Near midnight, in a pouring rain, my taxi driver stopped somewhere in Calcutta and told me to get out.

I had two suitcases, no idea where I was, and could barely breathe in the thick mixture of smoke, heat, and humidity that passed for air. My hotel, the driver indicated, was somewhere down the darkened road.

Then he left.

Standing alone in the rain, I made God a promise: If I survived this, I would never leave the house again.

This was, apparently, God’s answer to my prayer.

I have a genuine gift for getting myself into situations where I have absolutely no business being. Five minutes into the average adventure, I am usually looking for a scuba tank because I’ve discovered that I am not only over my head, but fully submerged.

The adventures are frequently uncomfortable. Occasionally terrifying. Sometimes hilarious.

But the participation prize has always been the story.

Calcutta became one of those stories. Ten years later, though, I’m no longer certain that the story was the prize.

In the months leading up to Mother Teresa’s canonization in 2016, it seemed as though every Catholic news organization in the world was heading to Rome. The agency I worked with already had a photographer there, which made perfect sense.

But I was disappointed.

I loved Mother Teresa. I wanted to be close to this moment, and I began praying for some way to participate.

Then a thought came to me: If everyone else was going to Rome, why not go to Calcutta?

This was the city in which Mother Teresa had lived and worked. It was where she was buried and where the Missionaries of Charity continued the work she began. Most importantly, it was filled with people who had known her not simply as a saint or international icon, but as Mother.

And because everyone would be in Rome, I imagined Calcutta might be quiet.

Peaceful, even.

I may have been spiritually inspired, but I was logistically delusional.

My colleagues laughed when I told them the idea. The Missionaries of Charity did not exactly court publicity. They generally did not allow photographers into their homes, and the likelihood that they would welcome an American photojournalist during one of the most important moments in their history seemed rather slim.

Still, I wrote to them.

The response addressed me as “Dearest Jeffrey” and said that, after prayerful consideration, the Sisters would be delighted to welcome me.

Be careful what you pray for.

As my plane climbed away from New York, I watched the familiar lights disappear beneath me and wondered what, exactly, I’d gotten myself into.

The airport in Delhi looked like the sort of place James Bond might stroll through on his way to save the world. That glamour evaporated aboard the packed, overheated flight to Calcutta. By the time I walked outside, the air felt like it was made of smoke and water. Then came the midnight taxi ride, my roadside abandonment, and the desperate search for the hotel.

Eventually, I found it and pounded on the locked door until a kind, smiling man let me inside.

The air conditioner in my room was more of a theory than an appliance.

And I had booked it for two weeks.

Sr. Ita had been instrumental in getting me to Calcutta in the first place. At Mother House, I explained why I had come and what I hoped to document. I had expected strict limitations. Instead, the Sisters opened far more of their world to me than I ever imagined they would.

I attended early Mass near Mother Teresa’s tomb. I accompanied the Sisters into their homes. I watched them care for children, adults, the sick, and people approaching the end of their lives.

At first, Calcutta had overwhelmed every one of my senses. There was the heat, the smell, the traffic, the crowds, and poverty on a scale I had never witnessed.

But slowly, something changed.

I began raising my camera less often.

The Sisters didn’t deliver speeches about love. They simply loved the person standing before them. Again and again, I watched them give themselves completely to whoever needed them at that moment.

The longer I watched, the less satisfied I became with remaining merely an observer.

On September 4, Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa in St. Peter’s Square. In Calcutta, the entire city seemed charged with electricity. Sisters arrived from across India, and the chapel at Mother House filled for Mass beside Mother Teresa’s tomb.

Rome had St. Peter’s Square and the formal proclamation. Calcutta had the rooms she had walked, the streets she had traveled, and people who still spoke about her as someone they had known and loved.

That morning, at least to me, Rome had nothing on that room.

Once the celebrations ended, I had four days remaining in Calcutta.

So, I locked my camera gear in the safe at the hotel and showed up to volunteer.

दिनभर थका मन - Dinbhar Thaka Mann

We were shipped off to a place called Nirmal Hriday, which translates to Pure Heart, the first home Mother Teresa had founded. It’s a hospice for the dying destitute, a place where the poorest of the poor go to die. Mother Teresa had envisioned a place where those who had suffered their entire lives would find love and comfort during their final days.

