Priesthood Sunday

Today being Priesthood Sunday I would like to once again thank the wonderful and holy priests that I have known.  I have written before about my pastor Antonio Leon and Father Keene.  We have a new assistant pastor that I am also quite impressed with.  Fr. Ed Murphy gives wonderful homilies and is not afraid to bring up the topics of abortion and contraception.  In the short time he has been at my parish he has started a Courage Chapter and a Tuesday night class in apologetics.  We have been quite blessed with good and holy priests at my parish including Fr. Powers who ran the RCIA class I attended before moving to another parish.

In another parish I sometimes attend they now have a new pastor who took over this month.  He is originally from Poland and is an organist with a degree in music.  I heard that he wanted to have the organ in the parish fixed since it hasn't been used in years.  

The previous Pastor, Fr. Sullivan I must admit use to drive me crazy. This parish use to have a convenient evening daily Mass until they got rid of it so I heard a lot of Fr. Sullivan. He  could certainly be described as a man of the left, but for the most part he kept these leanings out of the homilies.  What use to so annoy me is that he would deliver his homilies by leaving the sanctuary and coming out a good distance into the pews. While giving the homily he would swing his robe belt constantly in a circle which was quite distracting.  Once on Ash Wednesday he described how he forgot about the fast and had cooked up a pot of chili with meat for a class he was giving that night.  He then said he cooked some more chili and would label them liberal chili and conservative chili.  On the Sunday after Josef Ratzinger was elected Pope he gave a rambling homily that fully showed all of his progressive leanings.  He described his election like being in a car wreck - something you just had to accept and to get use to.  He then rambled about divorce and remarriage and homosexual marriage.

Now you might be wondering what a rant against a priest in a post about Priesthood Sunday is doing here.  Like I said Fr. Sullivan use to drive me crazy with his constant irreverence, but he also had quite some good things to say in his homilies and there are quite a few things from his homilies I still remember that were quite good.  Some time ago I also started to pray for him as I try to do for the priests of the parishes I attend.  A couple of months ago I was surprised to find how my attitude had changed towards Fr. Sullivan. Before seeing him with his idiosyncrasies and casual treatment of the Mass could cause me to get rather heated inside, but instead I started to become more aware of the positive things that he did and the negative ones made less of an impression on me or I could more easily ignore.  He is now retired after 80 years of service to the Church with several of them as a missionary in Korea.