WITH FAITH, ONE CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS

Every year I start a new journal, with a new theme, to record the events of my ministry. This year, I pasted the image above on the cover of my new 2025 journal.  I had just committed to a new project to build and furnish a new church in Kenya. Since I had organized several projects before, I was starting to believe that I had exhausted my own available resources, as well as those I thought I could raise from my friends and acquaintances. I thought it might help me stay focused on the possibilities that only faith can produce.

Here it is May, half-way through the new year, and this newest project is almost completely funded - a new stone, fully furnished, St. Veronica Church in rural Kenya in west Africa thanks to a few generous benefactors and some of my retirement funds! I am so very close to the finish line now! I am only $8,450 away from finally finishing this entire project - inside and out. I believe that even this last amount will show up somehow because Jesus was right, "With faith, even mountains can be moved!"  Just like the poor parishioners of St. Veronica Parish in Kenya, I consider this project a "miracle" as well!  This "miracle" will serve to remind me throughout 2025 "Not to be moved by how impossible things look!" 

CLAIM THE NAME, YES, BUT MAKE SURE YOU CAN .........

This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13

The topic of “love” comes up so often in the gospels, that I find myself repeating myself sometimes.  However, some of this is so “basic” that it is worth repeating.  

Some recent studies tell us that around 70% of Americans claim to be "Christian," but that only a small minority let their understanding of "Christianity" affect their everyday life. According to recent reports, despite 70% claiming the Christian faith, in reality only a tiny minority of American adults (6%) demonstrate a consistent understanding and application of biblical principles. In other words, only 6% seriously put basic Christian principles into practice . 

In response to these statistics, some of those who are most vocal about claiming the title "Christian" are making "Christianity" synonymous with bigotry, meanness, hate and repression. I reject this current brand of Christianity called “Christian Nationalism.” I, for one, am not about to join their crusade! I am not as angry at such religious narrowness, which would have us believe that they are the only true Christians, as I am angry at the rest of us who are letting them get away with it! I consider myself a person trying his best to be a "Christian,” but I do not share their agendas nor their religious arrogance. After twelve years in the seminary and fifty-five years of preaching the gospel, I refuse to let them dismiss me and claim that only people who think “like them" are "truly Christian!” I not only object, I simply refuse to let them get away with it!!

How will people know that we are disciples of Jesus? The gospel answer is that it is our love for one another that will make us stand out in the community as "Jesus-like!" Yet, the facts reveal that some self-professed "Christians" can be just as nasty, just as hateful and just as selfish as everybody else! As the famous Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Just look at the public behavior of men and women who self-righteously proclaim they are "Christian" but engage in rhetoric that is intolerably un-Christian and language that would be profoundly offensive in any authentic Christian community. Venomous hate is now preached daily under the banner of reclaiming our "Christian culture!" The same people who scream "family values" are teaching a whole generation that it is OK, and even funny, to encourage vicious personal assaults on people who think differently from them. They spewed personal assaults on Pope Francis and now they have even started their personal assaults on our new Pope Leo. I do not understand them at all! I have voted for both political parties and I have prayed for both conservative and liberal Popes. Can you imagine the future of our church if individual members only respected Popes they "liked?" Well, we are already there! Nastiness and meanness are epidemic in our culture, even in so-called "Christian" communities.

“This is how they will know you for my disciples: your love for one another” What does it mean "to love?" It means living out the ways, works and words of compassion. By doing that, we will leave God's signature on the church and the world. It's really millions of little things, done out of love by millions of Christians, that will transform this world, not the mean-spirited actions and hateful words of "wolves in sheep's clothing!" Christians are called to respectfully resist such mean-spirited behaviors and hateful words, even when those deeds and words come from the enemies of Christianity. Did Jesus not tell us explicitly to "love your enemies" and "do good to those who hate you?" 

