The Holy Spirit and the Book of Ruth at Pentecost

Events at the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts of the Apostles have roots deep in Salvation History. In the traditional Hebrew Pentecost, the Book of Ruth is read.

May 24 , 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

(Note: The graphic above depicts Ruth and Naomi preparing to depart Moab to venture down to Bethlehem.)

Shannon Bream, host of Fox News Sunday, is a lawyer by training having earned her Doctor of Law degree at a prestigious Florida law school. Prior to that, she graduated magna cum laude from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, a school founded in 1971 by evangelist Jerry Falwell. Not surprisingly, Ms. Bream has been well informed by her alma mater, and has written several books with an evangelical biblical perspective. Her titles to date include, The Women of the Bible Speak, The Mothers and Daughters of the Bible Speak, and The Love Stories of the Bible Speak.

One of the heroic women of the Biblical literature Ms. Bream wrote about in the first of those titles is Ruth, heroine of the Book of Ruth. It is a brief but remarkable story. In Jewish tradition, its author was the Hebrew judge Samuel. Although the book is descriptive of the period “when the judges ruled” (1:1), scholars have variously argued for its oral tradition in the time of the monarchy of King David (10th to 8th century BC), in the postexilic era (5th to 4th century BC), or somewhere in between the two.

The Book of Ruth tells of a family from the ancient town of Bethlehem in Judah that takes refuge in the country of Moab during a famine. While there, the sons of the Judean family marry Moabite women. When the father and the two sons die from unknown causes, the bereaved mother, Naomi, determines to return to her ancestral home in Bethlehem. She urges her daughters-in- law, Ruth and Orpah, to remain in Moab with their own people.

Orpah remains, but Ruth discerns that her duty of devotion to her deceased young husband also extends to his bereaved mother, Naomi, who is now widowed and alone. So Ruth insists on accompanying Naomi to Bethlehem. The story provides a moving quote of Ruth that over the centuries has found its way into the popular music of Christian liturgy:

“Wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you dwell, I shall dwell there also. Your people will be my people, and your God shall be my God too. Wherever you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried beside you.”

— Ruth 1:16-17

In Bethlehem, Ruth’s beauty, devotion and kindness soon attract the attention of Naomi’s near kinsman Boaz, (2:l-4:12). Despite the fact that Ruth is a foreigner, Boaz, a Jew, marries her, and by an act of Divine Providence she becomes the great grandmother of King David, of whose lineage Jesus was born. This is noted in the genealogy at the beginning of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. It’s an odd inclusion in the genealogy:

“... and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Raihab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the King.”

— Matthew 1:4-6

It was highly unusual for any genealogy to add the name of the maternal line in Sacred Scripture, but both Ruth and the small and inconspicuous Book of Ruth have an outsized influence and footprint on the faith of Israel and Pentecost. It is evidence of the Spirit of God guiding Salvation History across millennia. I must remember that when I am bowed low by whatever cross I happen to carry in this time. The Great Tapestry of God has threads I can only see from the back in another life.

Pentecost and a Bigger Picture

As a story, the Book of Ruth provides an account of the series of events that led up to the inclusion of a Moabite in the ancestry of King David, and one thousand years later, of Joseph, spouse of Mary, and, by extension and adoption, Jesus. The story’s emphasis on the fact that Ruth is a foreigner, her acceptance by the people of Bethlehem despite this fact, her place in the genealogy of King David, and the acceptance of the book as part of the Hebrew canon all suggest a deeper and more complex purpose.

So it comes as no surprise that the Book of Ruth is read in the Hebrew observance of “Shavuot,” known in English as the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. It is one of three pilgrimage festivals requiring a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for its observance. In the Hebrew calendar, Shavuot falls on the Sixth day of Sivan, the day after the conclusion of seven weeks — the fiftieth day after Passover. Hence the name, “Pentecost,” from Greek, “pentekoste” meaning fiftieth day.

In later Old Testament times, the Festival of the Harvest also became associated with the giving of the law to Moses upon Mount Sinai which, by tradition, also took place on the Sixth Day of Sivan. Because of the association with the giving of the Torah, a tradition evolved among Jews to honor Shavuot with an all-night vigil called the “Tikkun for Shavuot Eve.” It included readings from the first and last verses of each weekly Torah reading, a selection of Psalms, paragraphs from the six Orders of the Krishnah, a list of the 613 precepts of Moses, and the Book of Ruth.

