enthused and positive

As you can see, I've been on a little blogging hiatus. But Rocco has snapped me out of it with this little post of his, which mentions His Excellency, Archbishop Kurtz.

Snippet:

The praises of lay ecclesial ministry have been sung mightily over the summer… and not from the usual chorus of liberal activists, either. Unless you happen to count Pope Benedict’s recent high-profile appointees in the States among that group. But a few days after the weather gods set Louisville ablaze to welcome him – the mercury hit a record-high 103 degrees on his installation day – Archbishop Joseph Kurtz told the hometown CoJo that “the baptismal call is a call of leadership.” While most of that is fulfilled in the ad extra world, the archbishop noted that “there are a number of (lay) individuals who are called to ministries in the church.” The pan-vocational rainmaker told the newspaper that although lay ministry “does not take the place of the call (to the priesthood)… I see these calls to be moving side-by-side.” He also noted that, in the absence of priest-pastors of its parishes, “there have been, from what I understand, very fine people who have served faithfully as pastoral ministers or pastoral associates within the archdiocese.” (Need anyone be reminded that Kurtz is still very much the Overbrook alum, let it be told that, just before his mid-August installation Mass in Derbytown’s Gardens arena, the archbishop’s request for an amice reportedly sparked a bit of a frantic (but successful) rummage through the closets of the Cathedral of the Assumption… and, even despite the crippling heat, during the post-installation reception in an adjacent tent, Louisville got its first sight of a violet choir cassock in quite some time.) After only three weeks in the Kentucky post, Kurtz has already been blazing trails across his new turf, and the response has been uniformly enthused and positive.

This pic shows the Archbishop's cassock as he hugs a woman who embodies the "uniformly enthused and positive" response to His Excellency by the faithful of the Archdiocese of Louisville.