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Greetings. Well the Mid-term elections are upon us. Many of us, hopefully vote not just for today by for the days and years to come. We try look into the future to see what kind of world do I wish to leave those who will come after us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us, “The ultimate test […]

Good day to you all. Hope all is well with you. Well, we have opened another new month, Oh my, how the time goes by so quickly. 🫨 Yesterday, we remembered all those who are saints, but we do not know their names or where they are from. It is our belief that anyone in […]

 Peace and All Good,   Fr. Vinnie, osf and the    Bros and Srs of the   Franciscan House of Prayer.

🎃 Greetings all. 🎃Halloween. As kids, for most of us, this time was more exciting as Christmas. It truly was a “kid’s “ night.We all have our remembrances of what the 31st of October means to us. Some of us would begin to put together our costume together in July, and I am sure would change […]

Hello, happy Friday. Have you ever wondered why a loving God and Father would allow His Son to undergo such a horrible and painful death as Jesus did? In those days, putting someone to death in this way was in someway a deterrent to prevent others to commit any major crimes against the Empire. This […]

Good day to you all. When you think of a saint, what do you envision? I would dare say that when I was younger, I would think of a saint as one who walked around with a rosary or prayer book or the bible in hand. There eyes would be looking heaven ward, and they […]

Greetings, hope all goes well. Today we remember two of men who had followed Jesus. After the decent of the Holy Spirit they with the other Apostles went forth to proclaim the Good News. One we might not know very well. The other we have heard about in so many ways. St. Simon also known […]

Dear sisters and brothers, greetings. I hope all goes well.I would guess we all have a favorite author. And as you might imagine, mine is C.S. Lewis. I have found that his writings can be very thought provoking. A convert from the Anglican Church to the Roman Church, he wrote a great deal about his relationship with […]

Greetings. I hope you had a restful weekend.In looking for an appropriate message, I came across one from someone we surly have heard of but may not know a lot about. Her name was Harriet Tubman. A former slave, she, through her determination established the “Underground Railroad” which enables those enslaved to escape and find their way […]

Hello, I hope your weekend so far has been restful.How many times have we started a novel and opened to chapter 1, page 1 without seeing if there might be something of interest in the pages we have just turned? Many time we just think it is a note about another book or some bio […]

Greetings. Hope your week has gone well. As I write this I cannot believe that it is already the 23rd of October. Advent will soon be upon us and then Christmas, New Years and another new page to continue to write our story.The question I ask myself is who do I turn to when I […]

Hello.So sorry about sending out Monday’s message to you today. Yes, I hit the wrong key and off it goes into the wild blue yonder.Today we remember someone we all knew about. John Paul II. John Paul took his name after John Paul I who died only some 30 days after being elected to the Papacy.St. […]

Greetings to you all. Yes I know, I sent a email with no mail in it. And yes, I hit something I should not have. What can I tell you, I’m old and sometimes I don’t know what button these fingers of mine are going to land.Oh well, on with the show!! In our spiritual […]

Greeting and a Blessed Sunday to you all.Today our Gospel from Matthew, once again has Jesus in confrontation with the religious leader. The Pharisees did not think it right to pay taxes to Caesar. Wanting to once again try to catch Jesus in a duel of words, asks Him if it is right to pay these […]

Hello, hope your week went well.Over the last few week I’ve written about what the saints and spiritual writers have said about Christianity. True Christianity is more than just buying a mark by “religious preference” when we go into the hospital. The historian Tertullian in his “Apologies” (Which means defense of) on Christianity written about […]

Hello. Well here we are at the end of another week. “Time flies when you are having fun.” Oh are we having fun???? We all have grown up on stories. As I have said before, stories were the way people learned from the earliest of times. Stories are so much easier to remember than pure […]

Greetings, hope all goes well. In every age there always seems to be one person who stands out and brings  great changes on an aspect of our society or even our religious practice. Such a person is one we remember today. Tressa of Jesus, or maybe better known as St. Teresa of Avila. She along […]

Greetings, hope all goes well. In every age there always seems to be one person who stands out and brings  great changes on an aspect of our society or even our religious practice. Such a person is one we remember today. Tressa of Jesus, or maybe better known as St. Teresa of Avila. She along […]

Greetings to all. Ziz Ziglar (1926-2012), the American writer once wrote, “ Be strong, but not rude; Be kind but not weak; Be bold, but not bully, Be humble, but not timid; Be proud, but not arrogant”. God gives us so many gifts that we may use for others. Be it our strength, our kindness, […]

Good day to you all. One of the hallmarks of being human, it would seem, is to seek out the DIFFERENCES rather than the LIKENESS we see in each other. I wonder if it could come from some deep down pride that says that there is no one like me. Well, in God’s eyes that […]

