In this space I intend to share my own faith with you, invite you to share yours, and answer questions. I am proposing that there is a way of seeing the Catholic faith that will make it very personal, and very relevant to you: and what I ask is that you set aside any ideas that you may already have about the Church. I am an orthodox Catholic who is not afraid to explore or to be challenged. All I ask is that if you would like to challenge me, you must let me challenge you in return.
I am proud of the Roman Catholic Church. She has some very serious problems, but the Bark of Peter is being guided very carefully by the Holy Spirit, and I have every confidence that she will arrive at her destination—the New Heavens and the New Earth—on schedule and with a full complement of crew and passengers.
We are the People of God, united with Christ through the sacramental ministry of our priests, our bishops, and our Pope. We are your neighbors, relatives, friends and coworkers. We are the bearers of Light into the dark places of the world, and we are not afraid. Take a closer look at us and see the Catholic Church again, for the first time.
Why name a Catholic website after a bird?
The red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is my favorite bird. The redtail is a raptor, or a bird of prey, which means that it hunts for a living. It is very large, with females (the larger of the two) having wingspans sometimes approaching 5 feet. In flight it is magnificent, soaring on updrafts with scarcely a flap of the wing, and, when there are a male and female in season, flying in wide circles together in a kind of dance of courtship. The hawk is a beautiful creature, as is the eagle — but the hawk has something the eagle has not. Eagles are noble, and rare: hawks are common as the rain. The range of the hawk extends from Alaska to Florida, and you see them in places you’d never see an eagle.
The Catholic faith is more like the hawk than the eagle. For our Faith exalts commonness, the ordinary and the everyday. At Mass, wine (mixed with everyday tap water) and flatbread become for us the Body and Blood of Christ, the most extraordinary things imaginable. But they started out ordinary, though they do not remain so. We are like that. We are born ordinary human beings, but through the ordinary everyday of the sacraments, we become creatures like unto God himself. There is much more to the Church than meets the eye — sort of like the hawk, who is noble as the eagle, though he is just being himself.
