I thought they'd be great at evangelization, had the personality. They were strong leadership. They wouldn't be whipsawed by parents who wanted them to change the school, so forth. So it's just it's a contact sport. You have to talk to an awful lot of people and you have to sort people and you have to be willing to say, no, I had a great time. Ask him when he goes to church. And he said, Well, I work on the weekends, so I don't go to church. I said, Where do you travel for business? He said, Chicago. It's not like, Are you telling me there's no Catholic churches in Chicago? It wasn't like on every other corner, you know? So it's just when that happens. I just ended the interview, so there's a bunch of times I've done that. So but I bet you in any other lots of other superintendents would suggest in the desperation to have a warm body where they said if they could get a letter vouching that they were a Catholic in good standing, they would just get the person forward. And that's a huge disservice to the future of all the kids whose souls are in the custody of that principal. |
| Ashley | I remember one of my kids, they're not at the parochial school anymore, but that school while we were there, had a change in the superintendent, and that was a huge deal. It was, you know, the previous superintendent who was a nun, had been there for, I think, decades. And it really kind of shifted the culture of the school. And so I know how kind of seismic those leadership changes are for the families. How are you kind of executing this? I'm just thinking of how much you went into just one change and you're talking about multiple superintendents. Are are schools approaching you? Are you approaching the diocese? Is are you working with chancellors? How are you? Actually, yeah. |
| Tom Carroll | So I've been in Congress. |
| Ashley | And leadership change. |
| Tom Carroll | So I think once I started doing this kind of I've been out of it all over the country, it got a lot of attention. So I've got a lot of calls from superintendents and bishops over the years. And when I explained why and they were wonder why I was spending so much time out of the archdiocese. Right. And people within the archdiocese, you know, thought it was odd to write. So I got criticism internally. And so I'm thankfully the cardinal who is a holy Franciscan, you know, backed me up every time he knew what I was doing and was, you know, behind it. But a lot of other people thought it. We should just hire people out of the education. Schools were fit to be time. But but anyway, so right now I'm looking at the virtue of just doing two a year Boston Dynamics, because I know everybody there, right? And then and San Francisco, I had to say there is a change and there was a vacancy in the superintendent. And so that led to me having a pretty long sit down with Archbishop Cordileone in San Francisco. And I worked with him and a bunch of other people. And there was a search firm and so forth, but somebody that I know really well and actually used to run retreats for me for the same time as More Fellows program. He was a theology teacher, Portsmouth Abbey, and around the Portsmouth Institute, he ended up becoming superintendent. So the combination of him as superintendent and Cordileone, who again, seven years left, which is a lot of time to do what we need to get done here. So, I mean, if I knew, if I knew what I know now, that day one, I could have done ten times as much. But Cordileone as you know, as I spoke to Chris Fisher, the new superintendent, and, you know, he says he's as strong of a backbone of any bishop that I've ever met. So I think I think they're going to do amazing things. So he was very interested because he knew Cordileone knew I was recruiting people, for example, at Thomas Aquinas College in California, and getting him to to move 2400 miles to work in Boston. But they weren't going to San Francisco. And so I explained what my sales pitch was. And I don't I don't go in and say, Hey, do you want to be a teacher? I say, Hey, do you want to save the souls of a generation of children? And along the way, say, the Catholic Church? |
| Grazie | And you know, Tom, the the right person jumps at that, right? And I that must be that must be wonderful. And when you say that to somebody and they jump and. |
| Tom Carroll | Meet, 80% of the people I recruited never plan on being a teacher. |
| Grazie | that's amazing. You know, that gives me a lot of hope, Tom, And I think it gives our listeners a lot of hope for Catholic education because we do see the problems. We see the lack of Catholic identity, right? It's a lack of Catholic identity in so many Catholic schools. So thank you so much for for joining us and telling us about your new project, which is called the Catholic Talent Project. And we're going to what can we read about it So and and pray. |
| Tom Carroll | Thank you. And the website is Catholic Tower and Project Board. My contact information is I'm and my wife thinks I'm a little crazy putting my doubts on a website. But so I talk to people all the time if they need advice on their own situation or want to know more about what we do, just ask everybody who's questioning who any grandparent a parent worries about the fates of their children or grandchildren to pray for the success of the Catholic Allen Project. |
