YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" #34

The now closed and torn-down St. Thomas Seminary that I attended in Louisville from 1958-1964 

I AM SHOCKED THAT I MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH SEMINARY

I didn't have much support when I left my country home in Rhodelia at age fourteen to go to high school seminary in the city of Louisville. Even my pastor, who at first refused to fill out the papers, told me I wouldn't make it to Christmas. I am shocked that I managed, not only to make it to Christmas, but the whole twelve years! The last six years got easier and easier as I completed each year, but the first six years were, to put it bluntly, quite often hellishly filled with ridicule, shaming and bullying! For many years, I have been ashamed to tell these stories believing that I was "defective" in some way. 

Those of us who came from "the country," were subjected to the regular ridicule of name-calling by those born in "the city:" hillbilly, redneck, hick and yokel! They added an extra ridicule for me because I was from "Rhodelia." "Hey, you! You from Rhodesia!" That kind of name-calling was not "every once in a while," but constant - and often accompanied with a laugh! 

I had the "misfortune" not only to be born a "hick," I was a skinny underweight "hick" which invited bullying as well. I was regularly stuffed into my narrow little locker and then the door would be shut. Those who did it, would invite others to come and laugh at me. They would open the door just wide enough to look in and then leave laughing. Sometimes this would go on for an hour. I remember trying to hide my shame and act as it it didn't bother me in hopes they would quit. 

On other occasions, I was stuffed in a tall trash can and then the trash can would be lifted up and set in a window sill. I had to sit there as people passed by and laughed. I had to sit there because to move would have meant that I would drop about three feet onto a terrazzo floor folded inside a tall metal trash can! I don't believe it is an exaggeration by any stretch to say that if the can fell to the floor it could have broken my neck or broken my back! 

Even the head priest, the Rector, joined in in his own way. With no help, guidance or counseling, I struggled with "culture shock." During my first year, I never knew what people were talking about. They talked about movie theatres, restaurants and sports events. I knew about bailing hay, loading lumber, feeding pigs and stripping tobacco. As a result, I tested to do well academically, but my performance was substandard. My focus was not on academics, but on simple survival! As a result, the Rector called me into the office at the beginning of my second year and told me "they" were sending me home because I was what he called "a hopeless case." I had to beg for a second chance.

Because I was underweight at 90 pounds as a high school senior, I would stuff myself with the only extra food that was allowed - bread! I would squish slices of it into a ball and eat as many as I could. I did that for several months and got up enough nerve to go up to the Infirmary to weigh myself. The Rector ran the Infirmary and you did nothing that he could not see. With the Rector watching me, I got on the scales and it showed that I weighed 99 pounds that day! As I left, I had to walk through two lines of waiting students along the halls. All of a sudden, I heard the Rector call out at me in a ridiculing voice, "Knott, come back when you weigh 100!" Many of the students giggled as I "walked the line!" 

In my last year there, my second year of college, I was sitting in Greek class. The Rector taught that class. All of a sudden, he called my name! That meant that I had to stand and read a passage in Greek that he had chosen and translate it. I still remember the first word! It was "pneumata," meaning "spirit." I was so shocked and nervous and caught off guard that I could not pronounce the word. I was trying to pronounce the letter "p" and "n" together which ended up with me just stammering since the "p" is silent in that Greek word. After I had struggled for a minute (which seemed like an hour), the rector yelled out, "Knott, just sit down! You have been a ball and chain around my leg for six years!" 

Sports was another source of ridicule and shaming. I went to a small four-classroom country school. At recess, the girls jumped rope and the boys "played ball" in a gravel parking lot with an old tennis ball and a flat board. Sports, in the city, may have been something played at school with the guidance of a coach or something they watched their favorite team play in person or on TV, but sports were neither played nor watched on TV in the country when I was in grade school. We worked after school. 

