Latest news with #ChristTheKing
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Catholic Churches across Tampa honor Pope Leo during first Sunday masses since election
The Brief Catholic Churches across Tampa honored Pope Leo during the first Sunday masses since the election. At Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa, it was even visible outside, in the form of decorations on the doors to represent the Vatican. An official inauguration mass for Pope Leo will be held in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, May 18. TAMPA - As Pope Leo XIV gave his first Sunday blessing to a crowd in St Peter's Square at the Vatican, parishes around the globe and across the Tampa Bay area honored the beginning of his papal ministry in their services as well. At Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa, it was even visible outside; in the form of decorations on the doors to represent the Vatican or 'Papal Fun Facts" hanging up in the hallways. What they're saying "We want to celebrate this important moment," stressed Father Len Plazewski. "In my homily, I try to weave together the fact that it's Mother's Day and we also have a Holy Father as well, as well as the Gospel, which is about the Good Shepherd and Jesus being our Good Shepherd, and that this is our new shepherd here, so we want to pray for him." Father Plazewski told FOX 13 he will certainly remember where he was and what he was doing, when the world got word of white smoke. "I was coming on a plane back from Louisville," Father Len laughed. "So I was in the air when the white smoke came and then I was able to land and get to the school in time for the big announcement and the coming out of the balcony and everything." READ: Nations largest single-day food drive returns to Tampa Bay for 33rd year He said that's also been a very special part of this week; seeing reaction through the eyes of young students at Christ the King Catholic School and even having a little fun in the process. "One of the things were, if we guessed his Papal name that he chose, we get ice cream at the end of the week," said student Gianna Gevvia. "We had about 40 kids guess Pope Leo, I didn't even guess it right," Father Len laughed. "But I think it's important for them to see and witness this moment in history, this will probably be a couple decades before we get another pope, and so it's going to make an impression on them. I also think the new pope being American and younger and being active on social media, I think, it makes all those connections." What's next An official inauguration mass for Pope Leo will be held in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, May 18. CLICK HERE:>>>Follow FOX 13 on YouTube The Source Information for this story was gathered by FOX 13's Regina Gonzalez. STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA: Download the FOX Local app for your smart TV Download FOX Local mobile app: Apple | Android Download the FOX 13 News app for breaking news alerts, latest headlines Download the SkyTower Radar app Sign up for FOX 13's daily newsletter
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
My Mom Should Have Been the Most Excited Woman on the Planet This Week. God Had Other Ideas.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Aside from her family, which always took precedence, my mother had two great loves in her life: Being a Catholic, and being from Chicago. My mom thought Chicago was the greatest city on Earth, and though she had traveled widely, her visits to other places only reinforced her preference for home. When we vacationed as a family, she would announce her hometown like a heralding trumpet, in part to explain to curious onlookers why our family seemed so lost, in part as a homing beacon to attract any other nearby Chicagoans to come and chat with her. 'We're from Chicago,' she'd sing out, to nobody in particular, as if her thick regional accent—Chi-CAAHW-go—hadn't already made that fact clear. Though my parents had long since moved to the north suburbs to raise my sister and me, my mom's regional identity remained rooted in her 1950s Chicago childhood on Leavitt Street, in the South Side neighborhood of Beverly, where in her nostalgically biased telling everyone was Irish Catholic, and everyone identified themselves by their home parish—in her case, Christ the King. Her Chicago Catholic childhood informed her suburban Catholic adulthood, insofar as her faith, though very real, was in part a tribal identifier. She worshiped because she believed in God and the Catholic scriptures, but also because she believed that believing in God and the Catholic scriptures was integral to who she was. Like my dad and I rooted for the Bears, my mom rooted for the Catholics. She followed with great interest the careers of any cultural figures who had revealed themselves to be practicing Catholics. She wore crosses and scapulars like other people wore ballcaps and basketball jerseys. Like framed pennants at a sports bar, the walls of our house were dotted with Catholic paraphernalia: crosses and icons and prayers written out in calligraphic script. On those family vacations, we always took time to visit the local churches, where my mom sang hymns loudly and took a hobbyist's interest in noting how things in this church differed from things in our church. 