| Grazie | Thank you. Welcome back to Conversations with Consequences. I'm your host is Dr. Gracie Christie, and I'm joined by two co-hosts. This is today, Ashley McGuire and Lee Sneed. Welcome to the show, ladies. We are so trying to talk to both of you. |
| Ashley | Absolutely. |
| Grazie | We want to talk about a couple of different subjects that interest us this week. One subject has to do well in my mind, it has to do with a Eucharistic revival that American Catholics are engaged in on one level or another. We just had the beautiful Eucharistic Congress where tens of thousands of Catholics attended and there was it was truly beautiful. It was so gorgeously reverent. And the idea, right, is that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, and that as Americans or maybe Catholics in general in the West, we have fallen away from the from the knowledge and the the concept that Jesus is actually present in the Eucharist. And that should change everything for us. That's that's such a concept that it should color our entire lives, like the fact that Jesus gives himself to us as food. And that is such a it's such a spiritual and material reality that's so spectacularly life transforming and miraculous that for us not to have that right in the center of our consciousness as Christians, we're missing out on the main thing. And we were looking at this very interesting piece in the free press that went viral, and it's about young Catholics bringing back the veil. And I know that I'm seeing this at mass women, young women, especially coming in wearing, you know, a cute little lace veil. What does that mean? And I think we should we should think about it and talk about it in the the setting of this this Eucharistic revival, this idea that the Eucharist is the source and summit of our life and how we approach it makes a difference. |
| Ashley | So the article interviews several women as to why they're wearing the veil, which was something that basically largely went away after Vatican two and is something you usually only see in the traditional Latin mass, which has been restricted under Pope Francis. Pope Benedict lifted those restrictions and he reversed that. And I think a lot of people think it's this kind of like old fashioned curmudgeonly thing or something just strange or fringy or misogynist. |
| Grazie | And that's like the worst acquisition. |
| Ashley | Well, and it's worse it's important to point out that the women who are wearing the veil today are doing it because they want to. But one of the women in the article that connects to what you were just saying, Gracie, said that she she wears it because it's a reflection. It's the way she shows that she understands that she's in the presence of something wholly and and different from the material world when she's at Mass, and that is the Eucharist. So there is, you know, we just finished this Eucharistic revival in the articles about the revival of the mantilla. And so I just it was interesting to see that, you know, somebody made that connection, you know, a sign that there really is an actual Eucharistic revival going on because that there's a connection between that and women choosing to wear the bill. |
| Grazie | When I was watching coverage of the of the of the Eucharistic convention thinking to myself that you can tell people that something is special, but we are embodied souls. So we have to we have to also manifest that in a material way ourselves, right? So how you approach something special is by doing special things, right? So when we are I, for instance, I don't like to take communion in my hands because I was taught since I was very little. I think I grew up mostly in pre-Vatican to Catholicism because I grew up in Mexico and and it was after Vatican two, but things hadn't really filtered down to where I was learning Catholicism from nuns and Carmelite nuns. And I was told that because Jesus was present, I shouldn't touch him with my hands because you don't approach that kind of that kind of royalty, that kind of divinity and and manhandle it. So the way that we do things physically and the way we that embodies how what we're thinking and what is in our hearts. |
| Ashley | And I think to I think like it's normally the custom for most people, I think anyway to, you know, dress up a little bit and not to wear gym clothes to mass just to show that, you know, you are something it's something special. Something good is happening here, something very that only happens here. And a lot of comments like that in the article from the interviewees. The first steps are really just to, I think, get people to stop wearing street clothes, gym clothes, I think. And then, you know, then they maybe they can open their minds up to seeing like, there's something very special. And also that I think you guys touch on a minute ago, like you thought, you know, I think and I thought too, because once I was in a TLM and I was told it was optional took this is many, many years ago optional to veil and that I was handed a veil by a male parishioner. And I was like, But then once I sort of understood it actually in the the hilderbrand quote that's brought up in, in the article about how, you know, you veil things that are special and sort of seeing it through those eyes rather than just like this grouchy man handing me the mail, I was like, this is something special. This is the way we present ourselves to receive the Eucharist and acknowledge how special it is in our lives. Well, and to your point, I find that often Sunday is the only day I wear a dress, you know, And if I have little kids and that's the one day of the week that I know I'm going to pull out a dress. And another woman in the article said she likes wearing it because it's pretty feminine. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, it is. Lace is beautiful, like women love to wear lace. And interestingly, the article also points out the Corinthians tells men they should not cover their heads in church. And that's why we tell our kids, you know, take a baseball cap off in church. I mean, rackets don't wear baseball caps to church. Or maybe if it's like a daily master, if we walk into a church, if visiting a city, the men take off their hats and the women. And it's it gets to sex differences that were different and that women, you know, whether they're at mass or not, the way we often like to express our feminine difference is by wearing feminine pretty things, dresses and clothes. And that that's sort of a continuation of that. |
| Grazie | But but on this on this topic, on this issue of sex, because I think that's that's where a lot of the objection to veiling at church I think comes to the sex difference. Right. So we have this overpowering drive right now in our modern Western culture to demolish sex differences. And if we if we do something and we say, well, this is a female, this is a female prerogative or this is a female trait or this is this is the way a female dresses as different from men than people say, No, no, no, she ought to do whatever the man does. Because what men do, what the things that men do, are better somehow. So we should be like men, right? So the prerogatives of men are better, and we should grab them and forget female prerogatives. But there's something very feminine about veiling the hair to cover the hair. And I think we could we could talk about that for a minute because it's it's very much tied into like these deep, foundational, traditional ideas about the beauty of woman and that the beauty of woman resides in her hair and that a woman's hair is somehow extremely attractive and extremely, extremely beautiful. And and there's there's a time and a place where you let your hair out and and a place where you cover it because you're concentrating on other things than than your physical attractiveness or showing off your hair. And maybe now we all have great hair, right? Because I, for instance, my hair is like a part time job. I have to diet and and I have to do keratin and and I have to do toners. And, you know, it's like it's a part time job. My hair now that I'm 55 and it used to be that a young woman had this that was that was her crowning glory right. And then after a few years, you don't have a crowning glory because you're not spending a fortune on your hair. And hair dyes don't exist, and neither do keratin or straightening irons. And so anyway, all to the point of there's something very feminine about hair and covering the hair that's very traditional and very old fashioned. It's in every culture, right? The hair, the covering of the hair for a woman. And that's something that people now in the modern world, they can't resist. They can't. They can't not they can't say, a woman should act different from a man. And yet all the beauties of our lives are tinged with this sex difference. Like whenever we are most beautiful and most alive, there's something very spectacularly different about us as women or someone else. |
| Ashley | Yeah. You see, even modern brides, even if they go all out with a big, poofy white dress, will reject the veil as some sort of. And, you know, see. |
| Grazie | I haven't I haven't seen that. I'm not going to the right things like everybody else. I see where the mantilla. |
| Ashley | Of that's I mean yes, I'd like to see that too. But I do feel like I've seen so much rejection of it as being some kind of archaic, you know, like pudding. Like pudding. I think like even with religious women, you know, I think they're just some sort of instinct, just like I had when the man handed me the veil. I was just like, no, I'm not supposed to do this kind of thing. This is not what's expected of me as a modern Western woman, you know? And I, I think they just think like the idea, you know, I mean, next thing they go will be dads not walking the daughters down the aisle because that's too patriarchal, too. |
| Grazie | So, you know, another let me say something else about veiling is that in in some cultures that mantilla or in Mexico they call it rebel. So it's a it's you wear it over your head, but and it's like a big shawl, right? It's a place where you put your babies also. Right? You put it over your head in the baby, you know, and it wraps around the baby in arrested on your shoulders. And it's like a it's a one stop shop like and that's your that's your maternity somehow. Your maternity is also part of the veil. And I've thought of this when I in in Cuban weddings and in other this is a Spanish custom and it exists in some Latin American countries and Cuban and Cuban weddings. The the bride wears a mantilla. And at one point in the ceremony, the husband is placed under her mantilla. So one corner's lifted up and is placed over his shoulders. And then part of the ceremony takes place with him under her mantel. |
| Ashley | That's lovely. |