In the minor seminary, we went to school all day Saturday and were required to play sports one afternoon a week. Everybody presumed you knew the rules of the game, whether it be softball, football, volleyball or basketball. We were simply assigned to a team and left to figure it out for ourselves simply by watching others. There were levels. In basketball, I was usually assigned to a D-TEAM, so you can imagine how humiliating that was for a skinny country boy. I won't even mention football! I was a little better  at volleyball. I even "helped" win a game one day when the ball came over the net, hit me in the head and went back over and landed in their court when they did not expect it! I did better in sports where two people played, rather than a team, sports like tennis, handball, ping pong and shuffleboard. I even grew to excel in handball. My partner and I won the championship game at a school tournament. I attributed my ability to "get better" to the fact that in a two-man sport I had someone to explain things to me, rather than running around confused by what everyone else was doing. 

I learned to lie in the seminary. I lied to get out of reading or speaking in public because I was so bashful. I lied about finances because my family only sent me $5.00 a month to live on. We were all required to own a metal breadbox in the canteen room for "goodies" and "snacks" sent to us from home. I must have set a record in those days. I owned a metal breadbox for six years that never held any "goodies" or "snacks" from home. After coming in from required sports, someone would say "let's get a coke and a snack." I would lie regularly by saying something like, "I'm not thirsty or hungry!" I was ashamed. To that, I was always having to "borrow" pencils, pens and paper because I did not have the money to buy them and was too ashamed to admit it. 

You might conclude that I was "damaged" by all this or that I am "looking for sympathy." Actually, I look at it as a very important part of my "formation" as a priest. I have ended up specializing in reaching out to people who are lost, fallen-away, marginalized, left-out, overlooked or hurt by the institutional church. If you don't believe me, just look at my work at the Cathedral of the Assumption between 1983 and 1997, examine my weekly column in The Record, An Encouraging Word, that I wrote weekly for fifteen years and read some of  my past posts on this blog!

I even argued with the editor of these stories about whether it was "wise" to tell my story about bullying. I insisted including it because "bullying" usually happens in secret - even in places like minor seminaries! Telling this story might encourage a bullied young boy or girl out there that "there is light at the end of the tunnel!" 

BISHOP FILBERT FELICIAN MHASI'S SECOND VISIT TO LOUISVILLE

My fellow volunteer-missionary from the Archdiocese of Louisville, Father John Judie, who has volunteered in both Kenya and Tanzania since his retirement, not only helped me with my St. Veronica Church project in Kenya, but introduced me to the Bishop of Tunduru-Masasi of Tanzania. Father John Judie, represented me at the dedication of St. Veronica Church in Kenya and then left to go down to Tanzania where he does most of his work these days. 

On July 26, 2024, Father John Judie came to my condo to introduce Bishop Mhasi to me for the first time. 

 

On his second visit to Louisville, Father John Judie brought him to my condo for lunch on July 15, 2025. On July 18, 2025, I went to meet Bishop Mhasi at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church (above) here in Louisville to interview him for this blog. On July 25, 2025, he came back to my condo to pick up a few things I sent back with him before he returned home to Tanzania. 

 

BISHOP FILBERT FELICIAN MHASI

By brief introduction, I am Bishop Filbert Felician Mhasi, from the Catholic diocese of TUNDURU-Masasi in the southern part of Tanzania. 

I was born on 30th November, 1973. I am the second from the last in the family of nine children; two sisters and seven brothers. I studied primary education in the government school, and then joined diocesan junior seminary for secondary education. After the completion of secondary education, I joined senior seminary for philosophy and then major seminary for Theology. I was ordained Priest on 3rd July, 2001. After doing my further studies, my Bishop at Mahenge diocese appointed me to work and teach in the diocesan junior seminary. Then, I was appointed to do pastoral work in the parish as a pastor.  

On 8th December, 2018, the Holy Father appointed me to be the Bishop of TUNDURU-Masasi. I was consecrated Bishop on 17th February, 2019. TUNDURU-Masasi (whereas 86% of the population are Muslims) is not my diocese of origin. My diocese of origin is Mahenge, whereas more than 87% of the population are Catholics! My pastoral work as a Bishop has not been easy, but with God's graces, we move forward. 

