CHURCH CHAT #38

 

NEW AT THE ST. THERESA FAMILY LIFE CENTER: A "MEN'S GROUP"

In early 2021, I started to lead the remodeling of the old St. Theresa/Cross Roads School in my hometown parish in Rhodelia, Kentucky, into a new St. Theresa Family Life Center and the old rectory into a  Guest House for presenters, private retreatants and visiting priests. One of the main features of the project is a museum room and a long hallway (both sides) old historic photo gallery. The project was dedicated October 15, 2022 - the Feast of St. Theresa of Avila. 

The idea was to build a place where the family life of the community could be celebrated, preserved, strengthened and empowered. A few groups like AA, Sunday Coffee after Mass and Youth Confirmation Retreats have already used the spaces. The parish offices are now located there. Even 30 American Bishops, who visited the grave in St. Theresa's old cemetery of the grandmother of Father Augustus Tolton, first black priest ordained in the US, had drinks and refreshments in the new Family Life Center. 

One of the newest groups to start using the Family Life Center is a Men's Group meeting each Thursday evening. Soon to follow will be a Women's Group. Father Knott had the opportunity to attend the July 2, 2026 Men's Group meeting pictured below. He was asked to present a "Saturday Afternoon Men's Retreat" on October 10 (2:00 to 6:00) followed by the Saturday evening Mass at St. Theresa Church next door. The retreat will be called "Get a Grip on Your Personal, Family and Spiritual Life." 

 BEFORE

AFTER

THE NEW PORCH HAS ROCKERS AND CAN BE USED FOR SHELTERED PICNIC BOOTHS

The old classroom for the 3rd and 4th grades was renovated into a meeting room for discussions. 

25 men of the new Men's Group met on July 2, 2026 filling the above room. 

The new St. Theresa Family Life Center has an extensive hallway photo gallery and museum room celebrating the parish history from its founding in 1818 to the present. It also holds five parish offices, another large meeting room, a beautiful kitchen, a cafe room (below) and two updated restrooms. 

Four of several cases and wall displays in the museum room.

Historic photos fill both sides of this long hallway.

The whole Family Life Center is heated and cooled with an underground geo-thermal system and powered by an above-ground solar panel system pictured below. 

The old rectory (below) has been totally renovated for use as a Guest House for visiting presenters, visiting priests and private retreatants.

The living room has a flat screen TV and several recliners. 

One of the bedrooms (below)

The downstairs has a laundry room and more space for overnight guest use. 

"HE'S SMART, KIND AND HUMBLE, BUT HE'S NO PUSHOVER"

 

BEWARE OF THOSE OVERLY ZEALOUS WEED PULLERS!

 

…if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until the harvest.

Matthew 13:24-30

Religious fanatics have probably done more damage to religion than all the atheists, agnostics and public sinners put together! As Blaise Paschal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction!” Cock-sure and blind as bats, they claim to have perfect eye-sight when it comes to good and evil, setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner! 

We are painfully familiar with fanatic Muslims who would fly planes into high rise buildings as a way to rid the world of “degenerate western influences” or our own Puritans who would burn so-called “witches” at the stake to keep their church “pure.” In our own church, fanatics had a heyday during what we know as the “Inquisition” and "Crusades." The “Inquisition” and "Crusades" were invented by religious fanatics who wanted to do a good thing: rid the world of heresy, error and sin, but they chose some of the most vicious, cruel, inhumane and un-Christian, methods imaginable to accomplish their goals! Many good, holy and even saintly people were brutally killed by those misguided people with their "good" intentions - all in the name of God, of course! I am scared to death of the “Christian Nationalist” movement that is gaining strength in our country for these precise reasons. As Jesus reminds us in today's gospel: beware of overzealous, fanatic weed-pullers!

Today's parable is one of my favorites. In it, Jesus reminds us that in his kingdom here on earth, the good and the bad exist alongside each other and nobody but God can really tell the difference! To make his point, he again turns to farming for a parable. He tells the story of a farmer who planted good seeds in his field, only to find out that, as they sprouted, weeds also appeared growing right there with them! 

In this parable, God is that farmer and we are his hired hands.  One day, the farmer’s hired hands came in to report the presence of weeds growing among the wheat and to suggest that they could fire-up their big weed-eaters and go to work on them!  The wise farmer gives them a quick and firm “no, don’t you dare!” “Leave the weeds alone and let them grow together with the wheat till harvest time!” Wisely, the farmer tells his hired hands that if they uprooted the weeds now, they would end up pulling up the wheat along with them because, at this point, no one could tell one from the other! 

This is a wonderful parable because the specific weed Jesus is talking about is an especially noxious weed that looks exactly like wheat when it is young and tender. In fact, people back then had a nickname for this particular kind of weed Jesus was talking about. They called it “bastard wheat!” Not only did it look exactly like wheat when it was young and tender, its roots also entangled themselves around the roots of tender wheat shoots! Not only can they not be distinguished, one from the other, their roots had become so entwined that if you tried to pull the weeds up too early, you would end up destroying the precious wheat crop by pulling up the wheat along with them! 