The bodies of the dying men lying on their cots reminded me of photos I’d seen of Auschwitz. The jobs… bathing broken bodies, cleaning bedsores, removing maggots from wounds, among others…

A Sister handed me a small cup of water and two pills, instructing me to give them to a man lying on a cot nearby. And I’m like, “Okay, and then what should I do…” She smiled at me and said, “Just do that first.”

As I approached him, his eyes followed me. His face was covered by leathery skin etched with deep lines from a life lived in the alleys of India. He stared at me through squinted eyes. I knelt beside his cot and looked at him. He was dying.

I handed the pills to him, and he just stared at me. I touched his hand with the paper cup of water, and he made fists with his hands. I gently pressed one pill against his lip, which made him purse his lips. I was beginning to understand why the Sister hadn’t given me anything else to do.

Eventually, I gave up. Instead, I sat with him, speaking about anything and everything to pass the time. He sat in silence, studying me. His eyes would react when I would say certain words. I had no idea whether or not he understood anything I was saying.

After being there for nearly three hours, the Sister called the volunteers to assemble to depart. And the man’s eyes grew wide. And he smiled at me. And gestured for the pills.

It was never about the pills.

I smiled back. And his eyes began to tear. I finally understood.

He just didn’t want to be alone.

छोटा लड़का - Chhota Ladka

Our next “assignment” was at a home on the southern end of Calcutta at Daya Dan, a home for younger disabled children. I went with a group of other volunteers who were heading there. The Sisters greeted us and handed out our jobs. Mine was laundry.

I washed diapers and bedsheets in these enormous concrete vats with some kind of industrial-grade soap that felt like it could strip paint. Other volunteers were tending to the children. Feeding them, entertaining them, playing with them. I was a little bummed.

When the laundry was done, everyone was already gathered in a large cinderblock room for “movie time.” They had about 40 kids surrounding an old, perhaps 20-inch TV. The kids were all gathered up with the other volunteers. And I was alone.

I walked out of the room to get a drink of water. The room I entered was dark, but I could see a large round table in the corner. And on it lay a kid, face down, spread-eagle, probably about six years old. I thought, “This is interesting.”

So, I poked his arm. Nothing. I poked it again. Nothing. One more time…

The kid leaped off the table and wrapped his arms around my neck so tight I thought I’d choke, his legs wrapped around my waist. He aggressively grabbed and felt my face. I realized that he was blind. I had a kid literally stuck to me.

There were some chairs in the movie room, so I figured maybe we could sit. He began to relax, and then he curled up on my lap and nuzzled his face into my chest. His arms were still wrapped around me. Every few minutes, he’d reach up to feel my face. The weight of his tiny body left a feeling I’ll never forget.

Eventually, he completely melted into my arms… as if he was my child… as if I was his father…

I can’t tell you very much about him, not even his name. I can only tell you what it felt like to hold him… and to be held by him.

Ten years later, I can still feel the exact weight of that little boy resting in my arms.

At this point, you might expect me to encourage you to buy a plane ticket and head to Calcutta. But no, that’s not what this is about. Forget that the crime rates are off the charts. Or that you can barely breathe the air. There’s a more important reason. And it’s from Mother Teresa herself.

She said, “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta, find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, and in your workplaces and in your schools.”

Where is your Calcutta?

We don’t have handicapped infants left to die on the street. But we have the horror of abortion. We don’t have lepers with half-eaten-away bodies rejected by society. But we do have those who are homebound or in hospitals or nursing homes, alone and forgotten.

We don’t have material poverty, with entire communities living in boxes or eating from landfills. But we have spiritual poverty. To quote Mother Teresa:

“The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people. You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is. What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”

It’s this underlying spiritual poverty that’s responsible for the divisions, mass shootings, suicides, and despair that are tearing the fabric of this nation apart. It’s this spiritual poverty that’s led to the loss of our Catholic identity and culture.

But we can change that.

Each of us is called, despite our doubts, fears, or sinfulness. Each of us can make a profound difference in the lives of others.

If there’s only one thing you take away from this, I’d pray it was this.

You matter.

Each and every one of you matters more than you know. You matter to your family, your community, and to this Spiritual Calcutta called America.

