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As the liturgy does so often, the readings for today spoke directly to this question in my heart. Paul writes to the Romans: \u201cThe willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.\u201d And a bit further on: \u201cMiserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is why we need the Church in its broadest meaning: the Holy Spirit working through the sacraments, the priesthood which administers the sacraments as vicars of Christ, and especially (it seems to me this morning) the fellowship of our fellow Catholics who share with us in the sacraments. Let\u2019s face it: we \u201cmiserable\u201d sinners need all the help we can get!<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div>\nI thought of this especially this morning after mass, when I interviewed brothers Tony, John, and Frank Pietrini (left to right) for the parish newsletter. They are three out of ten offspring of an Italian-American couple who settled in Beverly over eighty years ago. They were raised on the third floor of a three-family house a couple blocks from St. Mary\u2019s Star of the Sea Church<\/a>. All seven surviving Pietrini children and their families still lived within a mile of the church until just a year ago, when one sister moved fifteen miles away to be closer to her children. <\/p>\n This is not an \u201cauthorized\u201d biography of the Pietrini brothers and I won\u2019t go into more detail. (You\u2019ll have to read the parish newsletter.) I will say that Tony, John, and Frank are three of the happiest-looking seventy- and eighty-year-old men you\u2019re ever likely to meet, and when I began showing up at morning mass two years ago, they were among the first to welcome me. I feel about them the way I feel about Frank Kwiatkowski<\/a> and Frank Gaudenzi<\/a>: I want to be just like that<\/i> when I\u2019m a little older.<\/p>\n