“…every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Jesus was speaking about false prophets, a warning to his disciples. Not bad advice in general.
Perhaps not a bad criteria to judge those who would minister in the name of the Church – from volunteer to Bishop. The problem these days is that I wonder whether we would agree of what constitutes “good fruit” from a ministry or minister. There are places in which good fruit is measured by the liturgical celebrations of solemnities, feasts, and memorials; other places via outreach ministries. I was once told I was a poor minister and pastor because I dishonored the Blessed Virgin Mary. The instance was just having celebrated a Mass and did not center the homily on Mary. It was the Feast of the Ascension. Continue reading
We friars assist as Catholic chaplains at Tampa General. It is not my first time as a hospital chaplain. That was at Bethesda Naval Hospital. My time at Bethesda was at the beginning of the war in Iraq when the Marines were engaged in combat around Fallujah. Casualties were high. Every evening there was a chaplain assigned to the flight line to be there when marines, sailors, airmen and soldiers were medevac’d from the war zone. All of these service men and women were in grave medical conditions. I witnessed injuries that still left me amazed that the person was still alive. Alive with lives that would never be the same, never as they had planned. But the combat/trauma ICU and the flight line were not the hardest chaplain duty at Bethesda – at least not for me. For me, the hardest ward was the NICU; the neo-natal intensive care unit. 
friarmusings 