"Formula J"
Spiritual Water

The $15 billion-a-year bottled water industry may not seem a likely source of controversy, but surprisingly it is. Critics point to the fact that bottled water doesn’t always differ in quality from tap water, encourages the unsanitary reuse of plastic bottles, contributes to the accumulation of garbage, and leads people to ignore the lack of reliable supplies of drinking water for a billion of the world’s people—including the 30,000 people who die every week from unsafe-water-related diseases and the almost 6,000 children who die daily from diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation.

Now several companies have entered the fray by using religion to market their bottled water. Spiritual Water, for example, a new line of purified municipal water, sells under 10 different Christian labels—including  "Formula J"  with head of Jesus with the Fatima prayer in both Spanish and English on the bottle (see above right)—and claims to help people “stay focused, believe in yourself, and believe in God,” reports a Newsweek story by Lisa Miller. The Spiritual Water company, founded by someone who used to be in the pest-control business, donates a portion of its profits to charity. It also says its containers are ecofriendly because fewer people are less willing to throw out a bottle bearing an image of Mary or Jesus.

In Minnesota, however, a group of Catholic sisters have a different taken on the bottled water issue: They object to the whole idea. “I believe that water is a gift of creation, and it’s a gift for everybody. Nobody’s exempt,” says Sister Mary Zirbes of the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, Minn. “It’s meant for everyone, and therefore it should not be a commodity to be sold. It should be free to everyone.” With the Benedictine Sisters of St. Joseph and other faith groups nationwide, the Little Falls Franciscans have begun a letter-writing campaign and designed and distributed coasters to encourage people to drink water straight from the tap.

What do you think of using religious images in products and advertising?

Sister Maryanne Pierre, O.P.

Despite years of war and hardship, Sister Maryanne Pierre has helped to keep Baghdad’s St. Raphael’s Hospital open to those who need medical care. The Dominican sister, 58, was recently named a CNN “Hero of War,” a group of people the news network recognizes for their “feats of courage, nobility of purpose, or life-risking situations” to “avert conflict, save lives, or otherwise achieve an extraordinary mission.”

Sister Pierre was born in Iraq and was attracted to the Dominican sisters, who had established a community in Baghdad in 1873. After studying in France and the United States, Pierre returned to the Iraqi capital to work at St. Raphael’s.

In addition to treating sick and injured people during the Iraq war, St. Raphael’s, one of the few hospitals to remain open during the fighting, also had to deal with a large number of premature childbirths. “The fear caused many women to have premature births, Sister Pierre said. “Three hundred and fifty babies were born in two weeks.” Falling bombs and looters did not deter Pierre and the hospital staff from keeping the facility open. Most recently she went into the streets and asked U.S. Marines to guard the hospital.

“This is my job to stay here to help people,” she said. “Even during the first Gulf War we stayed. It’s our duty to stay here for all the people.”

What do you think of Sr. Pierre's work? Do you find it inspiring? Frightening? Both?

For 900 years the Augustinian monastery of Klosterneuburg (see video below) has risen above the banks of the Danube just north of Vienna. Though it is one of oldest monasteries in Austria, it has, since 2003, become a leader as well in a quite modern enterprise: the environmentally friendly heating of its immense facilities.

Two state-of-the-art biomass furnaces have replaced a number of obsolete heating systems or systems fired with fossil fuels in the monastery, a leisure centre, the hospital, and two municipal buildings in the city of Klosterneuburg. This new equipment has reduced CO₂ emissions by 97 percent.

Installed underground to preserve the monastery’s façade, the construction of the biomass boilers also allowed the monastery to build a new a wine storage hall (the region is famous for its winemaking) and new underground visitor parking.

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Sister Maria
Rosa Leggol, S.S.S.F.

When Sister Maria Rosa Leggol was 6 years old, she saw a group of German nuns passing through her hometown of Puerto Cortes, Honduras. After inquiring with the parish priest about who these women might be, she decided on the spot to become a religious sister. Three years later she prayed to the Virgin Mary to help her find the sisters she had seen. When she left the church she saw a train carrying two of those very School Sisters of St. Francis. “Never,” Sister Leggol says, “has a prayer had such a direct answer.”