Let me give you three simple examples of what I think it means “to love.” I have used all three of them before, in this very pulpit, but I think they are worth repeating. The first example came in the mail when I was pastor of our Cathedral. It was a "thank you note" from a someone whom we had been helped from our community service fund to which parishioners generously contributed. It was addressed to all of us. "Dear Members of Assumption. Even though I don't attend your church, you didn't try to force me into your beliefs on the grounds that I needed your help. I know now that there is still unconditional love left in our world." This note was signed by a woman and her children.

The second example came from my mother. When we were growing up in the country with seven kids in the family, food was never wasted. When we had fried chicken, my mother even fried the chicken back and ate it herself. I grew up believing my mother loved chicken backs. I was much older before it dawned on me -- she wanted us to have the best parts. She was willing to take what was left over, out of love for us.

The third example occurred one Friday when I had the opportunity to go to the Islamic Center on River Road. The Muslim community invited some of us from the Cathedral Heritage Foundation for lunch and to attend a Muslim prayer service. We were reverenced and respected and welcomed. We had reached out to include them in our inter-faith Thanksgiving and rededication celebrations. They reached out to us in return with a loving gesture of their own.

“This is how they will know you for my disciples: your love for one another” My friends, this is the very heart of our religion. this is what it means to be a true Christian. This must be present in every Christian's life or else all of his or her religious practice is for naught! This is not an optional activity. This is essential for discipleship. Often, religious people confuse loving someone else with approving or agreeing with everything they do. How ridiculous! How dangerous! Why can't we help another person for their good, and not for what we get out of it, as we did for that struggling single mother? Why can't we freely and quietly “give each other the best pieces of chicken” sometimes, as my mother did, instead of always competing for the best? I have always considered myself as “Consciously Christian, deliberately Catholic and unapologetically ecumenical and interfaith” Why can't we be good, strong and faithful Catholic Christians and at the same time have a curiosity about, and have a reverent respect for people who practice a different religion? This is what it means to love one another. This is our trademark as Christians, as disciples of Jesus. This is the heart of the matter.

Religious militants are very frustrated these days with the complexity and contradictions in our world and they feel they must change it by whatever means necessary, even by brutal force, until it conforms to their vision of God's plan. Religious militants need an enemy, someone to hate. They often do it by picking and choosing their preferred religious teachings, usually based on some obscure and misinterpreted Scripture passages that serve their needs and justify their goals, and ignoring those which challenge them! This kind of insanity is being passed off as religion these days in many of the world's religions, including our own!

During these confusing times, let us go back not to some imagined “good old days,” but to the basics of Christianity. Lived Christianity is what will attract people to our faith, not forced conformity. Lived Christianity is about small loving gestures in thought, word and deed by millions of disciples. Lived Christianity, not another Christian "crusade," will transform the world. Don't let misguided religious zealots seduce you with some hate-filled brand of religion. Christianity is, and always has been, about "unconditional love." Those of us who know this must respectfully and firmly disagree with those who spew venomous hate and call it “saving” Christianity!

 

 

"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" 2025 #20

                               

                 Below I am standing (with a beard in the early 1970s) close to the same area where the bell  

                                                        tower at Taize as it is today (above).  

                              

MY EUROPEAN TRAVEL ON A FEW DOLLARS

Part Two 

Between 1971 and 1976, I made 5 back-packing trips to Europe with students from Somerset Community College in Somerset, Kentucky, where my first assignment was as a newly ordained priest. Ignorant of how risky and challenging it might be to be responsible for young adults who had never been out of Kentucky, I managed to accompany small groups of from 5 - 10 at a time. After landing in Paris, we always made our way south to Taize, France, where 1,500 youth a week from all over the world would gather for a week-long retreat while camping in the open fields around the tiny town of Taize. Taize was the location of the ecumenical monastery of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox monks half-way between Paris and Lyon, about two miles from the ancient ruins of the famous Catholic monastery of Cluny. In this second of two blogposts, I will report a few of the odd experiences we "enjoyed" during those trips. 

