June 27-July 1 - LifeTeen Leadership Camp was held on our campus. I helped out a little with it for the Abbey and BCM.
July 6th - celebrated Mass at the Archdiocesan youth camp - Camp Tekekwitha!
July 9 - Attended (and preached) a nice weeding between one of our BC FOCUS missionaries (Abigail Searle) and one of our RCIA Catholics from last year (Timothy Thomas), both of which are FOCUS missionaries this year!! Wonderful couple who will be great things as missionaries on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
July 11 - Feast of St. Benedict, traveled to Manhattan, Kansas to celebrate Mass for a group of BC alumni and incoming students... a great group of people.
July 19 - Our annual monastic outing to a Royals game... which the Royals won (for the 2nd year in a row - that is called a streak in reference to the Royals!).
July 25-26 - Development trip to Salina & Dodge City, Kansas. All of the fans of Gunsmoke will remember the name of Dodge City! I had lunch with the relatively new bishop of that diocese and toured some of the old west stuff.
Exciting news for August - Br. Leven made his solemn/final/permanent vows on August 6th. That was great news for our community and we had a very nice celebration surrounding the ceremony!
On the same night of August 6th a donor provided us with 6 very nice tickets (in a dugout suite) to the Royals home game against Detroit. We joined his family as we saw this year's AL Cy Young (Justin Verlander) barely beat the Royals, 4-3!!
I substituted in a few parishes when needed through out July and early August.
The next 2 1/2 weeks were a blur... much College Ministry and FOCUS training. Fantastic time and great formation to prepare for the upcoming year!
It was during this time that I found out that our BC biology department has a Burmese Python! I asked the biology professor if I could play with her and he gave me permission to do so any time. She is 8 foot long (with the potential to get to about 20 feet) and just received the name Bella. You may hear me talk about her more in the future.
Our Abbey picnic for the college faculty/staff and their families drew about 400 people on August 17. Bella made an appearance and the kids loved her... many of the parents were not so enthusiastic about her!
Classes started at BC on August 24th and there has been a flood of activity with them individually and communally.
Along with this we have just started the silent phase of our Abbey Capital Campaign with is for the purpose of fixing our roof and windows and increasing our endowment.
Sports wise, our BC football team and soccer teams started off with some convincing wins. Football is 2-0 and has not been scored on (45-0, 14-0) and soccer is also 2-0 and has not ben scored on!!
And I could not mention sports without a shout-out for my AU TIGERS!! What a finish against a mighty Utah State!! I had to get that in before they face Miss State this weekend and put the longest BSC winning streak on the line. I am planning to be at the AU-Florida game in Jordan-Hare on October 15th!!
Other good things which have happened in recent days here: Nice opening school Mass with Bishop Brungardt (of Dodge City), Dr. Ted Sri gave some great talks at BC and the BC new student retreat went very well (run by my compadre, Br. Christopher).
Ongoing - My brother Barry's creation, the association of Catholic Coaches (A of CC), is going well. It was a great idea and (sadly) has no competition in it arena (it would be great to have one in ever state!). It is receiving some good support. And Barry's birthday is coming up soon - 9/11! People will be pausing to think on that day... not only about him...
Many things coming up - please keep them in your prayers: Justice For All training at BC tomorrow (Sept 10) followed by some campus pro-life work at Univ. of Kansas the following Monday/Tuesday, my new monthly Catholic Apologetics class has its first session on the evening of Sept 18th, Msgr. Michael Magee comes to visit for less than 24 hours and will give 4 talks here (3 on the new translation of the Mass), the EWTN series (hard to believe that it is about 1 month away!) and many more less glamorous things!
Anyway... I have to run... Excuse any typos in this post (I will check it later).
God bless you all,
Father Justin Damien Dean, OSB
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