It was for the observance of the Hebrew Pentecost that Mary, Mother of the Lord, and the Apostles were present in Jerusalem for the events that would become the Christian Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-47) the fiftieth day after the Resurrection of Jesus. It was the descent of the Holy Spirit among them. It was the birth of the Church.

When Beyond These Stone Walls began in the summer of 2009, I had no idea that I would still be writing posts from prison for it in 2023. I wrote about many things, but a priority for me was to write posts about Sacred Scripture with a focus on some of the Sunday Gospel readings which many readers seemed to like.

But I have run into an unforeseen problem. I have tried to research and write special posts at major feasts such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost but in 2023 I am faced with writing about the same Scriptures again and again. I do not have the luxury of looking out at a congregation gathered for Mass to adjust the length of my homily by the number of people I see yawning or dropping off.

Writing at Pentecost has been one of my biggest challenges. For one thing, Pentecost always comes at or near the anniversary of my priesthood ordination which I also feel obliged to mention in a post. It would be an insult to Catholics if I ignore my own ordination. In 2022, Pentecost fell on June 5th which was also my 40th anniversary of priesthood. So for the first time I combined the two subjects into one post. The next few paragraphs are an excerpt from “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost”:

It is interesting that the word for both wind and breath in Hebrew is ‘ruah,’ and the term in Hebrew for the Holy Spirit is ‘ruah ha-Qodesh.’ It simultaneously means the Spirit of God, the Wind of God, and the Breath of God. The same term is used in the story of Creation (Genesis 1:1-2) :

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God, ‘ruah ha-Qodesh,’ was moving over the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2)

And the term was used again in Genesis 2:7 as God breathed the Spirit into the nostrils of Adam, and again in the Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the Apostles, “He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” (John 20:22)

When I look back on forty years of priesthood, most of them in exile, imprisoned souls were reached through no merit of my own. In spite of myself, the Wind of God took me up in its vortex, and I am simply blown away by it.

The Great Gifts of the Spirit

“Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.”

— Peter at the Institution of the Eucharist, Luke 22:33

In Genesis 11:1-9 is related the story of a great tower erected in the land of Shinar in Babylon. The great Tower of Babel was left unfinished because Yahweh confounded the speech of the builders so they could not comprehend each other. The city was thenceforth called “Babel” which is the etymology of our word, “babble,” a term for incomprehensible speech. The story was an imaginative attempt to account for the origin of the diversity of languages.

The tower is today recognized as a “ziggurat,” a towering pyramid of successively recessed levels of stone. For the Babylonians, its purpose was ceremonial as a “cosmic mountain,” symbolic of the Earth itself. Its height was seen as a way to God as described in Genesis 11:4, a tower that “could reach to the heavens.”

As in many such stories, there is both a literal history behind it and an interpretation of it in the mind of the Ancient Near East. The tower became in time the story of God’s scattering of the human race into diverse languages. The story of Pentecost in Acts 2:5-12 has “men from every nation under heaven” in a multitude that came together and were bewildered as each heard the witness of the Apostles in their own languages.

They were “Parthians and Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and Libya, and Cyrene, and parts of Rome, Jews and Greeks alike, Cretans and Arabs.” They were the known world of that time, all the nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, literally the Sea of Middle Earth. Each heard of the mighty works of God in their own languages (Acts 2:5-12). For some, it was an answer to the divisions of our Babel-ing.

But others only mocked, accusing the Apostles of drunkenness: “they are filled with new wine.” Then came the great discourse of Peter (Acts 2:14-36) which began with a spirited defense of the Apostles:

“Men of Judea, and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. These men are not drunk as you suppose for it is only the third hour of the day.” And then Peter spoke from the Prophet Joel, and in the end, a great multitude came to believe and were received into the Church.

This was Peter filled with the Spirit and fortitude, the same Peter who, just 54 days earlier at the Last Supper vowed to the Lord that he would go with him to prison and to death. It was the same Peter who just a day later fell to the lower depths of Golgotha to deny three times that he even knew Him.

In my life as a priest, the wind of Pentecost has been more like a Category Five storm than the gentle breeze of the Spirit I once envisioned priesthood to be. After graduation with a double major in psychology and philosophy from St Anselm College in New Hampshire in 1978, I enrolled in a four year post-graduate degree program in theological studies at St. Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1978 to 1982. Summers and between semesters were spent in a three-year counseling internship for the Baltimore County Police Crisis Intervention Unit. It was an education in human suffering.