When the time finally came for harvest, the weeds and wheat would cut together and threshed. Threshing was the process of separating the seeds from the chaff. The wheat seeds had a golden color and the weed seeds had a slate gray color which made it easier to separate them. The weed seeds were slightly poisonous, having a bitter taste and causing dizziness and sickness, so they had to be destroyed. The precious wheat could then be stored in the farmer’s barn.  

The point of the parable is that, unlike human beings who tend to judge quickly, God is lenient and patient and wise. 

This parable clearly reflects Jesus’ own experience of being condemned by religious people. They thought of themselves as the precious wheat while the social outcasts that Jesus associated with as the useless poisonous weeds.  Jesus could see that often it was the other way around! As Scripture says, “People see externals, but God can see into people's hearts.”

My friends, the message for us today is simple! Good and evil exist side by side in the church and in the world, but we need to be very weary of overzealous fanatics who want to "pull weeds" and “clean house” – whether they come from the church or the government! More often than not, those people do more harm than good because they really cannot see what they are doing, or even understand the purity of their own motives, all that well! As Jesus put it, when he warned people about false, people-abusing prophets whose uniform was a woolen sheep pelt, "Be aware of wolves dressed up to look like sheep!"  

What to do with "weeds," has always been, and will always will be, a problem for the church! However, as the parable teaches us today, we also need to know that overly enthusiastic weed-pullers have sometimes created bigger problems than the "weeds" they so eagerly want to pull up! As Jesus said, "...if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest." As the great preacher, Billy Graham, so wisely put it, "It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHURCH CHAT #37

 

Ordained June 11, 1927, Father Reavy became pastor of my home parish of St. Theresa of Avila in Rhodelia in March of 1932.  He is pictured above, in his cassock, on his only mode of transportation in those early days. Thank God for horses! I guess it beats walking! However, I prefer my gasoline-powered car - without a cassock! 

In 1933, a new highway was constructed to Rhodelia (2-1/2 away) to replace the impassible dirt road during the rainy season. He was pastor of my home parish during most of my father's teenage years. He was promoted to pastor of St. James in Elizabethtown in January 1937 - seven years before I was born.   

WHEN ONE WAY IS BLOCKED, DON'T GIVE UP! BE CREATIVE!

 

Some men brought on a stretcher a man who was paralyzed. Not finding a way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on the stretcher through the tiles into the middle in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the one who was paralyzed, "I say to you, rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home."

Luke 5:17-26

The guys in today’s gospel have always inspired me during my 56 years of ministry. Their buddy needed healing. He was paralyzed. When the door of the house where Jesus was staying was blocked by a crowd of people, they could have given up and carried him back home. Instead, they carried him up on the roof, tore a hole big enough to lower their buddy down, right in front of Jesus! Jesus commended those guys for their determination and healed the crippled man right then and there.    

My friends! Declaring a situation as "impossible" is very convenient. It lets us off the hook and relieves us of the hard work of looking for "alternatives."  Nobody expects us to do the "impossible," do they?  Nobody will blame us for doing nothing if we can convince them that "nothing can be done," would they? Like the guys in today’s gospel, we need to use our imaginations, look for alternatives and be resourceful. Friends, I learned a long time ago that the biggest shortage in the Catholic Church is not money or priests. It's imagination!

I learned this truth about imagination back in the seminary. There is so much I can't remember, but there is one thing that remains vivid in my mind. It was toward the very end.  I forgot who it was, but one of our teachers asked us to present some "pastoral situations" for class discussion - maybe a wedding, funeral or counseling situation. He asked us to write up the "ideal" way we might handle the situation once we were ordained.

After we had all written up our "ideal" approaches to the situations we described, he collected the papers and stood there in the front of class and ripped them up into small pieces and threw them in the garbage.  After that he said to us, "You will hardly ever get to do the "ideal," so let's talk about some alternative approaches."  Man, has that insight ever come in handy over the last 56 years!

Here is an old story that I have told many times about the power of imagination. It's about watching TV one day and seeing a young man who had been in a motorcycle wreck and had one of his legs amputated, being interviewed. He had been a great athlete and was eaten up with bitterness about the loss of his leg. It was depressing so I turned the channel. On the other channel was a young man, about the same age, coming dawn the mountains on skis. It wasn't till he got to the end of his run that I noticed that he was a one-legged skier in the Handicapped Olympics!

One young man gave up and the other one got up! The second young man, with one leg, got up and looked for alternatives. This young man found an "alternative" rather than simply "giving up." 

We have all heard the saying, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree!" Since I have a reputation for my imagination and determination, that old saying came to mind in a serious way recently when I discovered that my own father was the Valedictorian at his high school graduation on May 14, 1935. I learned that he gave a speech based on an old Latin saying attributed to Hannibal, when his generals told him that it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant. "I shall either find a way or make one." My father's address was entitled "Find a Way or Make It."  

What does today's gospel tell us? Never give up! Never quit! Find another way! Find an alternative!