| Grazie | It's that beautiful. That's the veiling. The veiling is also part of our maternity because the veil represents what the woman brings to the family, to culture it. She brings this, she brings shelter, she brings nurturing, she brings, she brings safety and and a place of repose and and perfect ness, you know, for for her husband and her children and for the wider community, for everyone. Right. You go running to a woman when you need someone that someone shoulder to shoulder. |
| Ashley | You know, you also speaking of maternity, I mean, pretty much every image of marriage she has of just thinking. |
| Grazie | Yes. |
| Ashley | And it's like it's another way that we emulate her. And, you know, you referenced grandmother. There's another woman in the article I thought it was so interesting, said that she realized that her grandmother wore mantilla because she was worshiped pre-Vatican two and she wanted that connection to her grandmother to just worship the way her grandmother worshiped. And it shows, you know, again, that, like we're embodied people and are also people who our family ties matter to us and we yearn to have those those connections to our ancestors. And there was just it was a really interesting article that I thought showed the many very understandable reasons why why women are reaching back to. But yet, you know, I don't remember if it actually pointed this out in the article, but it showed a picture of a statue of Mary. And I thought, I can't think of one image of Mary where she's not veiled. That's the least image we need modern ones. |
| Grazie | But when our lady, when our Lady of Guadalupe up here to San Diego, she said to him in his native language in Nahuatl, she said to him, Don't you know that you're under my mantle? Right? So the mantle, the veil is we are under her mentor. Like this is this is the place of shelter. The veil is the place of shelter. It's the place where we're where we go home to. Maybe heaven is veiled. Like maybe when we go to heaven, we pierce a veil. And we exist under this Now, right? The we exist under the veil of heaven. When when we die and we're good. And God saves us from the other fate by His grace, how wonderful that are. That people are looking for reverence. I think it's wonderful that women and men are doing this, too, in their own way. They're looking for the reverence that makes life beautiful and that makes life meaningful, right? Like if you if you don't have things that you reverence, then why live right like that? Despair is from lack of reverence like you have to revere. |
| Ashley | So are we seeing in our parishes, ladies, are we seeing mostly young people that are starting to be? I mean, I go to a Novus Ordo parish, you guys who are you know, who do you see veiling? Well, it's definitely young women. I think it's grandmothers and old women. So it's it's older women and younger women. And that goes back to my point about how I think especially young women today, I think feel so unmoored, like we live away from our families where, you know, we didn't we were not raising children in a community like our our our mothers and grandmothers did. And so, again, I think that it goes back to this. You know, we we want connection. And one way we can find that connection, the veil is like almost a symbol of connection. It's a connection to our lady. It's a connection to the women that went before us. It's a connection to other women. You know, it's a way of seeing that there's other other women just like the reason that we dress nicely at churches is sort of a communal expression of reverence for the holy place that we're going. I think, you know, that for these women. I mean, it's worth pointing out that none of the three of us wear the veil, but we can all respect it and understand why, why women do it, and probably why it gives them a deeper sense of meaning and connection to the the people that they're worshiping alongside the other women. Yeah, I liked the quote in the article about the woman wondering if there was some kind of requirement because she saw these kind of like cool girls of mass wearing them and she wanted to join their club. She wanted she wanted that sense of belonging. And then she was seemed to be relieved when there weren't requirements, you know, And so she went out and bought a veil that day. Yeah. But I think that that's right. There is something about it that can be really special. I like I like the woman who was like, Yeah, really? I leave with my keys, my wallet and my veil. Yeah, It was also. |
| Grazie | You know, veils. Can I, can I put in a plug for veils because I don't wear them, but they can be very chic, right? Yeah, they could very easily have a. |
| Ashley | Whole veil, a wardrobe that resonates with their Sunday best. |
| Grazie | I seen that. I have these beautiful photos of my my own baptism. They're black and white and everyone's beautifully dressed and all the women are wearing little square veils that are not exactly they're not big, but they're square and white. And they and they're pinned on their heads and they look so pretty. It's a time it also harkens back to a time of more of prettier dressing, of more intentional. Like you you didn't leave your house without your lipstick and your hair is beautifully done and you well and you didn't receive your husband either coming home from work and you're old. But I think your appearance mattered. I think that's also very beautiful about the veil. |
