January 6, 2026

Dear Raff, I can understand your consternation at not being promoted to president of the Newman Center.  I can understand it, but I don’t countenance it. Certainly, it would be just and prudent to put you in charge of things there, judging by the success of your efforts up to now, and by your evident dedication and dependability.  But (may I be blunt?) what right have you to complain if someone else is chosen? Is your work for the Church done out of love for Christ, the Church, and your fellow students, or out of misguided ambition, vanity, and egoism? I think you should reflect deeply on the example of today’s saint. She and her older sister Dolores embarked on a vocation to the consecrated life soon after their parents died, greatly upsetting their other relatives in the little Spanish town that they called home.  But the order was disbanded, and St Raphaela had to hold together the little band of sixteen novices through sheer faith, while the bishop decided what to do with them. Just as they were finishing their training and as they were about to take their vows, the bishop announced that he had written up an entirely new rule for them to follow.  Raphaela was a bit perplexed – they had learned a different style of life and were unprepared (and unwilling) to follow the new directives, but if they refused they would all be sent home. So she took her courage in her hands, and the group secretly fled from the diocese to the protection of a benefactor, who hid them with some other nuns in a hospital and then went to Madrid to see about setting things right.  Then he died, and the little flock was left shepherdless. They persevered, however, under St Raphaela’s intrepid leadership and deep faith, until a Jesuit priest heard of their predicament and helped establish the Congregation of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart in Madrid, Spain. A few years later, however, a rift opened between Dolores and Raphaela.  The older sister recruited some influential supporters, and they deposed the Foundress (who had been named mother superior of the new Congregation by the Pope himself), sending her to the Order’s convent in Rome, where she spent the next 30 years in charge of the housework.  It was there, suffering that humiliating and unjust sentence, that this remarkable woman achieved her remarkable degree of holiness. She never complained, never made any efforts to assert her “rights,” and she filled the house with joy, faith, and love until she died on the Feast of Epiphany in 1925. The word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or “revelation.”  I hope that St Raphaela Mary’s example “reveals” how you ought to be behaving.  Continue serving the cause of Christ with all your heart, making the burdens and triumphs of those around you into your own, and God will see to it that the talents he has given you don’t go to waste. Your loving uncle, Eddy

Dear Joanne, My dearest of nieces, as you prepare for your graduation (this afternoon, I believe?) I am reminiscing here in my drab and almost comfortable cubicle/prison, recalling the highs and lows of your collegiate career.  You were a most comforting and faithful correspondent, exactly as your mother had been when we used to send our sibling letters back and forth during our own college days (no email back then, I’m afraid, just a lot of long waits and ink blotches).  Now you are finished. Off to conquer the world, no doubt. One thought keeps coming back to me: it can’t be a coincidence that you are graduating on the feast day of St Joan of Arc, your namesake. Has God ever given the Church a more heroic figure than St Joan?  A teenage girl, illiterate, of peasant stock, unable to ride and unschooled in war, receives a call from God to liberate a divided and corrupt France from the overpowering and almost completed English invasion.  No wonder she at first resisted the imprecations of her voices (i.e. the saints whom God sent to her as his messengers)! It was only when they told her “It is God who commands it” that she complied. And the world has never been the same.  She led armies, she outfoxed evil courtiers, she emboldened a cowardly king, she revived an entire nation, she befuddled the most learned clerics and lawyers of her day. Single-handedly (well, I guess she had the help of God) she reversed the fortunes of France and altered the history of Europe, enduring moral, physical, and psychological tortures of the cruelest brand.  Through it all, she suffered profoundly – confusion, exhaustion, betrayal… And why? “It is God who commands it.” She was given a mission by God, and she accepted it, even to the point of being burned at the stake, dying with the name of Jesus on her virgin lips. Well, do you have any doubt that God has a mission for you?  Is justice threatened any less in today’s world than it was in Joan’s world?  And are you any less likely a candidate to uphold the cause of Christ in the face of monstrous odds than Joan the Maid? (“Maid” was a term meaning “virgin,” not someone you hire to clean your house.)  Hardly. The only variable now is – when you hear his voice, will you take the risk of trusting him? … Oh, how I pray that you will, and I am sure your patroness is praying as well. Happy graduation; may it be the beginning of a glorious adventure.   God bless you always, Uncle Eddy