Hello.Well today we remember Christopher Columbus Day. Now as I recall this day, we went to school and learned about this man and how he “Discovered” America. Well, I don’t remember anyone saying that America was lost.Anyway, Columbus was one of the many explorers during his time that were willing to leave their home and […]

Hello. A blessed Sunday to you all.Our Gospel for today seems to leave a big question in our minds. At first reading our thoughts go to the man who was asked to attend a wedding banquet and yet way thrown out into the darkness because he did not have on the proper attire.  We all know […]

Hi, hope all goes well. And here we are at the end of another week. It is like that old soap opera in TV that opens up, “Like sand through an hour glass, so go the days of our lives.” It would seem that we are stuck in this thing we call “Ordinary Time.” But […]

Greeting, I pray that all goes well. It seems that we are just flying through this year. Before long, we will see the leaves change color if they have not started already, and then comes the snow. But here is Florida one needs a calendar to remind ourselves the month we are in. Just the […]

Greetings. Hope all goes well.I know we all have favorite sayings that we use in our speech when we are talking with our friends. But have you ever wondered where these sayings come from.  Many of them come from sayings of famous people which have filtered through time down to today. Some may have changed but many […]

Greetings, hope all is well.If you have grown up Catholic, the rosary surly is not new to you. It has been part of our faith tradition for many a year. Today we remember Our Lady of the Rosary. It is said that she appeared to St. Dominic in the Thirteenth century holding a rosary in […]

Hello, hope you’ll had a wonderful weekend. One of the most difficult times as a priest has been dealing with people who believe what that believe and that is the end of the story.  In some circles, these people would be called FANATICS.  I remember getting a Facebook memo from a former student of mine. […]

Hello, I hope you all had a good weekend.I don’t know why, but I got it into my head to go through some of the many stats of papers that I have in the office. Well today I came across some of the dialogue in the movie called CONCLAVE. This is a movie about the election […]

HAPPY FEAST DAY!!Well today we celebrate the feast of our Holy Father St. Francis (1181-1226). I as sure the all of you have heard of him, if not you surly have seen a statue of him in a garden as a bird bath.  There is much that can be said about this man from the […]

Hello, well here is another weekend. I don’t know how many of you are working or retired. Sometimes, as I remember, being a priest, weekends were defiantly work days. But it was a work the I truly enjoyed. I would not have stayed as long as I have if I did not enjoy the work […]

Hello! Today we remember those angels that Jesus told us who view His Father’s face in heaven. We have come to know them as our Guardian Angel. Each of us has such an angel who has been with us from our first day until the present.  I know that many of us have different ideas […]

Greetings. Good day to you all.Today we remember yet another saint that is familiar  to most of us. She is St. Theresa of the Little Flower. She lived from 1873 to 1893. She was just 24 when she died of acute tuberculosis. She was a clustered Carmelite Nun and lived most of her short life in […]

Greetings, I hope your week is going well. (Here’s that word HOPE again 😉 I would  dare say that most of our prayers are requesting God to help in some way or another. It might be for a problem we are going through or for a sick family member or friend. It could also be […]

Hello!Today we have another one of those feasts that we have from the tradition of our Church. It is the Feast of the Holy Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. We know of these angels only for the book of Revelations. When we envision angels, most of us remember these little pictures of babies with wings, Or we envision little […]

Hello.This past week has been a little bit nuts for me. It seems that everything all happened at once.Be that as it may, I will keep this meditation short.I opened one of my old notebooks and I have and found a sermon from Pope Francis which he gave in June of 2019. He was on […]

Hello, and happy Sunday. Yes,, we are still in Ordinary Time and will be until the 29th of November when we will celebrate the First Sunday of Advent. Today we hear yet another story, that Jesus uses to get His point across. Remember, stories are much easier to remember than facts and figures. And so […]

Hello. Hope all goes well.As I wrote the above, I just remembered what I was going to write about, that being Hope. I said that I hope. . . We all hope for something. “I hope it will stop raining before the outing, I hope the gravy will come out good for lunch today. I […]

Greetings. Yes it is the end of another week. Where they go, I could not even begin to say. Those of us who are old enough the “good old days” of the Church, where Friday was a day of fast, no meat, and if one could to attend Mass. Though those days are gone, it does […]

Hello, hope all is well. For the last few weeks, we have had some thunderstorms here in South Florida. I don’t remember it thundering as much as it has in the last few weeks.  And let us not talk about the dark days we have had. It is like winter up north where it is […]