One of my seminary professors was a young priest named Fr Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, a popular Catholic author who taught courses in Scripture and spirituality. Forty-one years later, just as I started this post, I discovered Father Rolheiser again in the pages of Give Us This Day, a monthly prayer and liturgical guide published by Liturgical Press in Collegeville, Minnesota. He had a brief reflection on Pentecost that I have been trying to decipher. Here is a segment:

“The Christian paschal cycle has five distinct moments: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, the Forty Days, the Ascension, and Pentecost. These were five moments in Jesus’ life as he moved through his death, his resurrection, his forty days of post-resurrection appearances, his ascension, and his sending of the Holy Spirit. ... The five interpenetrating moments in Jesus’ life that stretch from Good Friday to Pentecost invite us to always: Name your deaths; Claim your births; Mourn what you lost; Don’t cling to what you had but let it ascend. If we do this, Pentecost will happen in our lives. We will receive a new spirit for the life that we are, in fact, living.”

— Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI, “Pentecost Will Happen”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this Pentecost post with its challenges to let the Spirit of Truth and Grace dwell within us. You may also like these related posts:

Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost

Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and The Sins of the Times

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Please note that Pentecost ends the Easter Season. We will be removing our Holy Week Retreat as a menu option, but we will include it from henceforth as a Library Category of posts. It was well received among readers, and I thank you.

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Personal Intention from Fr Gordon MacRae: May 24, 2023 marks one year since the tragic losses of life in Uvalde, Texas. Please pray for the people of this deeply wounded community and for the healing of this community's broken hearts.

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

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Our Adoration Chapel founded by Saint Maximilian Kolbe will remain at Beyond These Stone Walls. Jesus came to us through Mary, and now we may reciprocate. Thank you for spending time in Eucharistic Adoration. Please also offer a prayer for me because I am the only one among us unable to see the Chapel.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and The Sins of the Times

There is a difference between the signs of the times and the sins of the times. It is required that priests are vigilant of the former but resistant of the latter.

Just days before sitting down to write this post, I was bestowed with the honor of membership in The Catholic Writers Guild. One of my first thoughts as I plugged in my typewriter today is that this might be the post that gets me kicked out. We are in one of the strangest times in the life of the Church and in the ministry of bishops and priests that we have seen in many centuries.

There have been times almost as strange, but the difference is that you were kept from knowing about them.

My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982 at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. It did not start off well. There was another candidate for ordination that year, but he fled just days before. Someone then scrambled to revise and reprint the program for the Mass of Ordination. It was presided over by The Most Reverend Odore Gendron, Bishop of Manchester. That was four bishops ago.

Like most Catholic priests in America, I was ordained on a Saturday afternoon. Unlike most, I was ordained alone. Such a thing became a more prevalent phenomenon, however, as the signs of the times began to reflect the sins of the times. In the 1970s and 1980s, fewer men found the courage for such a counter-cultural commitment as the Catholic priesthood, a response I wrote of in a Pentecost Post, “Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God.”

That post described the story behind the story of the gathering of the Apostles at Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles (1:13) reports that the Eleven — Judas had come to ruin — came to Jerusalem in the company of Mary, Mother of the Resurrected Jesus, to mark the Pilgrimage Feast of Weeks fifty days after the spring celebration described in the Book of Leviticus (23:15-16). Among the Greek-speaking Jews of the New Testament, it came to be called Pentecost for “fiftieth day.”

Pentecost became a Christian feast when the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles in Jerusalem in the form of a mighty wind and tongues of fire. Then almost immediately, the newborn Church saw its first scandal as Peter rose to defend the Apostles against a false accusation that they were all drunk at 9:00 in the morning (Acts 2:15). I took a part of my title, “Inherit the Wind,” for that Pentecost post from a cryptic passage in the Book of Proverbs (11:29): “Those who trouble their household will inherit the wind, and the fool will become a servant to the wise.”

Seminary studies throughout the 1970s and priesthood ordination in 1982 were both such counter-cultural endeavors that I troubled my household greatly when I became a priest. The Proverb came true. Ever since that day, I have been a fool by the standards of this world, and a servant to the wise. Whether I have inherited the wind that so moved the Apostles to evangelize even in the face of martyrdom remains to be seen. I am still here writing.

Though my ordination was 38 years ago, I remember every moment as though it were yesterday. As I lay alone and prostrate on the floor before the altar, the Litany of the Saints was intoned. I had a fleeting thought that my sister, from a pew just 12 feet away, was mentally urging me, “Get up, you fool! Flee!” Later when I asked her about it she confirmed it. “Yes, that was me.”

