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Minnesota priest casts for souls as he leads men’s fly fishing retreat

Posted on by Our Sunday Visitor

With the stealth of a Navy SEAL, Father Jake Anderson crept through tall grass on the bank of a small stream in northeast Iowa. He stayed low to the ground as he glanced at the current flow, his right hand grasping a fly rod.

When he spotted a change in current where a chunky brown trout might lie in ambush waiting for a bug to float by, he put his fly rod in motion.

The back-and-forth movements were smooth and snappy, the rod seeming like an extension of his arm. The keen attention to detail, the passion for hooking trout on his assortment of hand-tied flies, and more than two decades of experience wading streams in several states have made him an expert in the eyes of anyone who fishes with him — though far less so in his own eyes.

On this particular trip to a state that is home to miles and miles of blue-ribbon trout streams, he was joined by 13 other men, including a priest he has fished with, and another man who was ordained to the priesthood just days after the retreat.

It was an annual men’s fly fishing retreat, complete with a spiritual theme and a patron saint — St. Zeno of Verona, after whom they have named a group they formed, with members going on local outings throughout the year that sometimes include wives and children.

St. Zeno, who lived in the fourth century, often went fishing in the river that flowed through Verona, which is why art depicting him often includes a fish dangling from his crosier.

The 11 laymen at the May 21-24 retreat belong to the parishes of St. Michael and St. Mary in Stillwater, Minnesota, where Father Anderson served as parochial vicar from 2015 to 2018. He was looking for an activity that could draw men together for fellowship, fun and faith, and discovered that there were several parishioners who shared his passion for fly fishing.

Among them was Pat Houlton, 73, who helped get the group — St. Zeno Anglers — started in 2016 and helped Father Anderson launch the first fly fishing retreat four years ago.

Also making the retreat were Father Jim Livingston, whom Father Anderson has fished with in recent years and is pastor of St. Paul in Ham Lake, Minnesota, and now-Father Julian Druffner. (He was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin, May 28).

Ordained in 2015 for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Father Anderson, 37, is currently pastor and director of St. Lawrence Catholic Church and Newman Center in Minneapolis.

His devotion to what some call an “art” started when he was 11 and growing up on a small farm near Baldwin, Wisconsin. He remembers exactly when he first desired to pick up a fly rod – it was a day in June when he and his father watched the movie “A River Runs Through it,” a fly fishing drama produced by Robert Redford in 1992 and starring Brad Pitt. It won an Oscar that year for cinematography, with spectacular river and mountain scenes filmed in Montana.

After watching the movie, the future priest was hooked on fly fishing and told his dad he wanted to learn how to do it.

His father, Mark, who has since died, went to the garage, pulled out an old fly fishing rod that he had made while in college, and started teaching his young son how to cast.

Father Anderson “started practicing in the yard,” he said, then he “bought some cheap rubber hip waders.” Wearing the waders, he started making regular trips on his bike to the Rush River, a few hundred yards off their property. He quizzed people who were fly fishing and took copious notes about what he saw and heard; he also poured over books on the subject.

His passion grew and continued through formation for the priesthood at St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul. He got away to fish whenever he could, and grabbed fellow seminarians to join him.

Day trips happened during his free time, and he waded miles of streams with his fly rod in search of trout. He enjoyed teaching other men to fish, but even more, he wanted to “deepen a sense of fraternity.”

This year’s retreat took place May 21-24, with fly fishing sessions in the mornings and afternoons, and retreat talks, prayer and Mass interspersed during other parts of the day. For Father Anderson, it’s as easy to mingle faith with fly fishing as it is to drop a hand-tied fly called a “woodchuck caddis” into a trout’s line of vision.

“We want to just keep it as simple as possible,” he explained in an interview with The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. “It’s not like a retreat center. You’re not going into formal silence and there’s not three meditations a day. It’s more like just taking something guys like doing and yet having the Lord at the center.”