'We're from Chi-CAAHW-go,' she'd tell the local priest while shaking his hand on the steps after Mass. My mom collected priest friends like I collected baseball cards—not just from our home parish, but from all over the Archdiocese of Chicago and the wider world. I never quite understood how she kept track of them all—to me, as a kid, the various Father Toms, Mikes, and Mitches were all fairly interchangeable—but somehow she did, and they were a fixture of my childhood, passing regularly through our suburban home for dinners, and backyard barbecues, and occasional weeknight Masses at a makeshift card-table altar in our living room. She erected a gleaming white statue of the Virgin Mary in our backyard, and on nice evenings she would sometimes set up chairs out there and hold services al fresco. It's honestly a minor miracle that I wasn't a social pariah at school—an outcome I can only attribute to the Virgin's intercession on my behalf. Given all of her priest friends, it was inevitable that some would advance through the church's hierarchy, and it gave my mom great joy whenever some cleric she knew got an ecclesiastical promotion. Our longtime church pastor, a gentle, elegant man who took me and several classmates on a mission trip to rural Virginia in 1996, eventually became a diocesan bishop. The quiet, meticulous priest who blessed me on my high school graduation day—a South Side native who, like my mom, attended Christ the King—is now the archbishop of Omaha, Nebraska. A gregarious, funny priest I knew as Father Jerry, whom my mom met while he served as chaplain at a local Army base, eventually became Archbishop of Milwaukee. We once even had a cardinal come to our house, a vacationing Nigerian prelate with whom my mother had inevitably become connected. There is a framed photo of this odd meeting hanging in my parents' living room even now: the bemused cardinal in his Roman collar, my proud parents in their church clothing, and me in a messy Little League uniform, eager to leave and get back to whatever game I'd been parentally removed from. In our own ways, I suppose, we all thought we were posing for a team picture. But there are bishops and cardinals, and then there's the pope, and as far as my mom was concerned, the gulf between the former and the latter was as wide as that between the Earth and the moon. Her pride in her prelate friends was in part a product of her Chicago childhood—the South Sider's intrinsic delight in knowing people with clout, in being able to brag that you've 'got a guy.' But her devotion to the pope—every pope—reflected her firm belief that the pontiff was Christ's representative on Earth. The pope wasn't the sort of person that a mom from Chicago could ever know. The pope was doctrinally infallible. The pope was the shepherd of the entire global flock. Archbishop Jerry was knowable; Archbishop Jerry was someone with whom we exchanged Christmas cards. But a message from the pope would be one degree removed from a bona fide message from Heaven. And so I wished to God that I could have called my mom on Thursday afternoon, when white smoke billowed into the Vatican sky and the papal conclave announced that it had elected Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as the first American pope—and not just an American, but a Chicagoan, and a South Sider to boot. I would have given anything to hear her reaction to the news that the new vicar of Christ had come from her exact cultural milieu. Pope Leo XIV is one year younger than my mom, and they grew up less than 10 miles apart, in the heyday of post-war South Side parish Catholicism. It would have blown her mind to think that she and the pope were peers—that the occupant of St. Peter's throne was a neighborhood guy. She'd have racked her brain trying to remember if she and the pope had ever met as children, or if she had ever known his brothers. 'The pope's from Chi-CAAHW-go,' she would have sang out, over and over again. That fact would have made her life. I could still try to have the conversation, I suppose, but it wouldn't be the same. For the past decade my mom's been dealing with an early-onset variant of Alzheimer's disease. It first attacked her visual cortex, and since then has been slowly degrading her motor skills, cognition, and ability to communicate. Over the past six months she's become increasingly non-conversant. When I come to visit these days, more often than not she sits in a chair, eyes facing the floor, largely silent, occasionally blurting repetitive nonsense phrases like a charismatic prayer. She still lives in my childhood suburban home with my dad and a small army of nursing assistants, surrounded by walls still bedecked with crosses, and icons, and calligraphic prayers. When my grandfather died two weeks ago, we didn't even tell her. When someone you love gets sick like this—when their disease attacks the core of who they are inside—you can sometimes end up setting arbitrary benchmarks by which you might measure whether or not they're still there deep down inside. For the longest time, my benchmarks for my mom's thereness were her ability to respond to reminiscences about Chicago, and her ability to recite the Lord's Prayer. I'm a suburban kid, through and through, but I knew how to play my mom's South Side greatest hits. 