Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

Hello, and welcome to Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. We are a group of Catholic bloggers who gather weekly to share our best posts with each other. To participate, go to your blog and create a post titled Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. In it, discuss and link to your posts for the week--whether they deal with theology, Catholic living or cute Catholic kids. I'm mostly a book blogger so my posts are generally book reviews, some Catholic, some not. Make sure that post links back here. Once you publish it, come back here and leave a link below.

We also have a yahoogroup; signing up for it will get you one weekly reminder to post. Click here to sign up.

Happy Fourth of July!  Ok, it is the 5th but the whole weekend is the holiday, right?  Tonight at Mass we sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic, America the Beautiful, Let There Be Peace on Earth and God Bless America. I was at the parish in which I grew up, the parish I attended with my Dad for the last eighteen months of his life.  His church buddies were glad to see me and while I didn't know it when I went there, he was one of the Mass intentions.  

Why was I there?  Well, I decided that since we had a long weekend it would be a good time to start going through my folks' house.  Since the house is going to my brother when probate is done and since he lives next door and can keep an eye on the place, no one has been in any hurry to do anything about the house.  Basically no one wants to fool with it.  However, one day someone will have to so I took the first cut today, boxing up stuff I was sure no one would want and that we couldn't sell or done (appliance manuals, medical records, membership cards and the like, used underwear...)

There is just so much stuff there that I'm overwhelmed.  My thought was to deal with the easy stuff; either throw it away or give it to new owners and then we can go through the marginal stuff -- diplomas, yearbooks, old pictures.  What to keep? What to toss?

Question of the Week:  Tell us about a priest (or more) who have been significant in your life.  I'll talk about two:  Msgr. Stephen Adrel was the priest who married my parents.  He was the pastor of the church in my mother's hometown for most of my childhood.  I remember meeting him a week or so before I started first grade in the parish school and he made me feel so special.  I always loved seeing him on the playground (he came over most days to see the kids at recess) even if I didn't like going to Mass.  We used to go to my mom's hometown every summer for a couple of weeks and he always remembered me when we shook hands after Mass.  No other priest I knew at that time knew my name.

The other priest who has been significant is the pastor of my parents' parish, Fr. Louis.  He is one of those priests who has the gift of being able to remember names and after I started taking my Dad to church regularly, he knew me and when my Dad was having problems, told me to call if I needed anything. During the last few weeks of my Dad's life he there for my Dad and for me.  The last few days of my Dad's life, Father visited more than once a day.  His gift is making people feel the love of God through him and I thank God Fr. Louis was there for us when my parents died.

This week I reviewed a beach read.  I let readers know my two cents about the Hobby Lobby Case.   Of course I had to write about a romance novel, right?   Finally I introduced my readers to some children's books about other cultures.