Never doubt that your words, your prayers, or your actions can change lives. Because they can. And they will. If only you pray them. Speak them. And act.

And acting, as I learned in Calcutta, is very often simply being present to another.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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“Of course you should!”

Those words are my earliest memory of meeting Sister Maria Rose of the Crown of Thorns.

The occasion was the opening and dedication of the newly constructed wing of Our Lady of the Rosary Monastery in Summit, New Jersey. I had cautiously asked whether I should fly a drone over the new wing to capture it from a unique angle.

Her response was immediate.

And exuberant.

From that day forward, every time I saw her, I thought of her fondly as the Drone Nun.

It suited her, somehow.

After all, this was a woman who was born in South Africa, studied law and became a lawyer in Australia, worked as a screen actress, and then entered a Dominican monastery to live within the hallowed walls of the cloister.

And Six years after our first meeting, she professed her Solemn Vows there.

Makes all the sense in the world

Of course.

And I actually mean that.

Because the more religious men and women I meet, the less surprised I am by the winding roads that brought them to convents, monasteries and seminaries.

Again and again, I encounter people who are highly educated, tremendously gifted and, in the worldly understanding of the word, successful.

They aren’t people who failed to find a place in the world.

They’re people who looked deeply at what the world offered and were honest enough to keep asking questions.

Is this all?

What is life for?

Who am I meant to become?

You know what I’ve come to think?

They’re smart.

And they’re honest.

Honest enough to follow those questions beyond the easy answers. Honest enough to continue seeking when the search begins to demand something from them.

And sometimes, a true seeker must be willing to be found.

Perhaps that is where vocation begins…in the mysterious meeting between our searching and God’s summons. We seek meaning, freedom and real life, only to discover that God has been calling us by name all along.

During a Solemn Profession, that mystery takes visible form.

A woman steps forward.

She answers the questions placed before her.

And then she lies prostrate before the altar as the names of the saints are sung around her in the Litany of Supplication.

Heaven is invoked.

The Church prays.

And one human life is placed entirely into the hands of God.

Sister Maria Rose hadn’t arrived at that altar by a straight road.

Few of us do.

There’s an old saying that God writes straight with crooked lines. But perhaps we misunderstand the crookedness. A road can bend without being wrong.

Perhaps some roads must wind.

Perhaps our gifts need time to be discovered, tested and developed so they can bear fruit later in life. Perhaps we need to encounter the world in all its beauty, confusion, possibility and disappointment before we can understand what, or rather, Who, our hearts have been seeking.

Sometimes the road into a monastery passes through places we would never associate with a monastery.

Maybe it needs to.

A woman doesn’t leave her gifts at the enclosure door. She carries them inside, where they can be refined, transformed and offered back to the One who gave them to her.

Nothing is wasted in the hands of God.

And perhaps that’s why a Solemn Profession matters even to those of us who will never make one.

Because we’re all called.

Not all to religious life.

Not all to marriage.

Not all to the priesthood.

But every one of us is called to holiness. Every one of us is invited to prayerfully discern the particular way in which our life is meant to become a gift.

We spend so much of our lives asking, “What will fulfill me?”

Vocation asks a more dangerous question:

“To whom am I called to give myself?”

The strange and beautiful truth is that fulfillment is found within the answer.

As St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

And so we pray.

We breathe the air of the Sacraments.

We listen.

And we walk one uncertain, Grace-filled step at a time, toward the place where our restless hearts may finally come to rest.

Six years after Sister Maria Rose “encouraged” me to launch a drone above the monastery, I stood inside those walls and witnessed what a prayerfully discerned life looks like.

Not a straight line.

Certainly not an obvious one.

But a life gathered into a single, irrevocable “yes.”

When Sister Maria Rose rose from the floor, she wasn’t a woman whose former life had been erased.

She was the same woman, but gathered.

South Africa.

Australia.

The law.

Acting.

Every gift, every mile and every unexpected turn had been carried to that altar and placed before God.

And now she belonged to Him forever.

It showed.

Radiant.

Joyful.

Emotional.

The unmistakable expression of a woman who had crossed a threshold of grace.

There were newer faces inside the monastery that morning, too, women taking their first steps in learning and discerning life within the cloister.