When our week-long retreat was over we would drive through Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria, Germany, Luxemburg, Holland, Belgium and back to France  for our trip home. On one trip we crossed the border into Spain for an hour so so just so we could say we were in Spain.  

There were two times in Switzerland when 2 of us were forced to sleep in a tent and 4 of us were forced  to sleep in a car because of the rain. Otherwise, we would have slept outside on the ground. Both times, the rain was drizzling most of the night which caused the inside of the tent and inside the car to create a seal to the point that it woke us up in a panic because we had breathed up all the oxygen. In the tent, up a mountainside, we woke up so panicked that we practically tore the zipper off on the front of the tent trying to get out to breathe! In the car, on a side road, four of us in sleeping bags woke up at the same time, opened all four doors and rolled out on the wet ground in our sleeping bags, trying to breathe. 

There was a time in Switzerland when we pulled off the road in an orchard and found what we thought was a safe place to sleep. About the time we all dozed off, I was awakened by a crunching noise about a foot from my head. Startled, I looked up to see a car tire rolling past my head. We all started screaming which caused the car to stop. It was another car with a young man also looking for a place to sleep in the orchard. We all got up, introduced ourselves and became instant friends. He had one of those cheap French cars out of which he had taken all the seats except the drivers seat. He tried to convince us to go with him to Spain, (probably to share gasoline expenses) but we said "no" because we were going in the opposite direction - to Austria. After a bit of negotiation, and a bit skeptical about getting in a car with no seats with a stranger, we agreed to go with him to the next town for a beer. He drove the car and the three of us sat on the floor of his seatless car, seated so low we could not see out of the windows. We had a beer with him, he brought us back to the orchard, wished him well and sent him on his way to Spain. 

It seemed that every young adult in Europe was hitch-hiking during the summer. You could see them everywhere. We had heard that it was safe to pick up hitch-hikers back then because youth jobs were scarce and so parents gave their young adult kids a couple of hundred dollars and told them to "go see Europe!" One of those summers, when there was only three of us in the car, we always picked up a hitch-hiker to fill the empty seat and get to know some of them in the process.  I remember picking up a young man from Scotland in southern Germany. He was headed to Holland and we were going half-way there so we took him as far as we could. When it came time to get in our sleeping bags, he insisted sleeping in the trunk. I did not like the idea, but he insisted that we help him into his sleeping bag and lifting him into the trunk and shut the door. About an hour after we put him in the trunk and got into our sleeping bags for the night in the the car, I was awakened by a sound that sounded like scratching coming from the trunk. I immediately concluded that our friend from Scotland had been overcome with fumes from the gas tank and was scratching to be let out before he died! I work everybody up, got out of my sleeping bag and opened the trunk, fearing to see a dead Scotsman right there in a sleeping bag! What I actually saw a grinning Scotsman eating a green apple that we had taken to bed with him if he got hungry during the night! Relieved, we slammed the trunk and went back to bed! 

I remember one very embarrassing moment in Austria. We met a hitchhiker not far from the area where we picked him up. He invited us to his house for a bite to eat. When we sat down, his mother put a plate of "speck" in front of us. "Speck" is a fatty salted bacon, air-cured, lightly smoked, but uncooked! I later learned that it was a delicacy in that part of the world. I took a piece of speck and put in between a slice of her delicious rye bread and bit into it. It was like biting into a slab of uncooked bacon. The rawness made a crunch that I knew I would not get down my throat. When the host left the room, I pulled it out and put the "speck" in my pocket to get rid of later. The bread however was delicious! When she came back into the room, I went on about how delicious the bread was, but never mentioned the "speck!" 