Father Anderson celebrated the retreat’s opening Mass outside on a deck of the large cabin where the men were staying. He engaged them with a homily about the ascension of Jesus, with deep conversations about spiritual and earthly topics continuing through dinner and well after sunset around a campfire.

“There’s something beautiful” about going on the retreat, said Mark Setterstrom, 39, who is married with children and at one time played in the NFL. “I know these men so deeply. There’s such a deep commonality that comes together, not just from the fishing, but (from) spending time together in the Eucharist, in prayer, and then in God’s great creation.”

“This is the most deeply manly thing most of us will get in the entire year,” he added.

For him, it boils down to one thing: “We know Christ through this.”

The men who came this year ranged in age from 28 to 85, and that is part of the draw. Some of them are young fathers who like to fish and pray together with men who have decades of experience in both raising children and working in the professional world. The older men are willing and eager to share what they have learned throughout their lives, including the art of fly fishing.

Houlton, in addition to helping organize the retreat, serves as one of its main fly fishing mentors, a role he relishes.

“It’s just great fellowship,” said Houlton, who counts Father Livingston among those he has taught to fly fish. “As men, we bond through activity. … And, the fly fishing allows us to have an activity that we can share together.”

It also opens the door to more serious topics while sitting around a campfire at the end of the day — like the battle Houlton’s wife, Janet, is fighting with cancer, and the battle his son-in-law’s sister is also fighting with cancer. Fishing first and talking later is, perhaps, an indirect and winding road to the things that matter in life. But, it is a destination these men always seem to reach during the retreat.

“If you put men together in something like this,” Houlton said, “then they will talk more freely and they will talk about things — and, I think, more personal things. It opens that up.”
It is why Houlton declares: “This is my kind of retreat.”

The oldest man at this year’s gathering, Buzz Kriesel, 85, has been on all four of the retreats, and he attends most of the local outings, too.

“They’re all deeply faithful men, Catholic men,” Kriesel said. And “the families that they’re raising — the younger guys — are absolutely amazing.”

During a campfire on the first evening of the retreat, he gave a tribute to Father Anderson.

“God bless you,” he told the priest, as applause broke out among the men encircling the embers. “You’re the glue for this whole thing, you really are. You give us the heart, the spirit — and you out-fish all of us.”

— By Dave Hrbacek, OSV

Morning greetings lead to sacraments at Christ the King School in Burlington

Posted on by Cori Urban

Father Justin Baker, pastor of Christ the King/St. Anthony Parish in Burlington, which includes Christ the King School, was not surprised there were more students than usual receiving sacraments during the last school year at other-than-usual times.

He had taken to greeting children and parents before school — even in inclement weather — so they got to know him better than if they had only seen him at Mass. “They get used to you, and word gets out that you’re friendly and easy going,” he said, explaining his approachability. So parents feel comfortable asking him about the sacraments, and children are comfortable talking to him about it too. “Their familiarity with the pastor makes parents comfortable to bring their kids into the faith,” especially if the parents are “not necessarily church goers.”

And even though “you always have some catching up” with the sacraments with students in Catholic schools, there were more than usual last year.

Twenty-one students were baptized or received their First Communion.

Apollonia Alanbar, 8, sought baptism for herself, said her father, Nabil Alanbar, noting that he had not been practicing his faith for years but during Covid-19 had begun to watch Mass on television with his daughter. “She then asked Caitlin, her mother and my wife, to take RCIA with the intention of joining her in the Church.”

Father Baker taught the Rite of Christian Initiation classes and gave mother and daughter their First Communions and First Reconciliations. (Msgr. John McDermott, vicar general and chancellor for the Diocese of Burlington baptized Apollonia.)

“The school and church community has been fantastic. We were welcomed with open arms and could not have asked for a better group of people to educate our daughter,” Alanbar said. “The school has consistently gone out of its way to make students and their parents feel welcome.”

It is at school that the sacraments are taught and discussed. “Kids learn about the sacraments in school and tell their parents they’d like to receive them, or they tell me and I tell their parents,”

Father Baker said. Often it becomes an opportunity for more than one child in a family to receive sacraments.