Thirty-one years later in 2013 Dorothy Rabinowitz was writing “The Trials of Father MacRae,” her third in a series for The Wall Street Journal. She interviewed my sister who spoke candidly with a comment that never made its way into the articles. “The Catholic Church took my brother,” my sister said, “And now look what they have done to him.”

I have written of this in past Ordination Day posts, but many people have since asked me The Big Question. If I knew then what I know now, would I have joined John, the man who was to be ordained with me, in flight from this fate? I answer the question in one of the links at the end.

The Signs of the Times

Back in 2012, Anne Hendershott penned a research study for The Catholic World Report entitled, “Called by Name.” There were some interesting statistics analyzed in the study. In 2010 in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, a region that is 79-percent Catholic, there were no priesthood ordinations.

In the same year in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, a region that is only 17-percent Catholic, there were seven ordinations to the priesthood. In Portland, Oregon, the population of which is only 16-percent Catholic, there were nine ordinations in 2010. Researchers suggested that areas with large Latino populations may have fewer candidates for priesthood.

That turned out to be untrue. In the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas in 2010 there were seven priesthood ordinations and most were Latino. But across the nation in 2010, the number of priesthood ordinations and their ratio to the Catholic population varied greatly. Something less obvious was driving this.

In 1996, then Omaha, Nebraska Archbishop Elden Curtis penned an article entitled “Crisis in Vocations? What Crisis?” He theorized with some compelling data to back it up, that the attitudes and strength of fidelity in Church leadership is the number one causal factor in reduced numbers of viable candidates for priesthood. Archbishop Curtis wrote:

“When dioceses and religious communities are unambiguous about the ordained priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines these calls; when there is strong support for vocations, and a minimum of dissent about the male celibate priesthood and religious life; when there is loyalty to the Magisterium; when the bishops, priests, religious and lay people are united in vocation ministry — then there are documented increases in vocations. Young people do not want to commit themselves to dioceses or communities that permit or simply ignore dissent from Church doctrine”

— Archbishop Elden Curtis

In her article for The Catholic World Report cited above, Anne Hendershott analyzed a study by Andrew Yuengert, a Pepperdine University sociologist, who tried to quantify the observations of Archbishop Curtis about the connection between priesthood vocations and the attitudes and fidelity of Church leaders. He discovered some fascinating corollaries.

Andrew Yuengert found that dioceses with bishops ordained in the 1970s had significantly lower numbers of priesthood vocations than those with bishops ordained before or later. He found that corollary to be most prominent in the ordination statistics of bishops who were characterized as orthodox or progressive. Of interest, he discovered that bishops who regularly published articles in America magazine — considered to be more liberal — fostered fewer vocations than bishops who were more likely to publish articles in The Catholic Answer, considered to be more orthodox.

There was another interesting corollary in the Yuengert study. You may remember the great controversy at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 when then President Barack Obama was invited to give the Commencement Address and was bestowed with an honorary degree.

At the time, eighty-three U.S. bishops signed a formal statement disapproving of the University administration’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on the openly pro-abortion President Obama who worked to expand access to abortion throughout the U.S. and the world. Yuengert discovered in this another unexpected corollary: Many of the 83 bishops who signed that statement led dioceses with the highest percentages of priesthood ordinations in the country.

The Sins of the Times

I have heard many horror stories from priests ordained in the 1970s and 1980s that the seminaries they were sent to were anything but loyal to the Magisterium and supportive of priestly vocations. I have a horror story of my own that I wrote about a decade ago. It is worth repeating because it was typical of the sins of the times in the 1970s and 1980s, the era in which the decline of priesthood was set in motion.

I had requested to go to St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, MA, but was sent instead to Baltimore. This story took place in the fall of 1979 in my second year of theological studies at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore. St. Mary’s was at the time considered to be the most academically challenging and most theologically liberal of U.S. seminaries. It was called “The Harvard of seminaries,” but it also had a reputation for fostering — even demanding — dissent.

There were about 160 seminarians from some 40 U.S. dioceses studying for priesthood at St. Mary’s then. It had a capacity for more than twice that number, a reality that created an atmosphere of competition among national seminaries (as opposed to local seminaries like St. John’s in Boston). Though St. Mary’s has undergone a complete revision of its direction since then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was known as a birthplace of theological dissent among priests.

The atmosphere reflected that. Seminarians never wore any form of clerical attire, and would have been laughed out the door if they did. The beautiful main chapel was used for Mass only once per week — on Wednesday nights where a weekly seminary-wide liturgy took place, often hosting clown masses, experimental music (“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas was once the Communion hymn).