My experience in northern Italy was the very opposite. We stopped to visit an Italian student that we had met in Taize. His mother served us coffee and the most delicious little pastries I has ever eaten. I tried to wait till she left the room to "go back for more" so as not to appear piggish. She must have noticed how many we ate because when we got ready to leave, she boxed up the rest of them to take with us. I was thrilled with the news, so thrilled that after we got in the car and had driven out of sight, I stopped the car and finished off the rest of them right then and there! After a few weeks of camping out and eating so minimally, I was absolutely ravenous! 

As you can imagine, traveling in Europe under such conditions can wear on one's nerves. I remember one evening, after driving north for three hours when we should have been driving south for three hours because the student I was in the car with simply could not read a map! We were on the Autobahn in German, which can fray one's nerves in the best of times, and we had quit speaking to each other. We stopped at a roadside restaurant with only a small amount of cash with us and had no chance to cash travelers checks. It was cold and rainy on top of the coldish atmosphere between us. When we received our menus, we knew we would have to get something cheap - like a hot dog! We did not know what kind of "wursts" we were ordering so we went by the prices. We ordered in silence. He ordered one type and I ordered another. When the waitress brought out our plates and sat them down in front of us, he had two "wursts" that were thin as pencils and about eight inch long and I had two "wursts" about an inch thick and about four inches long. We both sat there staring at our plates for a a while, looked at each other, and burst out in outrageous laughter! 

At the end of my fifth and final trip to Taize, I was what was called "over it!" I knew that I never wanted to do that kind of traveling ever again! In the airport in Paris, right before getting on the plane, I took all my clothes out of my backpack and threw all of them in the garage can. I looked around the airport till I found a local young man who had just gotten off a plane. I went up to him and asked, "How you you like a newish backpack and tent? I am going home and I never want to see them ever again!" He was delighted and so was I!!!!!

Three, of the four of us from Somerset, Kentucky, somewhere in Europe in our leased car after Taize. That's me with the beard! 

55 YEARS AND COUNTING: "....AND SOME SAID I WOULDN'T MAKE IT!"

ORDINATION DAY - MAY 16, 1970

Cathedral of the Assumption, Louisville, Kentucky 

DRESSED AND READY TO GO BE ORDAINED

A QUIET MOMENT BEFORE GOING INTO THE CATHEDRAL TO BE ORDAINED

KNEELING BEFORE ARCHBISHOP McDONOUGH HAVING MY HANDS ANOINTED IMMEDIATELY AFTER BEING ORDAINED A PRIEST 

FIRST MASS DAY - MAY 17, 1970 

Rhodelia, Kentucky

SAINT THERESA CHURCH - MY HOME PARISH

SUMMARY OF THE LAST FIFTY-FIVE YEARS

"Once a Missionary, Always a Missionary"

Father J. Ronald Knott was ordained May 16, 1970. After ordination, he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in “Parish Revitalization” from McCormick (Presbyterian) Seminary in Chicago. He has served the Archdiocese of Louisville as a home missionary, college teacher, campus minister, pastor, cathedral rector, traveling evangelist, homiletics instructor and archdiocesan vocation director. He has presented over 80 parish missions and retreats in five states. He was a weekly columnist for The Record for 15 years. He served as a weekend Campus Minister at Bellarmine University for many years. He has led more than 100 presbyteral convocations in 10 countries and addressed the USCCB. He has authored over 30 books, some of them have been translated into Spanish, Vietnamese and Swahili. Father Knott was the founder of the Saint Meinrad Institute for Priests and Presbyterates while serving as a seminary staff member for 10 years. In retirement, he served in the Caribbean Missions for several years, mainly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and addressed the bishops of the Antilles Bishops Conference in Trinidad. In his home parish, he founded the Saint Theresa Heritage Partners in 2021 that led to building its new Family Life Center and Guest House. He continues to help in parishes and celebrate Masses at the Little Sisters of the Poor’s Home and the Louisville Ursuline Retirement Community at Twinbrook. He is presently sponsoring a seminarian in Tanzania and is involved in building a new St. Veronica Church in Kenya. He blogs every other day on a blog named An Encouraging Word found at FatherKnott.com.