Apollonia had wanted to be an altar server for months. “A few weeks before her First Communion, Father Baker pulled her aside and asked her if she wanted to serve at the altar, and I don’t know if I have ever seen her that excited,” Alanbar said, adding that she continues to serve every Sunday.

Father Baker does not pressure parents about the sacraments their children are missing, but if a parent mentions it, he remembers and lets them know “I’m ready when you are.”

He sees his role in the school as threefold: “Have a head for finances. Love your teachers, and live up to your name, ‘Father.’”

—Originally published in the Fall 2023 issue of Vermont Catholic magazine.

 

Popular catacomb tours at New York cathedral offer lessons in city’s Catholic history

Posted on by Our Sunday Visitor

“Catacombs by Candlelight” perhaps conjures images of a subterranean tour in Rome led by a guide wearing a headlamp. In New York, it’s the name of a revenue-generating history lesson told while exploring the cemetery and burial vaults of one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches. At the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, the tour’s tone is respectful and the candles are battery-operated LED models.

Frank Alfieri, the basilica’s director of cemetery and columbaria, said the tours were established in 2017 to communicate and monetize the historical significance of the property, which has been an active mainstay of the lower Manhattan area for more than 200 years.

The parish is bordered by Mulberry, Prince and Mott Streets in a gentrified area dubbed Nolita (for “North of Little Italy”). The land on which it stands was originally a farm purchased in 1801 for use as a cemetery by St. Peter’s Church, the city’s first Catholic parish, still located about one mile southwest on Barclay Street. When it opened in 1815, St. Patrick’s served as New York’s first cathedral until the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was dedicated in 1879. In 2010, the Old Cathedral was named a basilica.

The Catacombs by Candlelight tours are operated by Thomas Wilkinson, principal of Tommy’s Tours. He and his 12 employees conduct eight 80-minute tours five days a week for groups as large as 40. On the other days, they accommodate special group requests from historians and parish, school and fraternal organizations.

Wilkinson said approximately half of the participants are foreign visitors, and its American participants include both New Yorkers and out-of-towners.

“This church is still pretty much unknown by many native New Yorkers, but the tours scaled up very quickly, and this is now a popular destination on par with other larger attractions in the city,” he said.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, guide Leo Goodman unlocked a door in a brick wall to usher his group into the cemetery. He pointed out the oldest legible headstone, dating from 1803.

He stopped at the site of the original grave of Haitian-born sainthood candidate Pierre Toussaint, who came to New York as an enslaved man. Toussaint became a successful hairdresser and devoted himself to helping the poor and sick. He was a 66-year parishioner of St. Peter’s Church and a donor to the building fund for Old St. Patrick’s.

Toussaint’s body was moved to the more familiar St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in 1989 when the cause for his canonization was advanced. He was declared venerable in 1996.

Goodman backed up to a reinforced wall of the cemetery that was built in 1834 to protect the church and the graveyard from destruction by nativist Protestant gangs. Amid another wave of anti-Catholic riots in 1844, while a torchlight parade prepared to march on the church, then-Bishop John J. Hughes marshaled thousands of Irish immigrants to defend the cathedral. He stationed sharpshooters on the wall and warned the New York mayor of fiery consequences if Catholics were harmed. The violence was averted, and Bishop Hughes’ nickname “Dagger John” was secured.

Before descending to the catacombs, tourists got a chance to see the three wooly sheep who are seasonally employed to control the grass in the cemetery and, not coincidentally, attract the attention of passersby.

The catacombs were developed before the church was built above them, and Wilkinson surmised they may have generated the funds needed to begin the construction. They consist of 37 hermetically sealed family and group vaults arrayed along three 120-foot corridors. Most of the vaults have marble facades and bear the now-unfamiliar names of prominent 19th-century New York Catholics of Irish, German, French and Spanish heritage.