There were many liturgical abuses, and any refutation earned the commenter a notation of “theologically rigid” in his file. Other weekday masses were held in small groups in faculty quarters. On Sundays, seminarians were on their own, encouraged to attend Mass at one of several Baltimore parishes. Some rarely ever attended Mass at all.

In 1979, a rift of sorts formed between the seminary rector and those planning for a U.S. visit by Pope John Paul II at the end of the first year of his pontificate. In October, 1979, Pope John Paul II spent six eventful days in the United States, visiting Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Iowa, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

One of the highlights of the visit was Pope John Paul’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on October 2, 1979. He stressed the theme of human rights and the dignity of the person, deploring violations of religious freedoms. However, most of the 67 addresses given by the pope during his visit were directed to Catholics and stressed their responsibilities as believing members of the Church.

The messages were conservative in tone and contained unqualified condemnations of abortion, artificial birth control, homosexual practice, and premarital and extramarital sex. The pope reminded priests of the permanency of their ordination vows and also ruled out the possibility of ordination for women, bringing protests from a number of Catholic feminists.

Little of Pope John Paul’s vision for the Church in the modern world was received with any enthusiasm by the administration and faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. It was in the weeks before this momentous visit that all hell broke loose at St. Mary’s. The seminary rector, now deceased, was a priest of my diocese and a member of the Order of St. Sulpice — aka The Sulpicians — which ran the nation’s oldest seminary since its founding some 200 years earlier.

Just weeks before Pope John Paul’s planned visit, it was somehow learned that all seminarians from several major seminaries in the region were invited by the Holy Father to take part in a Mass for seminarians on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Upwards of a thousand seminarians were to have special seating with an expected crowd of 100,000.

Seminarians at St. Mary’s, however, were never told of the invitation, nor were we told that the Seminary Rector had declined it on our behalf for reasons that he refused to divulge. The resultant furor was shocking; not only for the majority liberal seminarians, but for the administration and faculty who just assumed that we would disdain the theology and vision of Pope John Paul II just as much as they did. A line had been crossed that threatened to sever our identity as future priests.

A letter of protest was quickly drafted and signed by more than half of the 160 seminarians representing some forty dioceses across the land. I was one of the signatories of that letter, a fact that the Rector took very personally because we represented the same diocese. As a result, I was labeled a disobedient rebel.

A seminary-wide meeting was held, and the Rector doubled down on his rejection of the papal invitation. He warned that anyone who attempted to attend the Pope’s Mass one hour away in Washington would not receive permission to do so, and would receive failing grades for any course work assigned for that day. He also said that several crucial exams would be held that day and failing grades would be reported back to the diocese of each seminarian along with a report of disobedience to his legitimate authority.

Needless to say, we went anyway. No one has a vocation to the seminary.

The Priest Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The graphic above is not a real book, so please don’t try to order it on Amazon. It was created by the TSW publisher in response to a post of mine that stirred an uproar when first posted in November, 2013. It was “Stay of Execution: Catholic Conscience and the Death Penalty.”

That post publicly refuted another priest who published a letter in Our Sunday Visitor calling for expanded use of the death penalty in the United States. As a prisoner-priest, I wrote in favor of mercy. But it was I, and not he, who kicked the hornet’s nest.

Back to the seminary: One factor that struck me at St. Mary’s in the 1970s was the unwillingness of some bishops to become involved in — or even aware of — the training of their future priests. Formal complaints from seminarians about the blatant disregard for Pope John Paul II by seminary administration were ignored by most of the bishops who received them.

Some of the more traditional seminarians survived only because they were academically brilliant. They became the priests who kicked the hornets’ nest merely for refusing to either bend in their fidelity or be driven out as candidates for priesthood.

In the years since my ordination, I have heard many stories from priests whose priestly spirits were wounded in a kind of spiritual abuse that characterized their seminary years. Perhaps some will comment here.

But the last word on this goes to Father James Altman, whose recorded homily has mesmerized those Catholics who still value religious freedom, the hardest won of our freedoms, and the most fragile under any hint of a totalitarian regime. Father Altman has kicked the hornet’s nest, too, in a prophetic and much-needed plea to our bishops who have allowed Caesar to rule in the place of Christ. Here is Father James Altman whose brilliant and moving homily has moved many Catholics with the authority of truth. Don’t miss this “Memo to the Bishops of the World.”

“The faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the Supreme Law of the Church and look after their souls.”

— Father James Altman

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