Father McCabe was born in New York City on Nov. 1, 1930 and was ordained a Paulist priest on May 11, 1957.

After his ordination, Father McCabe served as associate pastor at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Los Angeles form June through September of 1957. He then served as:
• Associate pastor of Old St. Mary’s Church, San Francisco, 1957-1960
• Associate director of the Catholic Information Center, Baltimore, 1962-1971
• Director of the Family Life Center, Baltimore, 1971-1978 while still ministering at the Information Center;
• Studying at the University of Notre Dame, September 1979-January 1980;
• Associate Pastor of St. Peter’s Parish, Toronto, January-September 1980;
• Pastor of St. Peter’s Parish, Toronto, 1980-1988;
• Superior of The Paulist Center, Boston, 1988-1990;
• Pastor and superior of St. Austin’s Parish, Austin, 1990-1997;
• Sabbatical, 1997-1999;
• Associate Pastor, St. Peter’s Church, Toronto, 1999 until entering senior ministry status (retirement)

Father James McCabe

Today, the Church celebrates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holyday of obligation and the patronal feast of the United States –which was founded within a year after Blessed Pope Pius IX’s dogmatic definition of the doctrine that “the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, from the first moment of her conception, was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in view of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (Ineffabilis Deus, 1854). Then, on Monday, December 12, the Church in the United States celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patronal feast of North and South America. These two feasts bring a special added dimension to this Advent season.

The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe recalls the apparitions on December 9, 10, and 12, 1531, of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Juan Diego, an Aztec Catholic convert, to whom she said:

“Know, my son, that I am the ever Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God who is the Author of life, the Creator of all things, the Lord of heaven and earth, present everywhere. And it is my wish that here, there be raised to me a temple in which, as a loving mother I shall show my tender clemency and the compassion I feel for the natives and for those who love and seek me, for all who implore my protection, who call on me in their labors and afflictions: and in which I shall hear their weeping and their supplications that I may give them consolation and relief.”

The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe also celebrates the famous image, which miraculously appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak (tilma) and has been venerated ever since in the magnificent shrine in Mexico City near the site of the event. In 1988, in the course of a summer spent studying in Guadalajara, I had the privilege of venerating the miraculous picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the basilica in Mexico City. Later, in 2003, I was present in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a small, half-inch square relic of St. Juan Diego’s tilma was exposed for veneration. The only known such relic in the United States, it was originally a gift from the Archbishop of Mexico to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1941, and in recent years has been displayed in various U.S. cities in commemoration of St. Juan Diego’s canonization in 2002.

In his homily on that occasion, Pope John Paul II said “Guadalupe and Juan Diego have a deep ecclesial and missionary meaning and are a model of perfectly inculturated evangelization. … In accepting the Christian message without forgoing his indigenous identity, Juan Diego discovered the profound truth of the new humanity, in which all are called to be children of God.”

In 1531, Mary asked for a church to be built. Almost immediately, the Catholic Church began to be built among the peoples of this continent, calling and forming disciples throughout North and South America. Under the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Catholic Church continues to be built on this continent – inspired by the example of St. Juan Diego to be constantly more evangelizing and more missionary.

Father Ron Franco, CSP, is pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Knoxville, Tenn.

The Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths were represented, Native Americans put on song and drum performance, and there were readings in Spanish punctuated with music from an interfaith choir. The Boy Scouts of Grand Rapids, Salvation Army and representatives from the President Gerald R. Ford Museum were among the 400 people gathered in the square. Also present was Grand Rapids Mayor and minister George Heartwell.

“The Jewish prayers included a blowing of the Shofar, some Hebrew, and a large amount of English,” said Father John Geaney, CSP, rector of the Cathedral of St. Andrew, which is under the pastoral care of the Paulist Fathers. “Our Muslim brother prayed from the Koran in Arabic and was praying beyond that in English. We prayed for the first responders, for those who had died, and for those who grieve.”

The readings, prayers and music were followed by first-responder vehicles being blessed by each member of the clergy gathered on the curb of Cathedral Square as the vehicles drove by with lights flashing.

“The Hindus threw rice and flowers, the natives “smudged”, several minsiters stood with hands outstretched, some just bowed quietly, and I was sprinkling a whole lot of holy water as the vehicles passed by,” said Father Geaney.

Following the vehicles was a small honor guard of US Marines in dress uniform who lead those gathered in the square in a walk to the President Ford Museum. The distance between the two points is equivalent to the distance it took to get away from the effluvia that came from the collapsing towers in New York in 2001, according to Father Geaney.

“It was a great day for the Public Square and the Paulist mission of evangelization, reconciliation, ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue,” Father Geaney concluded.