Wilkerson said the vaults’ walls are 30 inches thick and each may contain the mortal remains of as many as 15 people. Complete records are not available, and vaults have not been disturbed to confirm specific occupancy. A single ornate mausoleum was built for Gen. Thomas Eckert, a confidant of Abraham Lincoln and later an executive at Western Union. Eckert’s crypt is open to view and features imported ceiling tiles and original Edison light fixtures.

The catacombs were included in a restoration of the church that was completed in 2015. At that time, lighting, air circulation and walkways were improved. Niches for inurnment of cremated remains were added adjacent to the vaults. Similar aboveground niches were installed in the cemetery. Alfieri said some 500 of the 600 new niches have been sold.

Tours end in the soaring body of the church, where the influence of successive generations of Irish, Italian, Chinese and Hispanic immigrants is seen in art work and devotional details.

Tickets range from $30-37. According to Alfieri, the tours generate more than $25,000 a month for the programs and upkeep of the parish. They also are a form of evangelization.

“The tours have a historical and landmark perspective and we’re not reciting Scripture, but on a peripheral and very subliminal level, there is evangelization,” Alfieri said. “Any time you can get somebody into a church, there is a possibility you can evangelize, even nonverbally. A church gives you a small glimpse of heaven.”

Grace Pfeifle booked the tour because her sister Tess was visiting from Washington, she said. Self-described Irish Catholics, they said they were impressed with the engaging presentation of historical details, including the spirited defense of the cathedral by Irish clergy and laymen.

Emdree Anne Lacasse and Remy Lemelin, Catholics from Quebec, toured with family members. They said they appreciated the rich history of Catholics in New York and the seamless way in which the guide linked past and present.

Lemelin had anticipated the experience might be akin to visiting dank catacombs in Paris and Rome established in response to an epidemic. He said he was not disappointed at all to find clean dry walkways through the well-ventilated crypt.

—Beth Griffin, OSV News

As synod winds down, members urged to sow patience

Posted on by Catholic News Service

As members of the assembly of the Synod of Bishops return home, share the results of their work and prepare for the final synod assembly in 2024, they must be on guard against people who will want to make them take sides as if the synod were a political debate, said Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe.

“The global culture of our time is often polarized, aggressive and dismissive of other people’s views,” Father Radcliffe, spiritual adviser to the synod, told members Oct. 23. “When we go home, people will ask, ‘Did you fight for our side? Did you oppose those unenlightened other people?'”

“We shall need to be profoundly prayerful to resist the temptation to succumb to this party-political way of thinking,” he said. “That would be to fall back into the sterile, barren language of much of our society. It is not the synodal way,” which is “organic and ecological rather than competitive.”

Having discussed synodality, communion, mission and participation over the previous three weeks, members of the synodal assembly began the final segment of their work with talks from Father Radcliffe, Benedictine Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, the other spiritual guide for the synod, and by Father Ormond Rush, a theologian from Australia.

They were to work on a “Letter to the People of God” at the synod’s morning session Oct. 23.

After a day off to give time to the committee writing the synthesis of the assembly’s discussions, participants were to meet again Oct. 25 to examine, discuss and amend the synthesis and to propose “methods and steps” for continuing the synodal process in preparation for its next assembly in October 2024.

“We have listened to hundreds of thousands of words during the last three weeks,” Father Radcliffe said. “Most of these have been positive words, words of hope and aspiration. These are the seeds that are sown in the soil of the church. They will be at work in our lives, in our imagination and our subconscious, during these months. When the moment is right, they will bear fruit.”

Father Rush told participants that as he listened to discussions over the previous three weeks, “I have had the impression that some of you are struggling with the notion of tradition, in the light of your love of truth.”

During the Second Vatican Council, when different approaches to the question of tradition were hotly debated, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger — later Pope Benedict XVI — explained the two approaches as being “a ‘static’ understanding of tradition and a ‘dynamic’ understanding,” Father Rush said.