After going through her novitiate at the community’s motherhouse in Milwaukee—“I learned how to pray, how to work, and how to have courage from those German nuns,” she says of this time—she returned to Honduras and began working in a hospital in Tegucigalpa.

Her work at the hospital helped to make her aware of the plight of the city’ poor young children, many of whom lacked even a semblance of an education or a normal upbringing. Sister Leggol has come to call these children “moral orphans” because many of them have been, in the words of journalist John Allen, Jr., who wrote about Sister Leggol in the National Catholic Reporter, “so badly failed by their own parents as to be effectively without a family.”

Sister Leggol’s work led to the founding of the Sociedad Amigos de los Niños, which offers abandoned and frequently abused children in Honduras a home, education, and the possibility of employment. She has also established 86 free health clinics in the country, which serve the dual purpose of providing basic health care to poor and rural Hondurans and also giving jobs to recent medical-school graduates. In addition to these efforts she also created a training center for young Honduran women who work as maids and a boarding school for needy rural boys.

"If you really understand God's call," she told NCR, "if you're clear that you have a vocation that comes from God for which you are responsible, then nothing stops you," she said. "I'm very strong in that way. Nobody gave me this job—I made it."

Her determination is legendary. She went over the head of her superior to begin the home for children, severed a relationship with a supporting foundation who wanted her to stop accepting handicapped children and mothers along their children, and once in the 1960s ran onto an airport runway to stop a plane from taking off so she could get the signature of a businessman on board who had agreed to donate to the children’s homes.

“I’m not an easy person,” Sister Leggol says. “I try to think 15 steps ahead all the time, which is why people think I’m crazy. If I had ever been married . . . all I can say is, poor man!”

For years the reality of trafficking in human persons “was a kind of global family secret,” said Msgr. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican undersecretary of state. Now, thanks to greater public awareness efforts, more people know about this $12 billion industry that in 2005 put at least 12 million people into forced labor.

The effort to publicize this issue has been taken up by 30 women religious from 26 countries who at a recent conference in Rome formed the International Network of Religious Against Trafficking in Persons, a CNS story reported. Together with the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the International Organization for Migration, the Italian Union of Major Superiors, which represents 95,000 religious sisters working in Italy, have designed a training program to help foreign women escape forced prostitution.

Women religious have made a commitment “to take on the great moral evil of human trafficking,” Holy Names of Jesus and Mary Sister Susan Maloney told the conference, an effort she called the “great ministry of the 21st century.”

Father Larry Janowski, O.F.M.

A vocation to religious life can be large enough to leave room for other vocations—being a poet, for example.

Just ask Father Larry Janowski. A member of the Franciscans since 1968, Janowski recently published his first book of poetry, BrotherKeeper (Puddin’head Press), named for the book’s poem about the death of a 5-year-old thrown from the 14th floor of a Chicago housing project for refusing to steal candy.

Janowski’s work has earned him prizes, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and his poems have appeared in a number of literary magazines. He gives poetry readings and workshops on a regular basis and is also a contributor to a new literary journal, Fifth Wednesday. With master’s degrees in both fiction writing and theology, Janowski is also an adjunct professor of English at Dominican University and Wilbur Wright College in the Chicago area.

On his way to becoming a poet, he says in an interview with the suburban Chicago Arlington Heights Post, “I had written poetry in high school and college and I remembered all the things I loved about poetry: the economy of language, the compression and the images. The fact that every word, every punctuation mark, every choice about a line break, all of those things are incredibly important. And yet your whole piece could be on a single page.” After a while, he says, “I began to realize my religious background and training also contributed to the kind of poet I am.”

Janowski does not so much consider himself a religious poet as a religious person who is a poet. “As with all people,” he says, “I’m in a constant quest for spiritual meaning, for some heartbeat everyone shares. A poem, a good one, can allow you to see you are not alone—and that goes for the poet as well as the reader of the poem.”