God Bless you! + Filbert F. Mhasi 

SOME PHOTOS FROM HIS DIOCESE IN TANZANIA

Lay people, Priests, Sisters and Seminarians

Bishop Filbert Mhasi at the door of his Cathedral. 

 

One of the Priests of the Diocese with some of the lay people. 

There are 22 Priests in the Diocese serving 22 Parishes and 140 Out Stations (Missions). 

Some of the Sisters attending the Bishop's Consecration and Installation - Teachers and Nurses

The Benedictine Sisters are teachers and the Sisters of Mary Immaculate are Hospital nurses.

Some of the Major Seminarians attending the Bishop's Consecration and Installation.

There are 16 Major Seminarians.

There are 169 Minor Seminarians

FACTS ABOUT BISHOP FIBERT MHASI AND HIS DIOCESE 

Bishop Mhasi will be 52 this coming November

86% of the people in his Diocese are of the Moslem faith.

Bishop Mhasi has to travel 3-1/2 hours to the airport to go to Metropolitan Bishops' Meetings and some parts of his Diocese. 

He travels a lot to do Confirmations in his own Diocese for his 22 parishes and 140 outstations. 

Most people in his Diocese are subsistence farmers and poor.

His biggest problems are financially based. 

The biggest blessing is the Catholic Church is growing in his Diocese.  

MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS LEARNED IN MY WORK IN THE MISSIONS

How good we have it and how convenient ordinary things are compared to much of the world! 

How hard it is for many Catholics even to get to church in other parts of the world. 

They often walk for miles to go to Mass and stay all day - no 50 minute service and leaving before Mass is over! 

THEY MAY BE GONE, BUT THEY ARE STILL AWARE OF US

 

On the Theology of Death

Karl Rahner S.J.

One of the most important theologians of the 20th century, Karl Rahner was born in March 1904. He was the fourth of seven children, the son of a local college professor and a devout Christian mother. In 1922 Karl followed his older brother Hugo and entered the Jesuit community. He died in 1984. 

"The great and sad mistake of many people, among them, even pious persons, is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh, no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes full of tears. Oh, infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent.

I have often reflected upon the surest comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and penetrating conviction that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them away. They are not even absent, but living near to us, transfigured: having lost, in their glorious change, no delicacy of their soul, no tenderness of their hearts, nor especial preference in their affection. On the contrary, they have, in depth and fervor of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is, for the good, a translation into light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians become perfect, those who were good become sublime."

IF YOU WANT TO BE KILLED, KEEP TELLING THE TRUTH

 

In those days, the princes said to the king: "Jeremiah ought to be put to death; he is demoralizing the soldiers who are left in this city, and all the people, by speaking such things to them; he is not interested in the welfare of our people, but in their ruin." King Zedekiah answered: "He is in your power"; for the king could do nothing with them. And so they took Jeremiah and threw him into the cistern of Prince Malchiah, which was in the quarters of the guard, letting him down with ropes. There was no water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah sank into the mud.

Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10

Jeremiah was a “prophet” and this is what “prophets” do - they speak "inconvenient truth." Prophets are not so much people who predict the future as people who get up in your face and rub a present truth in your face and make you look at it.  Today, we would call them “whistle blowers,” people who drag the truth out into the light of day whether it is convenient or not! Like prophets of old, whistle blowers are often considered “nut cases” at first. Like prophets of old, whistle blowers often get themselves killed, either actually or figuratively, because most establishments do not like to have their boats rocked or their embarrassing truths to come out. Instead of heeding the truth, they usually turn on the truth-teller. If you have ever been involved in such an action, you know just how dangerous the truth can be. If you were not physically hurt, you could be labeled or blackballed for years and maybe even for life.  

