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Gratitude
All is grace. This famous line from the novel The Diary of a Country Priest feels like it sums up the past two days (if not the past two weeks or months) here at St. Martin de Porres House. The past two days, as I pull myself out of bed (after the bell rings, I’ll…
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Makers of Peace
On Monday, October 7, we held a prayer vigil for Peace in Gaza, on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which Pope Francis called for a day of fasting and prayer for peace. Our friends at the Rechabite Catholic Worker in Lancaster joined us from afar at 6 pm. Several members of Pax…
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“And that love comes with community”: Summer 2024
I’ve been meaning to write a first post here on our website to introduce myself. Of course, time has been marching (often sprinting) along this summer, and I both can’t believe how much the time has flown since I arrived here at St. Martin de Porres House on May 24 and how much has happened…
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Wood Floors
Sometime during my first winter in Harrisburg, I was asked an unbelievably special question by Kirk Hallett, that man who invited me to come here to be a Catholic Worker in Harrisburg. At the time Kirk was battling acute myeloid leukemia. Kirk asked Mike (a dear friend who enjoys spending time in his woodshop) and…
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Gratitude for our Dorothy Day Room
Last week, with the generous help of the Notre Dame Club of Harrisburg, we renovated one of the rooms in the Catholic Worker house. This room will be named the Dorothy Day room and be themed accordingly. After a ceiling light was installed, spackling was done on the walls, dirt and dust removed, and a…
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Circles
There is a distinct lesson from my Humanities class during my senior year of high school. Our teacher gave us a piece of paper with a few concentric circles drawn on it (circles within circles as shown below). We were instructed to write the names of the people closest to us in the innermost circle.…
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On Love
“Where there is no love, put love and you will take out love.” St. John of the Cross Love is difficult to write about because it has already been written about so much. It is especially difficult to write about in English because it encompasses so many different meanings. That’s why the Greeks had multiple…
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Up the Mountain
Dorothy Day claimed Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) as the manifesto for the Catholic Worker Movement. The beginning of chapter 5 begins, “Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up the mountain.” Throughout the Gospels we are told that Jesus kept going up the Mountain to pray. One of my favorite occurrences is after he feeds…
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Good Friday
Pax Christi of Harrisburg hosted their annual Good Friday walk throughout downtown Harrisburg. Before the walk, the media interviewed Pax Christi member, and Catholic Worker board member, Rick Woodard. Rick put forth three ways we can follow the way of Jesus: My freshman year English teacher in high school took off 5% on each essay…
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Seeds of Faith
The word radical has a negative connotation. However, the word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin word meaning “rooted”. For example, the vegetable Radish comes from the same word. Therefore, the word radical truly means to be rooted, almost to the point of stubborness, in something or someone. The seed of a tree is planted into…
