‘Brother, Where Is Your Coat?’
GUEST COLUMN
When I about five years old in 1930, my Dad’s cousin, Brother Aloysius Gilmartin, would come down on the train to Altoona, Pennsylvania, from St. Francis College in Loretto to visit us. He would get off the train and walk half a block to Westfall’s Men’s Store where Dad worked. Dad would usually bring him home for lunch. He enjoyed our big family so much. And we all loved Br. Aloysius too; he was such a gentle and humble man.
One day it was bitter cold, about zero degrees, when he came to Dad’s store. Dad was shocked to see that he was not wearing an overcoat.
“Brother, where is your coat? It’s freezing out!” my Dad exclaimed.
“Oh, Frank, I don’t have one,” he replied. The monks of the Order of Francis take a vow of poverty and do not personally own anything, even their clothes.
You May Also Enjoy
What saints and Doctors of the Church have written is far more useful than anything written by Karl Marx in persuading Christians to adopt a critical attitude toward capitalism.
In the last decade of his life, over eighty thousand people per year sought out St. John Vianney for confession.
The technology that makes its use possible is in the background, a “black box” that is barely perceptible and poorly understood even by the technicians who design it.