 

We still kill prophets in a host of creative ways. We shun friends who will not go along with us when we do wrong.  We rage against "wokeness" when what it exposes is too painful to admit. We ridicule the teaching of the Church and those who teach what the Church teaches when they won’t bless the wrongs we want to do. We call evil good and good evil so that we can live with our inconvenient truths, even when we know in our guts that we are doing is wrong.     

 

All of us have a built-in “prophet” as well. That built-in “prophet” is called our “conscience.” Our conscience is constantly confronting us with truths that we would just as soon not look at. When our consciences keep accusing us of violating our principles, we have ways of “silencing” it temporarily and even “killing” it for good. We regularly silence our consciences with alcohol and drugs, so that we can do what we know is wrong.  If we do it regularly and consistently over the long haul, we can even kill our consciences, until one day we are capable of doing or believing horrendous things that no longer shock us!  As someone said, “When there is no faith, there is no conscience. When there is no conscience, there is no morality. When there is no morality, there is no humanity.”   If we don’t start listening to our prophets, inside and out, we will soon be in a dark place with no escape.  On the other hand, Jesus said this: “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free!” (John 8:31-32)  Our external prophets and our internal consciences make us wake up and face the truth because “people who tell us what we want to hear are not necessarily our friends and people who tell us what we don’t want to hear are not necessarily our enemies.”  Yes, the truth will set us free, but as President James A. Garfield said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” To relieve our misery when faced with unpleasant and unwanted truths, we tend to kill our prophets and numb our consciences!

 

In times like these, truth matters! We desperately need communal prophets and personal consciences to rub our noses in the truth no matter how painful it is to accept!  

 

"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" #33

"CHANGES IN THE CHURCH" 

Before I retired, I used to teach a seminary class about the transitions future priests would be going through when they left the seminary and entered ministry. Part of the class included planning their First Masses. From what I heard, no wonder so many of them want to escape the chaos of their upbringing that those of us with our upbringing cannot comprehend. Some of them yearn for "the good old days" they never knew. Most of us who grew up in "those days" have no desire to go back there!" 

Questions asked by class participants. "Where do I seat my father's new girlfriend in relation to my mother? My parents haven't been to church since my First Communion. What do I do if they come up for communion? My father can't be there since he is in prison. What can I tell people if they ask where he is?"

Obviously, these questions would never have been asked in the past. With all that going on in families today, those seminarians would never have been accepted in the seminary to begin with! 

One of the reasons I built "Jack's in the Commons" coffee shop was to get the guys out of their rooms with the possibility they might run into a live human being. Many of them had grown used to texting each other with questions in another room down the hall! 

Whenever, I was Vocation Director and they started idealizing "the old days," I would say to them, "OK, hand me your car keys! You would not have been allowed to own your own car back then!" "OK, how are you going to buy gas, snacks and pizza at the Unstable pub? Since you want to go back to "the old days," I will ask the bishop to rescind all monthly stipends. Back then, there were no stipends. Of course, I could have kept going, but if they knew what I knew,  they would know they were being selective about what they were willing to go back to!  

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One of the "changes in the church" that I personally find distressing is the practice of family members giving "eulogies" after communion. You never knew what to expect and sometimes you did not know how to handle some of what you heard. I can still remember one couple in particular. The husband died first. At his funeral, after communion, his wife approached the pulpit. She started off with words like this: All of you think he was such a wonderful man? Well, let me tell you what a pain he was to live with and then you can let me know whether you still believe that!" 

She obviously thought it was a great occasion to  "cash in her chips" and "get even." The congregation sat there with their heads down and their mouths open until she was finished. I was tempted to go over and intervene by announcing "let us pray" thereby cutting her off, but she managed to empty her angry feelings  about him onto all of us! Satisfied, she sat down!  The rest of us looked around in disbelief at what we had just witnessed until the service ended. 

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There were lots of things I did as a young priest that I look back on in amazement - things I would never have gotten to do unless there had been "changes in the church." Before those changes, the archdiocese would never have sent a young priest down to the home missions to live by himself.  

