Blog: 'Erik Ross OP'

niedziela, 17.04.2016

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. No matter what year it is, this Fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday. Because every year we need to hear the promise of Jesus, who is our Shepherd. “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall n [...]
niedziela, 3.04.2016

Jesus says to us today, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side.” And my first reaction to that is: yuck. Yuck! Why would I want to put my fingers into the wounds on the body of the Lord? [caption id="attachment_1945" align="alignnone" widt [...]
niedziela, 13.03.2016

Long ago, God said through His prophet, “I will remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).   [caption id="attachment_1818" align="alignnone" width="237"] The Adulterous Woman Alone with Jesus (James Tissot, c. 1894)[/caption] Today [...]
niedziela, 21.02.2016

It’s the second Sunday in Lent. It’s raining in Krakow, but I feel like I’m in the desert -- out in the wilderness of this fasting time, with a lot of barren sand ahead of me before I get to the Promised Land. It’s already been a long Lent. I want some relief. And relief in the d [...]
poniedziałek, 8.02.2016

In a few days it will be Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. And for the first few days (sometimes weeks) of Lent the whole community will struggle to remember NOT to say or sing “Alleluia”. We sing “Alleluia” as part of the Liturgy of the Hours, right after the first invocation of the T [...]
piątek, 25.12.2015

Today is Christmas. So what? It’s Christmas. But why should we care? Christmas is a children’s holiday, though not only that. One remembers standing as a preschooler in front of the big nativity scene to the side of the altar in church. Mary and Joseph and the whole menagerie had stood fo [...]
poniedziałek, 21.12.2015

I am not sure I would be Catholic today without two hoary old priests, now dead. Both of these priests spent almost all their days in the unspectacular American state of Wisconsin. Both doggedly transmitted the faith to crowds of people -- old and young, grateful and callously unreceptive -- for [...]
niedziela, 13.12.2015

The voice of him that cries in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. (Is 40:3) Those are the words of the Prophet Isaiah. But they remind us of John. John the Baptist, John who wore clothing made of camel's hair, with a leather belt ar [...]
niedziela, 29.11.2015

In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. This is the start of a poem written by Christina Rossetti in the 19th century. Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rosse [...]
niedziela, 22.11.2015

  As regular readers know, I emigrated to Poland from Milwaukee, a port city on Lake Michigan. No one knows where Milwaukee is when I'm in Poland, so I usually say, "If you head north from Chicago along the lakeshore, the next big city you encounter is Milwaukee." People nod as if th [...]