Contact: Stefani Manowski

media@paulist.org/202-269-2521

Father Rudolph Thomas Vorisek, CSP

Father Rudolph Thomas Vorisek, CSP, a Paulist priest for 55 years, died on May 18 at the age of 82. A Mass of the Resurrection will be offered for Father Vorisek on Saturday, May 21 at 10 a.m. at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, 60th Street and Columbus Avenue in New York City. Interment will follow at the Church of St. Thomas Cemetery in Oak Ridge, N.J. A Wake service will be held at the Paulist Fathers’ residence on West 59th Street in New York City on Friday, May 20 from 7-8:30 p.m.

Born in New York City on Nov. 1, 1928 to Rudolph F. and Josephine Vorisek, Father Vorisek earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Paul’s College in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree from The Catholic University of America. The future priest entered the Paulist Fathers’ novitiate on Aug. 29, 1949, and made his first promise with the community on Sept. 8, 1950. He was ordained a Paulist priest at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City on May 3, 1956.

After his ordination, Father Vorisek served on the staff of the Paulist Center in Boston until heading to Washington, D.C. to pursue graduate studies from 1956-57. He then served on the faculty of the Paulist minor seminary, St. Peter’s in Baltimore from 1957-68. Father Vorisek then headed to California to engage in campus ministry at the University of California at Santa Barbara (Isla Vista) from 1968-76 before joining the staff at the Catholic Information Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., from 1976-84. He returned to his hometown of New York City to minister as a hospital chaplain from 1984 until his retirement in 1991. From his retirement to his death, Father Vorisek lived with his Paulist brothers at the Paulist Motherhouse in Manhattan on West 59th Street.

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Father Phillip James Cunningham, CSP

A funeral Mass for Father Phillip James Cunningham, CSP, will be offered March 16 at 10 a.m. at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. Father Cunningham, a member of the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, the Paulist Fathers, for 60 years, died on March 11. He was 88.

Father Cunningham was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on May 23, 1922. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Los Angeles before earning a master’s degree at St. Paul’s College in Washington, D.C. and a master’s degree in liberal arts from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Before entering the Paulist Fathers, Father Cunningham served in the Army Air Corps from 1942-45. He made first promises with the Paulists on Sept. 8, 1950, and final promises on Sept. 8, 1953. Ordination came on May 3, 1956 at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York.

Father Thomas Stransky, former president of the Paulist Fathers who was one year behind Father Cunningham in the seminary, recalls his Paulist brother as a “compulsive reader.”

After his ordination, Father Cunningham served as a summer assistant at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Los Angeles. He went into pastoral ministry at the Church of the Good Shepherd in New York from 1955-63.

Father Cunningham then engaged in a special ministry at the Catholic Center of the Universidad Central in Caracas, Venezuela, from 1963-64. He returned to the United States and parish ministry at Old St. Mary’s in San Francisco from 1964-66.

He then headed east to Catholic campus ministry at Johns Hopkins University from 1966-78. It was at Hopkins that Father Cunningham’s ministry would shine.

“He had a deep commitment to campus ministry, both to the students and the faculty,” Father Stransky said. “That is kind of unique. Most people can only relate to one group or the other.”

Students and faculty alike were drawn to Mass on Hopkins’ campus because of Father Cunningham’s gift. He was also able to get faculty volunteers for discussion groups and the like, leading Catholic campus ministry to become one of the intellectual hotspots at Hopkins, Father Stransky said.

Father Cunningham left Hopkins to become associate pastor at the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome from 1978-80, where Father Cunningham began a campus ministry of sorts for English-speaking students attending the University of Rome, according to Father Stransky.

Father Cunningham returned to campus ministry at the University of California at San Diego (La Jolla) from 1980-88 before serving as associate pastor at St. Cyril Church in Tucson, Ariz., in 1988. He retired from active ministry in 1988, and was a resident of the Mercy Center in Oakland, Calif., at the time of his death.

“He was one of our kind intellectuals,” Father Stransky said.

Father Michael B. McGarry, CSP

Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, Jan. 25, 2011

A famous writer (not St. Paul) quipped, “All my life, I always wanted to be Somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.”

All his life, Paul, like Jesus, had been a faithful Jew. Hearing the Holy Spirit in his life, he discovered that the Christ he had been persecuting was the very one who called him to be something more, someone new.

But to be converted does not mean an end to conversion; it means the beginning of a live of conversion. It does not mean, like a sailboat, taking down one’s sails, for how can one continue to catch the Spirit’s breeze that caught him in the first place? Or, to mix the metaphor, attending to the Spirit’s call does not mean then to turn off the antenna. In fact, to be converted means precisely to render oneself all the more attentive to, and ready to follow, God’s will. Is not that what we do in the traditional morning offering, when we put ourselves at God’s disposal for the rest of the day?

And then we do it again the next day.

So we Paulists, following our patron, long not to be Somebody, but specifically to be the missionary our gracious God has called us to be. Within certain parameters, to be sure, the Holy Spirit calls us to be uniquely the missionary our gifts, our desires, our dreams permit.