'Remember Original Rainbow Cone?' I'd ask her, and her frail eyes would light up with recognition as she'd try and fail to pronounce the words Rainbow Cone. 'Remember Ryan's Woods, mom? Remember Christ the King? Remember Leavitt Street?' My mom stopped actively remembering those things awhile ago. Her grasp on the Lord's Prayer proved longer lasting, but that's gradually slipped, too. Though at times she'll still move her mouth when I try to pray with her, more often these days she doesn't seem to register that I'm talking to her at all. 'You wanna say a prayer, Mom?' I'll ask, and I'll run through the litany she'd make my sister and I recite as children—Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Most of the time, I don't even know who I'm doing it for anymore. The day my mom stopped consistently being able to pray with me is the day I lost my hold on my own faith. My own Catholicism, like my mother's, was a product of my childhood cultural context—of the living room Masses and the priestly pop-ins and the inherited conviction that the Catholic faith was the best faith on Earth. But I've found it harder to maintain that certitude as an adult, now that so many other prominent adult Catholics seem to take such pride in flaunting their disdain for the meekness, humility, and compassion preached by Christ in the Gospels. And I've found it harder and harder to believe in a God who would inflict such an awful disease on the woman who was His absolute biggest fan. I cry all the time about my mom: About how unfair it is that she got so sick so young, about the toll her sickness has taken on my father and the rest of my family. Sometimes I cry to think about how sad she'd be to know that I've fallen away from my childhood faith. My mom, for better or for worse, followed her faith in an unbroken line from her childhood right up to the day when she stopped being able to think clearly. But I'll never again believe with the simplicity and certitude I knew as a child. Sometimes I cry about that, too. And yet, despite myself, I was legitimately excited the other day when the cardinals elected Prevost as pope. Pope Francis sought to promote a synodal church, one that calls in the entire faith community instead of relying on rigid hierarchies. In his opening remarks Thursday, Pope Leo XIV signaled his own intent to advance his predecessor's synodal reforms and shape the church into an entity that welcomes people where they are, rather than castigating them for who and what they are not. I'd like to say that my enthusiasm over Prevost's election derived from the likelihood that he will follow in Francis' tolerant mold. But, in truth, I was mostly delighted that the new pope is a Chicago guy. I am still, in many ways, my mother's son. There will always be those Catholics who hate the new pope no matter what he says or does: the Pharisee faithful for whom religion is a mere political cudgel, the Sedevacantists eager to plunge the church back into the 1940s, and others with more legitimate grievances against the church, its priests, and their many combined moral failures. There will always be Catholics like my mom, who love the pope because he's the pope, whose childlike faith is unshakable no matter who leads the Holy See. A lot of the American church, I suppose, is people like me: cradle Catholics who still want to believe in something, but are no longer entirely sure that they can believe in this; the fallen faith community, still somewhat willing to be called back home. I went back home to the north suburbs last week for my grandfather's funeral. The night before we buried him, after the nursing aides had gone home, I went into the bedroom where my mother now spends most of her days. I go in there to talk to her most nights that I'm home, even though it's often a one-sided conversation. But that night, for some reason, my mom was awake and alert, and she smiled as I sat down next to her. 'Did you hear that Grandpa died, mom?' I said, and her eyes widened a little. 'Maybe we should say the Lord's Prayer?' 'Yes,' she said, slowly. I took her hand and started praying. I watched her concentrate. I heard her, softly, try to mouth the words along with me. I went on, through the old litany: the Hail Mary, the Glory Be. When I was finished her face broke into the sort of smile I rarely see from her anymore. 'I love you, God. God, I love you,' she said, as clear as a bell in her thick Chicago accent. GAAHWD. She's still in there, somewhere. Maybe my own faith is still somewhere down deep inside me, too.