Speaking of his vocations as priest and poet, Janowski recently told Chicago Public Radio, “I think that a great deal of being a member of a religious order is to pay attention to people, to listen to them, to try to hear what they’re saying, and also what they’re not saying. And it seems to me that that is what poetry is all about. It’s all about blessing people with a little bit of your own experience. In poetry we say, ‘This is something that I have learned, or maybe something I haven’t learned yet. Or this is something that has touched me, or something that I have lost.’ ”

Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh, the 90-year-old president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, can’t see much anymore, though graduate students still keep him up on current events by reading him the newspapers every day in his office. So he might have had some trouble watching his portrait go up last Tuesday at a ceremony at the National Portrait Gallery.

The photo is not just any portrait. It depicts him hand in hand with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a rally in Chicago’s Soldier Field celebrating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Father Ted, as he is known, chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which helped to pass the act by documenting how the voting rights of African Americans were denied.

The civil rights commission was one of 16 presidential commissions on which Hesburgh served during both Democratic and Republican administrations, working on issues from civil rights to Middle East peace to nuclear arms control.

His legendary ability to bring people together was a decisive factor in his effectiveness. He reached agreement on the civil rights commission’s recommendations by taking the commissioners on a fishing trip to Wisconsin. As the Vatican’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hesburgh invited two personal friends from the Soviet and American delegations to a successful meeting in his hotel suite. “Just buzz me if you need anything,” Hesburgh told them.

Father Ted served as president of Notre Dame for 35 years—longer than any other college or university president in the U.S.

Archbishop Leo
Cornelio. S.V.D.

The Catholic Church continues to “go green,” and by that I don’t mean only the liturgical color of Ordinary Time. In a sign of the church increasing concern for the environment, Archbishop Leo Cornelio, newly installed archbishop of Bhopal, India, said he would accept only one kind of congratulatory gift: tree saplings. Archbishop Cornelio, a Divine Word Missionary, said he intended the gesture to highlight concern over rising pollution and growing indications of global environmental degradation.

In response to his invitation, Archbishop Cornelio received more than 10,000 saplings, which he said would be planted at Christian institutions and in other public places.

Fr. Leo's Cookbook

If his production company can find enough sponsors, look for Fr. Leo Patalinghug and his Grace Before Meals program on a Public Broadcasting Service station next year. In the program, Fr. Leo, a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the director of pastoral field education at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, visits families and cooks with them. An accompanying cookbook of the same title links 50 homestyle recipes to the liturgical year, family milestones, and even life disappointments. It also includes scripture passages and essays about feasts.

Fr. Leo is no stranger to cooking. As a child he says he was “easily bored” and would help his mother in the kitchen. Later, while in seminary at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he would cook for his fellow seminarians when he had the time.

The idea for the cooking show was born while Fr. Leo was cooking for some priest friends, one of whom said he wished he had a video camera to film the process. After being transferred to St. John Church in Emmitsburg, Fr. Leo teamed up with a parishioner and television producer to create the program.

Fr. Leo, who is also a break-dancer and martial arts practitioner, sees the show and cookbook as a “movement to bring God’s family back to his table,” he told Catholic News Service. He sees his vocation as a priest to “feed God’s children—body, mind, and soul.”

You can find out more about Fr. Leo’s project at www.gracebeforemeals.com. The 2009 issues of the VISION Annual Religious Vocation Discernment Guide and Vocation Network website has a full length article about Fr. Leo.

“Visit the prisoner” is one of the corporal acts of mercy. Holy Cross Brother James Van Dyke not only visits prisoners, he counsels, trains, and helps them find services as well.

Brother Van Dyke works for the Correctional Services Department of the Salvation Army in northern Illinois, primarily at Cook County Jail in Chicago and the maximum security Stateville prison in suburban Joliet. Besides the traditional chaplain tasks of facilitating prayer and Bible study groups and offering counseling to inmates on spiritual and family matters, Van Dyke serves on a Life Learning Program team that provides inmates with spiritual, educational, and life skills classes along with self-help and substance abuse recovery groups.