| Ashley | Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I was remembering, too, you're talking about pictures is First Communion girls weren't else. So it's it's another way of connecting back to the different sacraments. I mean, yeah, it used to be a weddings and First communion so that, you know, this is a again the way of connecting back to sacred rituals. |
| Grazie | That's right. The first Communion. Somebody let me hope that I still see all the little girls around here wearing veils and First Communion. I hope that that hasn't gone by the wayside in the rest of the United States. |
| Ashley | I think it isn't. But, you know, if it's slipping away, clearly this veil revivals maybe a foreshadowing of of a revival of the hills of all of all stripes. |
| Grazie | Well, let's hope so. Let's hope it's all centered around a real a re grasping of again, the source and summit of Christian life, which is that Jesus didn't leave us orphans. He stayed with us. He stayed with us in the Eucharist. And what could be more important and than to know that and to act that out and to go running to him and to receive him. And with all the reverence that that that the reception of God calls for. So thank you, ladies, for joining me. Thank you. Every morning the Catholic Association reviews all the latest news and sends our subscribers a carefully curated collection of the most important news of the day. Items are specifically selected for a smart Catholic audience like you don't let the world take you by surprise. Subscribe to our daily media roundup at the Catholic Association dot org. And now Father Roger Landry offers us, as is customary, a short and inspiring homily to prepare us for this Sunday's gospel. |
| Fr. Landry | This is Father Roger Landry. It's a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation, the risen. We're just one step with each of us this Sunday, when, after several weeks of focusing on Jesus words to us in Saint John's Gospel about Jesus amazing self gift of Himself and the Holy Eucharist, we return to St Mark's Gospel, where Jesus will speak to us about the type of homage God expects of us. This applies to every interaction we have with God. But similarly, in this ongoing Eucharistic revival to the way we treat Him in the Holy Eucharist, this Sunday we have a dramatic scene in which Jesus followers are criticized by the Pharisees for not obsessing about the ritual handwashing traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Jesus truth incarnate responds with force and clarity. He calls them hypocrites, literally actors in Greek and incites the prophet Isaiah against them, saying this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me in vain. Do they worship me teaching us doctrines, human precepts? Then Jesus tells the Pharisees who disregard God's commandments and cling to human tradition. Jesus words that the Pharisees were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to his listeners. The Pharisees were considered extraordinarily faithful Jews. They went to the synagogue every Saturday. They prayed at least three times a day. They fasted twice a week rather than just once a year. Like other Jews on the Day of Atonement, they paid ties in their whole income rather than just in the things explicitly mentioned in the mosaic Law. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the temple, they wash before every meal. They only ate kosher meat, they wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus, the Triune God through Isaiah says, Remarkably, this people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me. And Jesus was right. The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who ended up conspiring to kill Jesus. Working together with your arch enemies, the Herodian, the Sadducees and the Romans. To have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from Jesus. They were, in fact authentically religious at all, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshipers. But then many others thought that they were exemplary believers because of the way they scrupulously adhere to human traditions above God's clear commandment. St Mark describes the sun in the Gospel, the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washing as something that God had not revealed that he wanted done, but something that describes in the fourth and fifth century B.C., had developed to foster what they called ritual purity. They needed to wash their hands in two directions with exactly one and a half eggshells of clean water, first pouring it down from the palms to the fingertips and then with their fingertips down to their palms. This was the religious practice they obsessed about is if such collectively neurotic, hygienic washing of hands, cups, jugs, kettles and beds, what would help them to grow in God's image and live in love with each other in response to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about the purity God himself want. The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus praised the pure of heart, saying They shall see God and reminded us where your heart is There will your treasure be? She said, come into the world not to show us how to wash our hands, but to give us a heart transplant. To take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh cleansing us so that we might receive within the love of God treasured with gratitude, and then love God and others as God has left us first. And so Jesus says to all those assembled here, me, all of you, and understand nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person. But the things that come from within are