The static version is “is legalistic, propositional and ahistorical — relevant for all times and places,” he said, while “the latter is personalist, sacramental and rooted in history, and therefore to be interpreted with an historical consciousness.”

Father Ratzinger wrote that “not everything that exists in the Church must for that reason be also a legitimate tradition,” but that a practice must be judged by whether it is “a true celebration and keeping present of the mystery of Christ,” Father Rush said.

The Second Vatican Council “urged the church to be ever attentive to the movements of the revealing and saving God present and active in the flow of history, by attending to ‘the signs of the times’ in the light of the living Gospel,” he said.

As synod members continue their discernment, he said, they are urged “to determine what God is urging us to see — with the eyes of Jesus — in new times,” while also being “attentive to the traps — where we could be being drawn into ways of thinking that are not ‘of God.'”

“These traps,” Father Rush said, “could lie in being anchored exclusively in the past, or exclusively in the present, or not being open to the future fullness of divine truth to which the Spirit of Truth is leading the church.”

To open the assembly’s final section of work, Father Radcliffe and Mother Angelini chose the parable of the sower and the parable of the mustard seed from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark.

And Mother Angelini encouraged synod members to “narrate the parable” rather than “issue proclamations” as they continue working over the next year.

“Today — in a culture of striving for supremacy, profit and followers, or evasion — the patient sowing of this synod is, in itself, like a profoundly subversive and revolutionary act. In the logic of the smallest of seeds sinking into the ground,” she said. “Thus, the synod seems to me to find itself called to dare a synthesis-as-sowing, to open up a path toward reform — new form — which life requires.”

The synodal process, Father Radcliffe told members, “is more like planting a tree than winning a battle.”

And the only way to ensure they continue the sowing rather than join the fighting is to “keep our minds and hearts open to the people whom we have met here” and treasure the hopes and fears they shared.

“Humanity’s first vocation in paradise was to be gardeners,” he said. “Adam tended creation, sharing in speaking God’s creative words, naming the animals. In these 11 months, will we speak fertile, hope-filled words, or words that are destructive and cynical? Will our words nurture the crop or be poisonous? Shall we be gardeners of the future or trapped in old sterile conflicts? We each choose.”

—Cindy Wooden, CNS

Eucharist as Communion

Posted on by Josh Perry

In this final part of our look at Catholic belief around the Eucharist, we take a look at the effects of the Eucharist, which can be summed up in one word: communion. When we talk about the Eucharist at Mass, we often use the word “communion” and phrases such as “going to communion.” This is for good reason.

When we speak of communion, though, we aren’t necessarily referring to the object of the Eucharist (a better phrase to describe the object of the Eucharist is “Real Presence”) or the action of the Eucharist (a better phrase to describe the action of the Eucharist is “sacrifice”). Rather, when we speak of communion, we are best referring to the effects of the Eucharist, the effects of the Real Presence and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in our lives.

When I train extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, I like to remind them that at the heart of their ministry is the act of giving and a receiving of the Eucharist. That action lasts only a moment with each communicant, but in that action, there are three relationships that are nourished and strengthened.

The first relationship is the vertical relationship — the relationship between God and the communicant. The Eucharist strengthens our union with God. This is what we most often think about when we think about the effects of the Eucharist — that the Eucharist draws us closer to God. This is an invisible grace that remains with us even after Mass. And if we allow that grace to work within us, it very powerfully re-configures our entire life to be in union with Christ. This union is the most powerful gift God gives us to help us on our continual path of conversion. We move from being people who “receive communion at Mass” to people who live in communion with God. We move from simply receiving the Eucharist at Mass to living a Eucharistic life — a life rooted in communion with God that allows us to always give thanks. When we share communion with God, we cannot but help share in God’s love.