Van Dyke also works with nonviolent offenders to explore alternatives to incarceration. For those released from prison and trying to reintegrate into mainstream society, he identifies services such as job placement, housing, and support groups. He was a pioneer in establishing the county’s drug treatment courts, which combine legal sanctions with treatment and a preventive approach to future drug-related crimes.

Father John P. Foley, S.J. and Cristo Rey students
 

Newsweek magazine named Jesuit Father John P. Foley as one of the people to watch in 2007. Foley presides over the national Cristo Rey (“Christ the King”) network of Catholic high schools.

In 1996, Father Foley, who has been a Jesuit for 53 years and previously had been an educator in Peru, went to the Chicago’s largely Hispanic Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood to open Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in one of the city least-educated areas. Working with over 100 corporations, the school runs a work-study program in which every four weeks students work five days and attend classes for 15 days. Groups of four students share a full-time job. The companies pay a salary for each full-time job which accounts for about 70 percent of tuition, to which families also contribute.

In a city where some high schools see 50 percent of their students drop out, Cristo Rey’s four-year dropout rate was 6 percent, and 96 percent of the students went on to college programs. Since the Chicago school opened, 11 more schools have opened in Cristo Rey’s network, and seven more are scheduled to open this summer in urban neighborhoods where poverty is high. It seems at least these schools have returned to the mission Catholic high schools used to have in this country: serving immigrants communities and giving their young people an affordable and faith-centered way to move ahead in the world.

Franciscan Sister Evelyn Brokish has a scrumptious supply of divine creations at her candy store, Poverello Delights, in Highland, Indiana. Opened since October of last year, Poverello Delights is the realization of a dream, says Brokish, recently interviewd by Debbie Bosak for Catholic News Service.

Her signature candy is ChocoNutty Trio, consisting of three layers of dark chocolate, peanut butter, and white chocolate. But she continues to receive inspiration for different types of candies from her customers, including her sweet chocolate Cashew Wheel, created to please a customer who said he was planning on stopping by the shop and hoped to find something with cashews. "Everything is homemade and from the heart," says Brokish. "I think customers appreciate that this store is different form any other candy store."

Proceeds support the ministries of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi. A slip of paper accompanying each purchase explains the origins of the name Poverello, an Italian word meaning "little poor person," once used to describe St. Francis of Assisi. "People are usually surprised that I'm a nun," says Brokish, "but it leads to all kinds of questions and discussions about God, vocations, morals, and even politics." Visit www.poverellodelights.com/.

Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.

“Ever since I was a kid, I devoured books on history,” says historian Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. of his journey to the Catholic Church. “I would never describe my odyssey as being an intellectual journey,” he said. “It was more or less a falling in love with history. It made me fall in love with one of the things history talks about and that would be the Catholic Church.”

Davis received the University of Dayton’s Marianist Award in recognition of his contributions to intellectual life, including his groundbreaking book, The History of Black Catholics in the United States. A Benedictine monk for more than 50 years, Davis is professor of church history at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana and also the archivist for the Benedictine abbey there and other organizations.

In addition he has advised the U.S. Catholic bishops on the pastoral letters having to do with the African American Catholic experience, Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) and What We Have Seen and Heard (1984). Davis himself, said Father Paul Marshall, S.M., rector of the University of Dayton, has a “presence. He carries the sacred with him. You can see God within him.”

Vision Vocation Guide just sent out a press release on Trends in Catholic Vocations based on the very encouraging statistics we've gathered from Vision Vocation Match and two recent vocation surveys we conducted among discerners and vocation directors. All of the statistics are fascinating; be sure to check them out.

Here's one stat I'm betting will change in the coming year: In answer to the question: What resources have you found most helpful in gathering vocation information?, 42 percent of respondents rated Discerners' blogs "Not Important at All." My prediction: That percentage will completely flip within a year, with at least 40 percent rating discerners' blogs as an essential resource. Please pass on links to discerners' blogs you already know to be helpful to those exploring a religious vocation.