what defile. He emphasized that nothing coming from the outside, either touching a jogger, a ritually impure person, or even anything we eat can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart. The heart is the real core of the person pointing to what we love and desire to. It's in the heart in the actions that flow from the heart that render a person pure, impure, holy or sinful. Jesus states that is from the heart, from what we desire, that sins like evil thoughts on chastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance and folly all come these evil desires, Jesus says, are what make us impure. And we see several of them, especially malice, deceit, envy, arrogance and murderous thoughts on evident display in the actions of the Pharisees. Jesus wants all of us to hear Him and understand the truths He is describing. He wants this conversation with the Pharisees to be consequential in the way You and I understand our faith and live it, especially with regard to him in the Holy Eucharist, too. We honor him with our lips or with our heart. Do we say to him and mean, as Saint Peter said last week, Lord, whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Or do we pay greater attention to celebrities or presidential candidates or others vying for our concerned attention? Do we say digits in the Eucharist, like Saint Thomas, the Apostle, my Lord, my God, and treat them with all and prioritize him? Or do we relate to him as if he's just bread and wine? Do we disregard God's commandments in favor of human traditions, cling to our own preferences of the way I would like to worship God? Or do we do this? The Eucharist and Jesus memory is He commanded to. We treasure his self gift in the Eucharist. Are our heart set on worldly things? Do we really mean the words we pray at mass? Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word. My soul shall be healed. Where do we give him lip service? Just saying those words as if we're not really sinners in need of his word to make us clean. Do we try to receive him with love and purity of heart? Do we come to communion with heart defiled by evil thoughts and chastity, greed, malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, or even by licentiousness, theft, blasphemy, adultery and murder? Do we truly adore him or do we worship him in vain? These are important considerations because there are many today who do what Jesus warned the Pharisees not to do in today's gospel. In this Sunday's gospel, they try to substitute human traditions for God's commandments, like the pseudo commandment to be nice over the Christian duty, to call people to repent, believe they substitute football stadiums for churches on Sunday, they substitute politically correct ideas on human sexuality, gender, sex, marriage and family for what God has clearly revealed. They supplant the commandment not to kill, to avoid the destruction of human life in the womb or in hospitals or in nursing homes. They replace God's command to love our neighbor as ourself with justification for treating migrants and refugees to the poor and needy, or those of other races or religions with hardened heart, or to keep things more particular to the Eucharistic revival. They cling to liturgical preferences about music, priests, homily length or even parishes more than they cling to Jesus himself in the sacrament. Jesus in the Sunday's gospel, is trying to call the Pharisees and everyone else to conversion. The point is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, rather than examining our own heart. It's to make a commitment to ensure our souls are as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be is to honor the Lord with both our lips and our heart, to cling to His teaching in all its beauty and fullness, to take great, great advantage of the sacrament confession, which God power washes our insides to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God. Take the opposite of what Jesus condemns. That means that we commit to chastity, to generosity, to self-sacrifice, to faithful love, to goodness, truthfulness, integrity, happiness over others, gifts, praise of God in others, humility and wisdom to respond to Jesus who says, Hear me all of you and understand with great attention, comprehension, and action. The great way we do this is at mass. As the Eucharistic Revival has been striving to make clear, this is where we come to honor the Lord, to worship Him not in vain, but with our lips, heart, mind, soul, strength and voices. So where we come to cling not to him in traditions and desires, but to God in his commandment, to recognize that while nothing enters, that enters from the outside can defile a person. What enters into us in Holy Communion during the mass can sanctify a person, provided that we receive Jesus as He desires and deserves. It's where Christians conspire not to put Jesus to death, but to enter into His passion, death and resurrection, and come out of mass in allegiance, to bring Jesus to the ends of the earth. This is the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday. God bless you. |
| Grazie | Thank you so much for another exceptional homily, Father Landry, to check out more from Father Roger Landry, make sure to read all of his writings at the National Catholic Register at NC Register dot com. And you can listen to his homilies at Catholic Preaching Icon. We hope to have you back next week. And until then, you go with our prayers. |