New Skete Monasteries News

  By Brother Gregory   The monks and nuns of New Skete closed their monasteries this past March 14th, and it seemed extremely unusual and strange to contact individuals and tell them that their retreat time at New Skete was canceled because of the COVID-19 virus. My thinking was that this will not last long and we will be back to normal soon. Well, here we are almost three months later, and the news on the internet and television is discouraging. It’s my job to go to the Post Office and pick up the mail, and the new normal is to wear a face mask and gloves. Periodically, I go food shopping to local supermarkets, and once again, I wear a face mask and gloves. Some of the supermarkets have one-way aisles and God Help Me if I go down the wrong way on an aisle, which did happen; I was not paying attention, and a woman was quick to tell me that I was going down the wrong way of the wide end aisle. I apologized to her, thinking that the supermarket “policeman or woman” was going to pul

The King and I   By Brother Stavros I missed having a grandfather when I was growing up. Both my grandmothers were wonderful characters. Both grandfathers died before I was on the scene. My mother’s mother was the grand-niece of Mary Surratt, whose son John was J. Wilkes Booth’s prime conspirator. After Lincoln’s assassination, he eluded capture by the U.S. Government because he skedaddled to Rome and joined one of the pope’s less colorful guards. Aunt Mary had the infamous fate of being hanged by the U.S. War Department as our own Bloody Mary, the first woman to have that distinction. But I digress. When my grandmother took up nursing at St. Mary’s Hospital in Baltimore, she fell in love with an officer in the Belgian Army, who was then an intern at the same institution. He returned from the Great War, as did countless thousands, a changed man. He never returned to his family of two boys and two girls in the District of Columbia. Rather, he sought the comfort of his Belgæ (mo