Father James DiLuzio, C.S.P.
uses his performance experience as a priest

Art, music, athletics, writing, web design —whatever your talents, there’s a good chance you can make them part of a religious vocation, not leave them behind. Take the case of Paulist Father James DiLuzio. In the days before he became a priest you may have seen him on TV in a soap opera supporting role or as an extra, putting his UCLA masters of arts degree in drama to work. After becoming a lector and a member of the evangelization team at New York ’s St. Paul the Apostle parish in New York , DiLuzio encountered the stories of scripture in a new way and asked himself, “What stories are we telling? How do these stories impact human life?”

His priesthood—he was ordained in 1993—and his interest in storytelling have led him to become part of a unique parish mission experience: Luke Live. Over three days he proclaims the first 15 chapters of Luke’s gospel by heart. Between his proclamations there is preaching, meditations, and music. Recently he introduced Luke Live 2, which includes proclamation of the last 9 chapters of the gospel, stories of saints, meditations, and music.

With Luke, DiLuzio says, “I find myself happily integrating my pre-ordination work as an actor, singer, English and drama teacher with my priesthood and Paulist ministry, engaging the faithful in encounter with the gospel in ways that are culturally relevant and illuminating.”

—Source: Paulist Today

How do you think you could use your talents if you were in religious life?

oesn’t let age—or height, for that matter—get between her and her work as chaplain to the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team. Seventeen years ago, Sister Jean, a member of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, planned to retire. But Loyola’s then-president convinced her to take a job counseling basketball players about dealing with the demands of sports and academics. Her role evolved into team chaplain, and these days she leads the team in prayer before tip-off, cheers them on during the game, and makes herself available as a friend and someone to talk to.

Soon after the university hired coach Jim Whitesell, Sister Jean walked into his office and told him, “It’s great to have you.” Then, Whitesell says, “she gives me a five-minute lecture on what I need to do with the program. She said, ‘You need to work on team spirit,’ and this and that. I was taken aback, but she was right on point.’ ” “Sister Jean is our biggest supporter,” says junior forward Tom Levin. “She always has faith and confidence in us, and she can always put a smile on our faces. Sister Jean has taught me to believe in myself and the team, and has shown us that hard work will pay off in the long run.” During her tenure as chaplain, Sister Jean says has “learned what it really means to work hard and give up your entire self. Sometimes we don’t think that young people do that, but these young men do, and it shows.”

The next time you receive communion, there's a chance the original wafer came from the hands of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Maintaining a tradition of making altar bread the sisters have passed down through generations, these Benedictines produce 2 million breads each week in their Clyde, Missouri monastery.

The sisters began baking altar bread in 1910, using an open fire and cast-iron baker. Now they distribute wafers to churches in the United States, several other countries, and, they say, “on the high seas.” By baking breads, the community supports its contemplative lifestyle and also participates in the liturgical and spiritual life of the church. They have been featured on television program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.

Not long ago, the sisters addressed a pressing need that seemed to have no satisfactory solution. In keeping with the belief that Jesus used a wheat bread at the Last Supper, Catholic teaching has required that communion bread be made with wheat and contain gluten, a protein found in wheat. At the same time, as many as one in 133 people suffer from celiac disease, which prevents them from consuming gluten. In an attempt to create a gluten-free bread, the sisters found a company that produced wheat starch, which is wheat with the most of the gluten removed. After much trial and error, they finally produced usable altar bread that held together, was edible—and contained only 0.01 percent gluten, or 1/270 of the maximum amount of gluten a celiac can consume each day. Problem solved!

Mary Annette Gailey had worked at a day-care center, in retail food management, customer service, and with computers. Then, drawing inspiration from her father, who had worked in a Mack Truck engine plant, she became an over-the-road tractor-trailer driver. It was here she also received a call to become a religious sister. After several years of discernment, Gailey, 38, recently made her final vows with Pennsylvania’s

.

Gailey frequently drove in silence to take better advantage of the contemplative side of her solitary hours on the road, which lent themselves to listening to God and sorting out the direction her life was taking. Driving a truck “allowed me to listen to the Holy Spirit,” she told the Associated Press. “It was a metaphoric journey being played out.”

