… I’m going to Rome!

I woke up this morning and my email, facebook and twitter account was on fire. What’s this… I was chosen as one of the 150 bloggers to attend the Vatican Blognic! Never in a million years did I actually dare to presume I would be chosen. I can only guess it is due the readers who contacted them and suggested I attend. For those emails I am humbly grateful.

Now begins the work. The event is May 1st, in two weeks. That’s a lot of planning in a very short amount of time. The biggest obstacle is the financing. Believe me, I dislike doing it, but I am going to resurrect the paypal donation button. If you can make a small donation, even a buck or two, I would be supremely grateful.

Also, help me spread the word. Link to this post on your blogs and tell your friends, “I know a cute little Catholic who needs our help”. We are strong and supportive community of Catholic bloggers and Rome has taken notice. This is wonderful opportunity for us all.

Lastly, I am hoping my parish can also help me and I am going to be reaching out to some various contacts I have in local and Catholic media.

Please, above all, I ask for your prayers. I want to make this trip but I want to make it with the right spirit and heart. Pray for me to maintain humility regardless of the outcome. I understand it is likely I may not raise enough funds to get there. And if I do, I certainly don’t want to loose my wits about me and become arrogant about the whole ordeal.

I am honored to be chosen.

Be on guard, boys.

… being molto bello!

Grazie mille, Gretchen.

… small enough to smuggle back with you in your luggage.

… Willy Herteleer went to mass every day for twenty five years straight. He was well know among local clergy and the Swiss Guard. He was regarded as happy and friendly, a man of rich faith who enjoyed chatting with pilgrims about confession and the Eucharist, which he called his “medicine.”

When he died he was given a funeral mass and buried in the Vatican cemetery established for Flemish and German nobility.

Willy Herteleer was not nobility. Not in the earthly sense. He was a homeless man.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A homeless man who faithfully attended Mass at a church inside Vatican City for decades was buried in a Vatican cemetery after it was discovered he had died and was left unidentified in a hospital morgue. [Read more]

An old Beggar by David Teniers II (undated)

If ever there exists people who can claim to feel abandoned by God, it’s the homeless. I struggle daily to fight back bitterness at my poverty, poverty that is really wealth in comparison to homelessness.

And yet there he was, for twenty five years, faithfully attending mass and making sure we took our medicine.

Requiescat in pace, Willy Herteleer.