I remember going up into "the hills" to gather some testimony for an annulment. I did not want to go. In fact I was scare to go. It felt like I was risking my life in a scene from the movie "Deliverance." I felt I was "dropping in unannounced" at the home of the banjo player in that film. I knew enough no to pull out some forms to fill out and sign. I just asked some of the questions as indirectly as possible. They were cautious, but more helpful than I had expected. I was happy when it was over and I am certain they were happy to get rid of that "Catlick" guy who was here "snoopin' around" and "askin' questions." 

For a while, I served on a Social Service committee to suggest ways to help a young woman who had at least one child by her own father, who had been raised in a cave, who could not read or write and who had never seen things like a traffic light or a TV. 

I taught a class at Somerset Community College called "Modern Social Problems." We covered contemporary issues like abortion, capitol punishment, child abuse and poverty. As a Catholic priest teaching those topics, I was told that I could not mention them as "moral issues," because it was a public college. I could only mention the effects they had on society. Being in the 'Bible Belt," I remember correcting papers the students wrote that began with phrases like, "I just don't think it's right....." and "The Bible says......" I felt the pressure of being "monitored" by other teachers who didn't trust me as a Catholic to begin with! 

I was invited my the owner of the local radio station in Monticello, Kentucky, to offer an ecumenical Sunday radio program. I called it "Morning Has Broken." I simply played recorded music from various Christian traditions and commented positively on them, only to be thrown off the air by the complaints of some of the local ministers who had to pay for their denominational airtime. 

One year, I remember being invited to a public high school as a guest speaker in a senior English class. They were reading the classic piece of English literature called Canterbury Tales. Since there were no Catholic students in that public high school and may have never been. They invited me in to explain what a priest, monk and nun is that were mentioned in Canterbury Tales. I did that for three years. A side affect of my visits was the fact that the students got to pick a minister to preach the sermon at their Graduation Prayer Service, the day before their graduations. The graduates picked me three years in a row! This caused the School Board to intervene. They students the fourth year, "You can pick anyone, but Brother Knott!"

One of the Sisters of Saint Joseph from Connecticut who volunteered down in Whitley City, in the other county I served, taught mathematics at the local Job Corps school. Some of the youth there were from "up east." A few were black and Catholic. The Sister who taught there invited them to church on Sundays. I did not know it at the time, but we were the only church in the county to welcome black people to church. The news got out and racism raised it's ugly head. I heard indirectly through a student at Somerset Community College from that county that the local Ku-Klux-Klan was taking about confronting us. That worried me a lot. I had to travel for an hour back to the other county where I lived by some dark winding roads. I never knew when the Klan would block the road and "deal" with me. It never happened, but I was scared to death to travel that road at night all by myself.  

In my time in Wayne County. Kentucky, I volunteered to be a "chaplain" on Sundays at the Lake Cumberland Youth Development Center - a juvenal delinquent facility way out in the countryside. I conducted informal "ecumenical services," mostly teaching them to sing along with recorded hymns and then commenting on them. I seemed to work and I got the feeling that some of the youth actually looked forward to those services. I am convinced that teaching them to sing hymns, rather than a lot of preaching, is what made it work as well as it did! 

I still remember listening to one of the young "innocent looking" boys  as he told me about beating up his grandmother, tying her to a bed, robbing her and then killing her!" I desperately tried to hide my shock and talk to him in a calm collected voice. It took me months to "get over" that experience. I learned to have great respect for that old saying,  "You can't judge a book by its cover!" 

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As I wrote about these experiences, I realized clearly that I would never ever have had these experiences unless there had been "changes in the church" when I was a young priest! 

GET IT RIGHT, FOR GOD'S SAKE!

 

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

His Son was not sent to condemn the world, but to save it.

John 3

God loves the world? God does not condemn the world?  God wants to save the world? You'd never know it from the hell-fire and brimstone preaching that has come from some pulpits! If you have listened closely to the preaching that has come from those pulpits, you would have to conclude that God would like nothing better than to wipe us out and start all over! 