The Greetings, In our day, we don’t have the opportunity to celebrate a person who lived in our “time zone”. Today we remember a person know as Pedro Pio (1887-1968), who was a Capuchin Franciscan Friar. He is known for his holiness and that he was blessed with the stigmata that St. Francis once was […]

Greetings, I hope your weekend will be restful .Well here we are yet in one more week. I don’t know about you, but these weeks seem to just fly by. I remember as a kid, saying to my mother “I can’t wait until Saturday so I can go horseback riding. The days are going by […]

Good morning. I pray that your week ahead will be a good one.Today we remember the author of the Gospel we have been hearing from for the last number of Sundays. Matthew, remembers was the Tax Collector. And we all know how we feel about the tax collector. But here is a man that Jesus saw […]

“Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?”At first reading of this parable from Matthew’s Gospel, I am sure we all would side with the workers who who worked all daly long and find out that those who were only working for an hour are receiving the same wage […]

Hello,What do you consider prayer? Where should it be said? What words should you use?  There is a little story of a novice in the  monastery who asked his Abbot, “Is it OK if I smoke during prayer?” The Abbot, with a stern face said, “Not at all, Brother,” and he went on to say […]

Greetings, well it looks like I am getting the hand of this new computer. I should not gloat over it , the whole thing could come apart even as I write this to you. All during this new adventure, I have truly been tried to be patient. A friend of my called me and encouraged […]

Greetings.I am sure that you have been inspired by what you read or what you have heard from someone. It is amazing where and when God will send us a message that will move us or enable us to accomplish a task that we are working on. As I have told you before, I have […]

Good morning. Hope your week is going well.I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself during my pryers or meditation, wondering who God is. I think of story creation in the Old Testament. God saying let us make . . .  I wonder about the size of the universe, which no one really […]

Good day to you all. Here we are again as we were yesterday celebrating the sorrow of a mother who stood at the foot of the Cross watching her only child die a horrible death. Let us read what St. Luke tells us in the second chapter of his Gospel. Following the Law of Moses, Joseph and […]

Hello. Hope all is well.It would seem ironic that we should call this day the “feast” of the Holy Cross. An installment of a gruesome, painful, long lasting way to be put to death. But we see this Cross adorn our homes and in our churches. We sign ourselves with the “Sign of the Cross”. […]

Hello. I hope this finds you all well.Our Gospel today speaks to us about something we all find very difficult to do. That is to FORGIVE another.Depending on the fault we have committed, those two simple words “I sorry” always seem so hard to say. But we know that forgiveness is something we all are […]

Hello, hope all are well and that you have a restful weekend ahead of you. How many times have we put aside our ideas, our dreams, our hopes because someone said that we were foolish to believe that something like that could come to be. How many of our dreams have never come to fruition  because […]

Hello,25 years ago. Can it be so long ago that we experienced the horrible event that took place? Let us pray that God gives us the gift of understanding. An eye for an eye just does not work any more. We start with an eye for an eye. Then a building for a building. Then a city for […]

Hello, yes, it’s me. Sorry for the mix up with sending out the wrong days and the other mix ups. It is truly a learning curve. I would dare say that we all say prayers of petition.  We say our novenas for nine days, we say the correct number of prayers, we follow the instructions to […]

Hello, Well, it looks like we are back in business, for now anyway.I will be sending you the meditation on the Birth of Mary which was yesterday. I’m sorry that I have not been able to send these thoughts out to you. I just hope that I will be able to get something out for you […]

Greetings, hope all is well.I am sure we all watch the news on TV, at some part of the day. I know I turn it on when I wake up in the morning not because I’m interested in what is happening, but just to get my head together and I turn off the TV and […]

Greetings. Yes it is Friday and another weekend. For some is a couple of days to relax. But I know after being a priest for some 48 years, weekends were just other work days. I guess I enjoyed it after 48 years. Oh well, happy Friday and a safe and blessed weekend.The 5th of Sept. […]

Good morning, (just hope you get this in the morning.)I happened to open up one of my older books where I keep my quotes and other little things to send out to you, Today I opened one that goes bace several years and came across the following. So this meditation on my part may be […]

Hello. Well it looks like I have a handle on this new computer. I should keep my mouth shot less something goes bust.I dare say that we all have had some hard days. Some of our making, though we like to think that it someone else’s doing. We are told over and over again in our […]

Greetings, hope all goes well. My last few meditations have been on Hope. I really don’t know why I am focusing in on this virtue but for some reason I have been praying and meditating about it for the last week or so.  “HOPE”, we use this word in so many ways that it sometimes […]

Hello. Hope your weekend has gone well. Well here we are at the end of another month. The Fall is just about here and we will once again enter a time when the Mother Earth will take her rest. Winter, in most parts of the world will be somewhat cold and bleak, but Mother Earth […]