FINAL RESTING PLACE 

St. Theresa Cemetery, Rhodelia, Kentucky 

READY FOR A FINAL DATE TO BE ADDED

THE MARGINAL, THE LEFT-OUT, THE REJECTED AND THE HURTING

 

Pope Leo XIV

"Simply Amazed - Forever Grateful" is carved at the top of my already-installed tombstone. I composed it a few years ago to sum up my life so far. Those are the words that came to mind as I began to realize the implications of what was happening as I watched the TV as they announced the name of our new Pope. The election of Pope Leo XIV will forever add an important event in my growing list of  life experiences that drove me to come up with those words as a summary of how I felt about my life. Yes, I am simply amazed and forever grateful for Pope Leo's election! 

Why am I amazed and grateful? Even though It makes me proud, it is not because he is American born. It is because his election has seriously validated my own ministry in the last fifty-five years and given me hope and enthusiasm again that I thought was beginning to wane within me. 

What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?"  I have often described myself as "Consciously Christian, Deliberately Catholic and Unapologetically Ecumenical and Inter-Faith." I even did many Parish Missions by that name.  I think today that is some of what Pope Leo XIV is going to be about as he takes Pope Francis' vision to the next level. Once again, we as a church have been given a dynamic inspirational moral leader and this country has been given a dynamic alternative to the immoral, corrupt and mean-spirited fumes that have been breathing in lately. Pope Leo is "An American like no other American," as the Italians are saying. We now have two highly visible American world leaders, side-by-side, presenting opposing options for us to choose from when it comes to us building our futures. 

What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?"  Secondly, I have been reaching out to, and writing about, marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics and various members of other faiths from the the very beginning of my ministry as a priest. I have listed some of them further on in this post, but  the fact is I was doing that ministry most visibly at the Cathedral of the Assumption starting 30 years before Pope Francis was elected. As Pope Leo said on the balcony in his first speech, "God loves all people - unconditionally." I was saying this to the growing congregation of our Cathedral for years, "God loves everybody - no ands, ifs or buts about it!" Because of that message, we earned the nickname "The Island of Misfit Toys" because people were reminded of the children's film, "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" where broken toys could go to be repaired so that they too could be part of Christmas! 

What do I mean "his election has seriously validated my ministry?"  Here is a short list of some of my involvement in ministry to the marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics, as well as various members of other faiths - all those who God loves unconditionally and all those we are called to love unconditionally as well! 

(1) When I was in major seminarian, I chose a Disciple of Christ history professor on the seminary faculty to be my advisor/spiritual director, while choosing a priest-monk as a confessor. 

(2) I was first given an opportunity to learn to preach by the United Church of Christ in 1968 when I became one of the first two Catholic seminarians to join their Christian Ministry in the National Parks program and was assigned to preach in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. 

(3) After ordination, I accepted an assignment in the "home missions" of our diocese. I started an interfaith campus ministry program at Somerset Community College called IF - for INTER-FAITH. I volunteered to do interfaith services at Lake Cumberland Boys Camp for juvenal delinquents and took students of various religious backgrounds, most of whom had never been out of Kentucky, to France on five backpacking trips to the ecumenical monastery in Taize. I opened a used clothing and household items store for the poor called "Clothes 'n Stuff." I preached in several Protestant churches, a baccalaureate service at an all non-Catholic high school three years in a row and had an interfaith radio program on Sundays called "Morning Has Broken" for a few years. 

