No mystery, I guess, that an attorney chooses an attorney. A broad question from an embarrassment of riches. Who would you choose?
An Influential Catholic You Look Up To?
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
St. Maximillian Kolbe.
Courage.
Charity.
His love for others sprung from the deep well of the Immaculate Heart. Immaculata. His eye on the prize never waivered, and when the day came that put his great faith to the test he didn’t fail.
He was the property of Our Lady in all ways possible. He was a shining example of a man who lived in the world but was not of the world.
He helped me to find my way back.
For thoses reasons he is my Saint. A man that I look up to.
Nowadays, I find the LESS influential ones more worthy of being looked up to.
Revision.
The Catholic whom these words are attributed to;
1st Reading 1 John 4:7-10
“Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”
St. Thomas More for the same reasons. Think about the courage that it took to tell his own family members that he wouldn’t take the oath to Henry. And the patron saint of being in the world, but not of the world.
Depending on how you define “influential”, one figure I look up to is Ven. Cornelia Connelly, whose family life was, to say the least, pretty turbulent.
Born in Philadephia, she married an Episcopal priest in 1831 and they both later decided to become Catholic. They had 5 children, two of whom died in infancy or childhood (one was accidentally scalded and died in his mother’s arms).
Then her husband, Pierce, decided he wanted to be a Catholic priest — which meant they would have to separate permanently and both take vows of celibacy. She was NOT happy about that but eventually accepted his decision. They moved to England in the 1840s, he was ordained a Catholic priest, she entered a convent and the kids were placed in boarding schools. She would later found a teaching order called the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus.
Then Pierce became disillusioned with the priesthood and the Church, publicly renounced his faith and sued in the British courts to force Cornelia to leave the convent and live with him again. The court case was highly publicized in England and stirred up a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment. I cannot imagine how humiliated and embarrassed she must have felt. He eventually lost that case, but he got custody of their 3 surviving kids and they also left the Church (one did eventually come back) because they blamed the Church for breaking up their family.
I see her as an encouraging figure for those of us who have had close family members abandon or stop practicing the Faith and who feel like failures because of that. She is at the “Venerable” stage of the sainthood process.
Husband sounds like an uber jerk.
“Husband sounds like an uber jerk.”
Yes, in a strange way it reminds me of some of the AITA (Am I The A-Hole) family breakup stories posted on Reddit. I am sure that if Reddit existed back then 99.9 percent of the commenters would have told him “YTA” (You’re The AH). Seriously, though, I do admire Cornelia for her extreme patience and her perseverance in her vocation, and for not giving in to bitterness or resentment against her husband or children. She did say that the Holy Child order was “founded on (her) broken heart”.
St. Thomas More is pretty hard not to choose, being a (retired) lawyer. If our profession today had half of his integrity and dedication to God and His truth, this country would be a much better place. That said, just to offer another choice and one more contemporary, I’ll go with Bishop Joseph Strickland. While he has not yet risked red martyrdom, his refusal to cower before the tyranny of the current Vatican showed me that he is made of the same stern stuff as More, and thus he is a fine example for any Catholic.
As a numbers guy, I guess I could go with Blaise Pascal … A mathematician who understood that “The heart has reasons which the head knows not”.
Besides, Gauss, although a surveyor like me who understood that “When our last hour sounds, we will have the great and ineffable joy of seeing the one whom we could only glimpse in all our work.”, was a Lutheran! 😀
St. Athanasius.
He is my constant reminder that being “contra mundus” is a good thing. He also reminds me that there is reasonable hope for a Church where a majority has its cranium in its posterior.
That said, I used to keep a Mass card of St Thomas More in my government office, to remind me who to serve first.
It is hard to find a current Catholic that is famous and influential but I would go with the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone. He has been openly critical of Catholics like Pelosi and Biden for the Pro-Choice stance.
In the last couple of days, my YouTube feed has been recommending Scalia videos, which I’ve been happily watching. There aren’t many people whose minds are so clear that they can convey their ideas without words getting in the way. Even then, you’d have to fight the impulse to use words in a tricky way just because you’re that smart.
‘A Man For All Seasons’, my favorite movie of all time!
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For past – as a Third Order Franciscan, I tend to look to Franciscans – St. Thomas More, my good St. Francis, and particularly, St. Maximilian Kolbe. They all accomplished so much in their short lives. I edit 3 Catholic newsletters, and St. Maximilian particularly inspires me since he was also a newspaper editor and broadcaster among his many gifts. For present – Bishop Robert Barron. He is neither conservative nor liberal, traditional nor progressive. He is faithful, which is the label all good Catholics should want. He is also very pastoral and an excellent and clear teacher, which IMO would all make for an excellent first American Pope.