If I had not had a dramatic conversion experience as a young priest, I might have been one of those doomsday preachers, threatening people with eternal punishment by a get-even God. Because of that conversion experience, I am a committed preacher of the "good news." I believe with all my heart that God not only loves us, but loves us without condition - no ands, ifs and buts about it - no matter what! That love is not something we could earn no matter how good we try to be! No, it is an unexpected, unearned, free gift from an incredibly generous God! Yes, we can reject that love and turn away from it, but God does not withhold it from us because of what we do or fail to do.  That love is always there and free for the taking, so if we cut ourselves off from it, it is our fault, not God's!  

My conversion experience was about a dramatic change in my perception of God. Before my conversion, you could say that I was scared of God, that I never felt acceptable to God, that I was always anxious and guilty about something, that I held back and shamed about one thing or another. I have always been a believer and a follower, but my relationship with God was never a totally comfortable relationship. I was a believer and I wanted to please God, but our relationship was parental. God was the demanding father and I was the screw-up child who wanted to be valued.

At my conversion experience, I discovered the truth of God's unconditional love for me and for all people. Every day since then, I have felt that love in my bones. I live each day now with the certain knowledge that I am loved and forgiven, in spite of my sins and mistakes. I try to teach others about this free gift, this incredible love, that is available to all of us - the good and bad alike. I know I am not perfect, but I also know that that is OK, because my best is good enough for God. In spite of my many imperfections, I do not worry at all about having to face God after death. In fact, I am totally at peace as far as death goes! When the time comes, I know that something better than I can imagine awaits me.

Because of my conversion experience, I refuse to be part of the "hellfire and brimstone school of preaching," which believes that the best way to get people to shape up, and do the right thing, is to scare the hell out of them, by painting God as a just judge who is going to give us exactly what we deserve - eternal punishment as payback. As far as I am concerned, I believe that approach is not only theologically unsound, I don't believe it works! In my 56 years of ordained ministry, I have seen many more people converted by the "good news" than all that "fire and brimstone" ranting and raving.

Here are just a few of the things the scriptures teach us about God.     

• He looked at everything he had made and declared it good.
• Like a shepherd he feeds his flock and gathers the lambs in his arms.
• While we were still sinners Christ died for us.
• It was not you who chose me. It was I who chose you.
• This man welcomes sinners and even eats with them.
• The good and bad alike are invited to the feast
• All received a full days pay.
• Both sons, the prodigal and the compliant, are loved by their father.
• I go to prepare a place for you so that where I am, you may also be.

Pietistic, arrogant, religious know-it-alls get on my nerves big time! They make me angry most of all because they attempt to horde God's love and measure it out to people in little thimbles, as if God's love was in short supply. Resembling the twisted god they believe in, they tend to project onto the real God their own self-loathing. One of the things that saddens me most is that I know that some young people think they have to be bible-thumping, body-hating religious fanatics to be serious disciples of Jesus Christ.  Since many young people can't wrap their minds around that tired old approach, many throw the baby out with the bathwater, yawning at what they hear while dismissing religion altogether.

How tragic it is, after God has bent over backwards to let us know that we are loved and that he wants us to have a full life, for so many people not to enjoy God:  not to enjoy the generous daily blessings of God, not to enjoy the daily unfolding of his marvelous creation, not to enjoy basking in his friendship and not to enjoy the marvelous array of people he sends into our lives.  A personal relationship with God is supposed to be life giving, not life draining!

Once I discovered that God loves and accepts me, sins and all, I was able to love and accept myself, sins and all. Once I learned to love and accept myself, sins and all, I have learned to love and accept others, sins and all! This insight into God's love has done more than anything to make my religion life-giving, instead of life-draining!  This insight into God's love has brought God down out of the clouds and made him a delightful companion who walks beside me as we live my life out - together!