New Skete Monasteries News

            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 pr...

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 th...

  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 goi...

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...