So on this feast of the conversion of St. Paul, we Paulists recommit ourselves to be faithful to the conversion we are called to, to work ever more faithfully, tirelessly, and creatively to reach out to the seeker, to listen compassionately to those who have left our Catholic family – always with a “welcome mat” ready to receive them home again. And to engage ever more creatively with our Protestant and Orthodox brothers and sisters, and to work for new and effective possibilities of cooperation with our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters. A tall order, to be sure, but an ever more fulfilling and challenging one.

But the conversion of St. Paul does not beckon us simply to work harder and to explore new possibilities. More fundamentally, it calls us Paulists to go deeper, to anchor ourselves more firmly in God’s call to us to be faithful to our mission and to be close, through prayer and reflection, to the source of our vocation.

And, I would add, it beckons all of us Christians to go more deeply and self-consciously into the bedrock of our Christian vocation. Paul’s conversion is not only the model for us Paulists; it is also the model for all of us Christians. Not to some vague “I’ll try harder” mode of being a Christian, but to the specific beauty of each of our unique and specific conversions.

A family gives thanks

A trip to any store is all it takes to make one aware that the holiday season is upon us. There was a time when the holiday season really began with Thanksgiving Day, but in many places it has already been in full swing since Halloween. Thanksgiving itself has become a brief but welcome pause in the increasingly hectic pace of the season.

Thanksgiving harvest festivals are, of course, quite common across the world, but the American Thanksgiving is quite uniquely an American holiday, our foundational feast, our ritual of reenactment of our origin as a people. Thanksgiving is a civic celebration of who we are by remembering where we have been, and so is a symbol of who we hope to be.

Few of us, of course, are descended from the original Massachusetts pilgrims. Most of us are more recent immigrants (or immigrants ourselves). I, for one, owe my American citizenship to that great wave of immigration from Sicily and southern Italy that inundated the Port of New York some three centuries after the pilgrims had made their mark. Each immigrant group has added something significant and distinctive to our country’s cultural mix. Yet it was surely those hardy New Englanders who, early on, first gave our nation its soul. This is what we celebrate at Thanksgiving – in that most Christianly soulful of ways – by giving thanks through the sharing of a meal.

Most of us live lives of quite caution. It is hard for us to even imagine what it must have been like to have embarked upon so hazardous an enterprise as did the pilgrims (although the memories of immigrant relatives and the ever-present witness of immigrants in our country should help us to appreciate the awesomeness of the experience). Certainly, something so vast and mysterious (as the New World must have seemed) was bound to arouse all sorts of complex emotions among the settlers – both in their brightest hopes and their darkest fears. Interpreted in the light of faith, the unknown of the ocean crossing became for the pilgrims something known, as they recalled God’s Chosen People’s crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan River. Good Calvinists that they were, those early immigrants to New England recognized the religious and political community as a creative force, part of what went into the development of a good human life.

Prosperity has a way of dulling our senses, making us feel more secure and contented than befits a truly pilgrim people. In the great ongoing struggle between virtue and narcissism for the soul of America, the pilgrims’ legacy recalls an almost forgotten concept of community – not as an abstract principle but as an experience of friendship and affection. Our New England forefathers knew only too well what we as a nation forget only at our peril: What is worth hoping for in our individual and collective lives as citizens requires real community and a kind of feeling for one another akin to that found among people who are friends. Whenever great things are at stake, they remind us (as Thanksgiving Day was originally intended to remind us) that we are all ultimately dependent on one another and upon God.

Father Ronald Franco, CSP, is pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Knoxville, Tenn.

The St. John’s Bible is the first handwritten, illuminated Bible commissioned since the invention of the printing press and the first to be commissioned by a Benedictine monastery in 500 years. The work’s 1,150 pages are more than two feet tall and three feet wide, and made from traditional materials: calfskin, ancient inks, gold and silver leaf, platinum and quill pens fashioned from the feathers of geese, turkeys and swans.

“When I saw the volume dedicated to the Pentateuch, I was deeply moved by its beauty,” said Father Gilbert Martinez, CSP, pastor of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle. “I was reminded that so much of our prayer is not with words, but simply looking upon what is beautiful and, in this case, looking upon scripted words of this remarkable St. John’s Bible.”

All 73 books in Scripture will be included in the Bible’s seven volumes. The New Standard Revised translation of the Bible has been used as it has been officially authorized by most major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox.

The Bible was commissioned by St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., and executed by Donald Jackson, senior scribe to the Crown Office of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, and other contributors. The genesis of this project go back to 1970, but planning and work did not begin until 1998. The Bible will be completed in 2011. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s will house the completed St. John’s Bible.

RSVP to the events at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle at welcomecenter@stpaultheapostle.org or by calling 212-315-0918.