(5) After ordination, I earned my doctorate in 1980 from McCormick (Presbyterian) Seminary in Chicago in "Parish Revitalization." My doctoral thesis was entitled "Strangers in Town: How One Roman Catholic Mission Church Dealt With Environments (internal weakness and rejection from the outside)" 

(5) At the Cathedral, I led a congregation that grew from 110 to 2100 members by specializing in reaching out to marginal, left-out, excluded, rejected and hurting Catholics. I was co-founder of the Cathedral Heritage Foundation (later called Center for Interfaith Relations) that still exists today. We built a new kitchen for the homeless, supported St. John Day Center for the the Homeless and sponsored an annual Dessert Festival to help house AIDS patients when AIDS was first discovered. 

(6) For 15 years, I wrote a weekly column in our diocesan newspaper, THE RECORD, called "An Encouraged" directed at discouraged, rejected, left-out and marginalized people, especially hurting Catholics. 

(7) While I was a weekend campus minister at Bellarmine University, I offered an annual "Blue Christmas Mass" for several years for the grieving - those who had lost loved ones, but could not identify with the normal happy Christmas Masses offered in their parishes.

(8) While a seminary staff member at St. Meinrad, I annually hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for "those left behind" - the international seminarians studying at that seminary who could  not go home to their families. I started a program there called "World Priest" that helped immigrant priests adjust to American culture and serve in American parishes. I bought them clothes, helped them with spending money and made sure they could afford class trips. 

(9) After retirement, I volunteered to work in the Caribbean Missions, making 12 trips and raising over $1,250.000.00 in financial aid, especially to the Diocese of Kingstown in the poor country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  

(10) I raised the awareness of my small hometown parish of its connection to 19th century slavery, honored all 222 of our enslaved members in a museum room in a totally renovated closed school that I turned into a rural eco-friendly family life center and restored the tombstone of Father Augustus Tolton's enslaved grandmother, Matilda. Father Tolton is the United States' first slave-to-priest who is up for canonization. Father Tolton's enslaved mother, Martha Jane, was baptized and confirmed in my home parish. Because of these efforts, 35 bishops came to visit the grave of Father Tolton's grandmother last Fall. 

(11) Recently, I have been involved in the missions of west Africa by agreeing to sponsor a Tanzanian seminarian, helping a family add to their house and raising the funds to build a new stone St. Veronica Church, and furnishing it, in Kenya. 

Yes, I feel deeply that the election of Pope Leo XIV has validated my fifty-five years of ministry at a time when I thought the Cardinals might elect a Pope who would try to take us back to some imagined "good old days." His election has made me feel that maybe I have not been blind, deaf and dumb all these years after all! Along with Pope Leo, we old missionaries like to say, "Once a missionary, always a missionary!"  He will no doubt, like Pope Francis, continue to "Make the Church Outward Looking Again."     

GONE, BUT CERTAINLY NOT FORGOTTEN

 MARY ETHEL MATTINGLY KNOTT

Taken at my First Mass       May 17, 1970

September 10, 1917 - May 12, 1976

My mother died 49 years ago today. She died of breast cancer at a little over 58 years old. I was the second of her seven children, not counting a miscarriage. I was holding her hand when she died. 

We were very close, mostly because we both almost died in her giving me birth. I was born at home, delivered by my paternal grandmother and baptized right there in the bed where I was born by this country midwife grandmother. We cried together when I was born. She cried every time I came home from the seminary. We cried together, walking back to the hotel, when the doctors in Dallas, Texas, told us she had breast cancer. She cried when I was ordained and said my first Mass. We both cried when I anointed her in our living room as she left for the hospital for the final time. I cried when she died, at her funeral Mass and when we left her body in the cemetery. 

I always wanted to do something to memorialize her, but I could never afford it when she was alive. Forty-one years after her death, I got the chance. I was able to build a "prayer garden" at Saint Meinrad's Monte Cassino Shrine where I went to the seminary for six years and where I worked as a staff member for ten years. I included my brother, Mark, because I wanted to honor him as well. If you are ever at St. Meinrad, go up the hill to Monte Cassino and visit her "prayer garden" and say a prayer for her! 

Mom, I Still Love You! May You Rest in Peace!