The second relationship is the horizontal relationship — the relationship between the communicant and the Body of Christ, the Church. “The Eucharist makes the Church” as French theologian and priest Henri de Lubac would say. The Eucharist strengthens our communion with the Church. We recognize our communion is strengthened with our brothers and sisters who are with us at Mass, but do we recognize that our union with Catholics throughout the world is also strengthened? The beauty of this communion is that it transcends place, culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, citizenship status, and political belief. What would the world look like if we lived our daily life in that communion? “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). And this communion in the Church gives us hope, for not only is our union with those in the Church on Earth strengthened, but also our union with those who have gone before us in faith — the Church Triumphant. The Eucharist even transcends death.

Listen carefully to the latter half of the Eucharistic Prayer, and you will hear the Church praying for this unity established in the Eucharist, unity with God, with one another, with the saints in heaven. Listen carefully, and pray it well!

— Josh Perry is the director of the Office of Worship for the Diocese of Burlington.

—Originally published in the Oct. 21-27, 2023, edition of The Inland See.

 

 

Author tells how Jesuit priest profoundly influenced Alcoholics Anonymous

Posted on by Submitted Article

For her first talk in the home state of Alcoholics Anonymous’s two Yankee Protestant founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, author Dawn Eden Goldstein stressed the spiritual basics — humility, love, and service – behind the good works of both non-denominational AA and one of the fellowship’s best Catholic friends, the late Jesuit Father Edward Dowling.

Goldstein built her talk at St. Michael’s College Oct. 17 around her new book — “Father Ed: The Story of Bill W’s Spiritual Sponsor” — that describes the priest’s keen interest in and profound influence upon AA and his close friendship with Wilson, who grew up in southwestern Vermont. “Dr. Bob” came from the Northeast Kingdom.

Goldstein spoke about Father Dowling’s essential humility, alongside his delight in connecting the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, to AA’s “Twelve Steps,” leading to a lifetime close friendship with Wilson that amounted to being the AA founder’s “spiritual sponsor,” as the late Wilson once put it.

The speaker, a former writer and copy editor, was received into the Catholic Church in 2006 after being raised in Judaism and then having a born-again Christian experience in 1999.

Edmundite Father David Theroux, director of the campus-based and event-sponsoring Edmundite Center for Faith and Culture, introduced the speaker and shared some of her history: Born in New York City, Goldstein began her working life as a rock-and-roll historian. She went on to editorial positions at the New York Post and the Daily News before publishing her first of several books in 2006. In 2016, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in sacred theology from the University of St. Mary of the Lake. In 2023, she received a licentiate in Canon Law from the Catholic University of America.

She said that as a non-alcoholic, she personally identified closely with Father Dowling’s words that his not being an alcoholic made him “underprivileged,” given the great gifts that he had witnessed through AA.

She said the priest, who died in 1960, “loved ministering to humble people” – that is, “the least of these” of Matthew’s Gospel, which were words Father Dowling “took very much to heart.”

Goldstein said that fact motivated her to speak on three points relating to Father Dowing, Wilson and humility: “How Father Ed as a young Jesuit gained his love of humility; how he brought his life of humility into work of AA and friendship with Bill; and how his encounter with the humility of AA members strengthened him in his ministry.”

She shared engaging and sometimes humorous stories that brought forth the priest’s humanity and simplicity: a star baseball player nicknamed “Puggy” in his St. Louis youth, his spiritual crisis that amounted to a “dark night of the soul” in novitiate with the Jesuits that helped him relate to alcoholics “hitting bottom,” his physical suffering from a calcified spine. She also told of Father Dowling’s great interest in journalism and politics, including activism advocating for true democracy, with insights ahead of his time (as were his pre-Vatican-II ecumenical instincts on the spiritual front, she said).

Goldstein said Father Dowling felt what really saved him in his early spiritual crisis was “the negative path to God.” He said that if he ever found himself in Heaven, “it will be by backing away from hell,” she related.

“That’s how young Puggy found humility and made his surrender,” said Goldstein, who characterized this as a perfectly valid spiritual path, both in AA experience and Catholic theology.

— Mark Tarnacki

—Originally published at smcvt.edu/about-smc/news