In his youth, Jesuit Father Patrick Conroy pictured himself as a lawyer and a senator, working in the deep recesses of Washington's U.S. Capitol building. In a way, he's doing just that but not in the way he imagined.
Ordinary lives, however quiet or unnoticed, are a sequence of miracles, tragedies and triumphs. Everyone stumbles into hell and is repeatedly resurrected into ultimate beauty.
As a Twin Cities lawyer for 30 years, Anne Krisnik channeled her passion for social justice issues into her volunteer activities, among them, two decades of cooking once a month at the Catholic Charities Family Service Center in Maplewood. She planned upon retirement to devote more time to fight systemic poverty, which she hasn’t been able to do with a full-time job.
Ken Hackett, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, is gearing up to try retirement for the second time. The retired president of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops' overseas aid agency, is leaving his ambassadorial post three years and three months after presenting his credentials to Pope Francis.