Who knows where their own roads have taken them?

Maybe one day I’ll return to witness another of them place her life before God.

But first, I’ll need to speak with her.

Learn her story.

And, of course, determine what her nickname ought to be.

Because Drone Nun is already taken.

And now—solemnly, joyfully, forever—so is she.

Learn more about the Dominican Nuns of Summit by visiting their Website!

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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Every time I walk south on Mott Street, I feel as though I’m walking backward through time.

Long before I knew the history beneath these streets, I knew this part of Manhattan through my father. He would take me to Parisi Bakery for bread, Jefferson Market for meat and Balducci’s for fruit before we made our way to South Street and my beloved grandmother’s apartment for a feast.

Near Mott Street’s southern end, the sidewalks narrow. The smell of noodles, bao and Chinese pastries drifts from storefronts while signs bearing Chinese characters climb the brick facades.

It’s unmistakably New York, but also a world unto itself, one of those rare corners where another culture has not merely survived, but taken root.

Chinatown.

There, where Mott meets Mosco, the Church of the Transfiguration comes into view.

It’s not grand in the way St. Patrick’s Cathedral is grand. No broad avenue before it, and no soaring spires rise over the city. Built of rough fieldstone, it holds its ground amid the daily tumult of Chinatown.

At the risk of starting an argument with half of New York…I think it may be the most interesting church in the city.

Not because it is the largest or most ornate.

Because of what it has witnessed.

The building dates to 1801. The Catholic Parish of the Transfiguration moved into it in 1853 and went on to serve successive waves of Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants. Today, Mass is celebrated there in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

Streets have been renamed. Buildings have risen and vanished. Entire populations have arrived, struggled, prospered and moved on.

But the church has remained.

The City Beneath the City

A short walk west lies the former site of Collect Pond, a spring-fed source of fresh water for early New Yorkers.

Industry fouled it so badly that the city drained its waters toward the Hudson through the canal that gave Canal Street its name, then filled the pond by 1811. The reclaimed ground proved unstable. Buildings shifted, streets became muddy and poorer residents and immigrants moved into cheap housing around the five-way intersection that gave Five Points its name.

By the middle of the 19th century, the neighborhood was infamous for poverty, disease and violence. Irish refugees crowded its tenements. Italians came later, followed eventually by the Chinese community that transformed much of the old neighborhood into Chinatown.

Popular history remembers Five Points for its gangs, saloons and lurid alleys.

But history has a habit of remembering criminals more clearly than it remembers mothers.

The people there were families building lives under brutal circumstances. They fell in love. Children were born. The sick were cared for, and the dead were mourned.

Within the stone walls of Transfiguration, lives were joined, blessed and commended to God.

If its walls could speak, they would tell stories of heroism, horror and heartbreak. They would also testify to the words of St. Paul:

“Where sin increased, Grace abounded all the more.”

A Story Carried Across an Ocean

Transfiguration is sometimes called the “Church of Immigrants.” Its languages and faces have changed, but people have always entered looking for belonging, carrying their devotions, traditions and saints.

Perhaps no event reveals that history more clearly than the annual procession for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The first time I photographed it, it seemed to take place on the hottest day of the year. Much to my dismay, that pattern repeated itself every time after without fail.

After Mass, the Chinese Catholic community poured into the streets. Banners rose above the crowd. The faithful carried an image of the Blessed Mother as a brass band played and prayers were offered in Cantonese beneath the blazing August sun.

By the time we returned, I was drenched in sweat and exhausted.

As I trudged back up Mott Street toward the air-conditioned sanctuary of my car, an elderly Chinese man stopped me. He took me by the arm and pointed toward another man resting on the stoop of a nearby brownstone.

“You talk to him! You talk to HIM!” he insisted.

So I sat beside the man and opened another bottle of water. His face was deeply lined, but his smile was gentle and warm.

Then he began.

He spoke of a forest thousands of miles away.

Of a procession.

Of oppression.

And of freedom.

And of how, in 1994, it all found its way here—to Mott Street.

He spoke of Catholics in Fujian Province who practiced their faith where public religious activity could draw the attention of authorities. According to his recollection, the Assumption was less familiar to local officials than Christmas or Easter and therefore offered an opportunity to gather quietly as a community.

