New Skete Monasteries News

Trails               We have added a new hiking trail in the northeast section of our property. We have never had a formal trail in this area before. What it means for hikers is that now it is possible to make a complete circuit around the monastery starting and ending at the same point whether that starting point is the kennel areas or our Guest House [Emmaus House].           As many of you know, the earliest trails were to the south of the monastery buildings. There is one large circuit that is identified as the red trail. That trail is bisected on a north-south line by a yellow trail. The yellow trail also divides in the middle into a high trail and low trail. The low trail connects eastward via two short orange trails to the east wing of the original red trail. Within the last decade we added a blue trail that goes down to our stream which runs down in a valley on the east side of New Skete Lane. Even more recently that blue trail was extended south along the stream and th

            By Brother Luke               Well, maybe not all iPads! But we have a new development in choir at New Skete which utilizes the iPad. We are now switching over from paper copies of music to digital copies. This is happening partly due to the quarantine and even more because we are very fortunate to have a candidate, David Freiler, and a Resident Volunteer, Ralph Karow, who have been with us through the quarantine.   They both have special skills that have made this transition possible.             David is of the generation that grew up with computers and he can take pdf files and manipulate them via Adobe and construct the order of music for each service. Ralph has both computer and music degrees and experience with both so he and David have been a dynamic duo prompting and then moving this process along. Brother Gregory is pitching in as well. He has long advocated making this transition and now that the “stars are lined up fortuitously” his efforts to digitalize

By Brother Gregory             When I was a teenager growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, I asked my father one day, “When did we come over from Ireland?” I thought that my father would be happy to tell me about the Tobin ancestors’ journey from Ireland. Instead, my father brushed aside my question and said, “Why do you want to know that?” I was very surprised to hear his response. Years later I asked my father again about our Irish ancestry, and he began to tell me about his own father suddenly dying in 1928 when he, my father, was just 17 years old. Dad was the second oldest child, and he had to leave high school, go to work, and begin to support the family—his mother and five other siblings—during the Great Depression. My mother, a registered nurse, died in 1995. Dad, who was in the Navy Seabees during World War II and an auto mechanic by trade, died in 2004. I was the one who took the family photos after we closed the house, and I can remember my mot