“I was spending time in solitude, with just the Holy Spirit, and God spoke to me,” she said. “It’s definitely not like people picking up the phone and someone calls you . . . . There’s no lightning bolt. It’s much like a quiet whisper and listening to your own heart.

Her discernment process included attending come-and-see events, keeping a journal, meeting regularly with a vocation director, and living as an affiliated member of the Holy Family Sisters. For a while she spent one week living as a layperson, and another as if she were to be part of religious life. Her experience living as a religious gave her greater peace. “Someone said to me, ‘Go where the peace is,’ ” she said. “When you find the deepest peace, you know it’s true.”

“God never stops calling,” she says “When do we finally listen?”

The San Damiano Foundation,

, produces films highlighting the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi and the Franciscan concerns for social justice, peace, and nonviolence. Under the guidance of author, photographer, and filmmaker Gerard T. Straub, who is a Secular Franciscan, and his staff, the foundation produces fundraising films for Christian charities which aid the world’s poor. It also screens films at churches, high schools, and universities across the United States.

The foundation gets its name from the church outside Assisi, Italy where in the year 1205 Saint Francis, not long after his decision to commit himself to God, went to pray and seek guidance about whether he should lead a life of solitude and contemplation or service to the poor and spreading the gospel. While praying in San Damiano, which was deteriorating, he heard the voice of Christ say, “Francis, go repair my house which, as you see, is falling completely to ruin."

He understood this command literally, and so he begged supplies and rebuilt the church a brick at a time. After completing the restoration a year later, it then dawned on Francis that Jesus also meant the whole church, and so Francis set upon the tasking of rebuilding and renewing the universal church, as well as himself.

San Damiano Foundation's productions include films on poverty—both material and spiritual—soup kitchens, migrants, contemplation, and people heroically making a difference by working among the poor and the sick.

Chapel Basilica, Conception Abbey, Missouri
 

Forgiveness was central to Jesus’ ministry and mission. And the Benedictine monks of Conception Abbey in Conception, Missouri have made it central to their own mission in the five years since gun violence tore their peaceful world apart.

Lloyd Robert Jeffress, a 71-year-old retiree, walked into the abbey 90 miles north of Kansas City on the morning of June 10, 2002 and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rife, killing two monks and leaving two others seriously injured. Jeffress later killed himself.

The doors at Conception Abbey are still unlocked and open and forgiveness continues to be the reigning theme as the members of the rural monastery quietly marked the fifth anniversary of the tragedy this week. Since the shootings, little has changed in terms of how the monks go about their daily routines and interact with visitors. Father Gregory Polan, the monastery's abbot, said ending the monastery's practice of openly welcoming strangers would defeat their purpose of living Christ's teachings.

If anything, said Polan, the shootings helped reinforce the teachings of Saint Benedict, the founder of the abbey's religious order, who instructed monks to keep death always before their eyes as a way to gain perspective on how to live their lives.

Local law enforcement has also kept a close relationship with the monastery, a bond that began on the day of the shooting. “The unbelievable strength and faith . . . have overwhelmed us,” said Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Espey. “We're always welcome. . . . It brought a lot of people closer together.”

* Source: An article for the Associated Press

Tuesdays are Vocation Night on "The Busted Halo Show" with host Paulist Father Dave Dwyer. Last night Father Dave interviewed VISION Executive Editor Patrice Tuohy (hey, that's me!) about VISION and its highly successful new online feature VocationMatch.com. I was impressed with how well Father Dave prepared for our interview. He was up on all the trends in religious vocations and how young adults and vocation directors are using new technology and media to find each other.

Understanding the power of media is nothing new for Dwyer, who produced and directed television for MTV and Comedy Central before entering the priesthood. He now serves as the publisher of BustedHalo.com, the Paulist website for young adult seekers, and hosts his weekday call-in radio show, which began last December. "The move to satellite radio is a natural progression of sorts," says Dwyer in an interview by Bill McGarvey posted on BustedHalo.com. "I feel proud to stand on the shoulders of Paulists of years past who were pioneers in Catholic book publishing, radio, film and television." Dwyer is confident that if "St. Paul were alive today, trying to get the message of the Gospel out, he’d have a website, a blog, a podcast, and a channel on satellite radio." Not to mention, a webcast, vodcast, and vlog. Thanks, Father Dave, for your help in promoting vocations and creating a culture of discerment.

“The Busted Halo Show” airs live every weekday between 7-9 pm EST on Sirius channel 159.

When he was in high school Father Michael Zaniolo wanted to get married and have a family and career. His life started going in that direction when an interest in building and designing led him to becoming an electric engineer. But “I felt a spiritual emptiness,” he tells the Chicago Sun-Times. “The more I prayed, the more I kept sensing and hearing, ‘I want you to be priest.’ And I kept telling God, you’ve got the wrong guy. Finally, I said to the Lord, OK, if this is what you want me to do, I will explore it.” Ordained a priest in 1988, Zaniolo has been the chaplain of Chicago’s

since 2001.

“With 50,000 airport employees and tens of thousands of travelers passing through daily, the airport is fertile ground for ministry to anyone who needs to talk about what is going on in their lives,” he says.

Zaniolo is the city’s one full-time chaplain who with several other priests is available to hear confessions and celebrate the Eucharist. Three deacons and several lay volunteers also assist at ten weekend Masses. In addition, his work involves being visible and available to workers, travelers, and even homeless people at the airport. “Once people find out I’m a priest, they’ll say, ‘Father, can you pray for so and so?’” Zaniolo’s “parish” also includes three fire stations that serve the airport, a police station, and nearby hotels, restaurants, and parking facilities.

“I hear confessions every day,” says Zaniolo. “It’s something that people usually don’t do every day, but for some reason, here at the airport . . . I hear them regularly. For the travelers, I’m sort of like an anonymous priest, so they can really unburden themselves.”

A tough part of his job is being one of the go-to people at the airport for emergencies. “I remember once a teenager committed suicide and her parents were on their way to Hawaii. I had to deliver the bad news and comfort them until they could find a flight back home,” he tells the Sun-Times. “Once a flight attendant’s eighth grader got hit by a train while the flight attendant was on the plane. They always call me for those things.

“The nice thing about being an airport chaplain is that it really allows me to be a priest. I do have a lot of administrative things to do . . . but I also have more opportunities to hear confessions and to give some advice and counsel to people.

“The reward is I get to really see the movement of God within someone’s life,” he says. “I could not have designed a life better than I have now.”

After 21 years as president of Maryland’s College of Notre Dame, School Sister of Notre Dame Kathleen Feeley, 78, “felt the call to go to Africa, because of all Africa has suffered and all the needs it has, especially in education,” she tells the Baltimore Sun. Following Fulbright fellowship trips to China and India, she heard—at a birthday party of all places—of the new Catholic University of Ghana. She contacted the president, and “he almost jumped out of the computer,” Feeley says. His message: “Come immediately.”

The university area, with its power outages, bad roads, and unairconditioned convent, is a far cry from Baltimore, where, Feeley told The Catholic Review, “I had an overdose of comfort and security.”

Most of the university’s 500 students are committed Christians and bring a faith perspective to their studies. “I love the sense they have of living in a spiritual world,” says Feeley. “It’s a quality I hope they keep.” In her teaching of English and religion, Feeley says her “goal is for them to read. Their lives will be much richer.” She also tries to expose her students to new ways of interpreting the Bible, with which they are very familiar. “There is a tendency toward literalism,” Feeley says. Besides teaching, Feeley also works with School Sisters of Notre Dame novices from all of Africa.

Her work in Ghana, she reports, has enlarged her view of Catholicism, led her to rely more on the Holy Spirit, and increased her appreciation of her community’s idea of transformation. “Being transformed is more than being your best self,” she says. “It’s being the self you never knew you could be.”

Would you consider taking on a big challenge at any point in your life?