After midnight, they would make their way into the forest and hold a candlelight procession in honor of the Blessed Mother.

His account was oral history, a memory carried across an ocean, but its broad contours fit the documented record.

Catholicism has deep roots in northeastern Fujian, where Spanish Dominicans arrived in the 17th century. Local communities survived repeated suppression, including the Maoist era, preserving the faith within families and homes.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, migration from Fujian to New York was rising. Some came through dangerous smuggling networks, burdened by enormous debts.

Among them was a small group of Catholics who found a spiritual home at Transfiguration. In 1994, they asked the parish to help bring their Assumption devotion into the streets of their new city.

This time, they would not have to wait until midnight.

They would not have to disappear into a forest.

They would walk in daylight.

From Fujian to Chinatown

What began as an expression of faith and gratitude among Fujianese immigrants grew into one of New York’s largest and most distinctive Marian processions.

For several hours each August, Chinatown becomes an extension of the church. The image of Mary passes apartment windows, restaurant kitchens, storefront shrines and intersections ruled by delivery trucks, buses and the horns of the impatient.

Some join their hands in prayer. Others watch from doorways. Still others raise their phones, aware that something unusual is happening.

The procession is unmistakably Chinese and unmistakably Catholic.

It’s also unmistakably New York.

People arrive carrying their story from another place. Their language, grief, food, songs and saints. They build a home without entirely surrendering the one they left behind. Eventually, their story becomes the city’s story.

And the streets remember.

There’s nothing sentimental about religious persecution, human smuggling, poverty or exile. But Christianity makes a more radical claim: suffering does not have the final word. Grace can enter wounded places. Faith can survive conditions designed to extinguish it. Something once hidden in fear can one day be carried openly through the streets.

That’s what happens each August at Transfiguration.

A devotion preserved across generations is proclaimed in the heart of New York City. A hymn once whispered is played by a brass band.

The city’s harbor is guarded by the image of a woman holding a torch, welcoming those who come in search of liberty.

But on an August afternoon in Chinatown, another woman is carried through the streets by people exercising that liberty.

One stands at the gate of the city as a promise.

The other is borne through the city in thanksgiving.

And somewhere between them lies the immigrant story of New York: departure and arrival, suffering and hope, the memory of one home and the difficult building of another.

At the corner of Mott and Mosco Streets, the old stone Church of the Transfiguration remains.

It doesn’t speak.

It witnesses.

And each year, when the Blessed Mother passes outside its doors, another chapter is written.

Once upon a time on Mott Street.

To be continued…

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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Every story has a place it keeps coming back to.

For this one, it’s a small island in the Potomac River.

Over the past four installments, we’ve crossed an ocean, stepped onto an unfamiliar shore, watched a fragile dream take root, and followed it through persecution, failure, and into the founding of a nation.

Now, in the final chapter of Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath, we return to St. Clement’s Island.

Not simply to remember what happened there on March 25, 1634…

But to discover why it still matters.

And why, after all these years, I keep returning too.

ENTER PART V: RETURNING TO THE ISLAND

This concludes Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath.

Thank you for making the crossing with me.

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Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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A note before you begin: I’ve also created an immersive words-and-photographs feature edition of this story, featuring an expanded gallery and a presentation designed to let the images and text unfold together. If you’d like to experience it, enter The Answering Grace here.

The sound was almost nothing.

A whisper of fabric against the marble floor.

Then stillness.

At the foot of the sanctuary in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, three women lay facedown before God.

Above them, the cathedral climbed toward Heaven in arches of stone and colored glass. Around them, the Church began to call upon the saints by name.

Mary, Mother of God.

Saint Joseph.

Saint Peter.

Saint Paul.

One name after another moved through the vast cathedral as the Litany of the Saints rose above Sister Eden Marie, Sister Elena Marie, and Sister Maria Annunciata, their bodies motionless against the floor.

Outside, Fifth Avenue continued doing what Fifth Avenue does.

Traffic ebbed and flowed. Horns sounded. Pedestrians threaded through one another beneath scaffolding and glass. Somewhere above Midtown, a crane continued the slow work of changing the skyline.

It was a Thursday, after all.

But inside the cathedral, these women were promising forever.

Perpetual is a startling word.

It doesn’t promise that every day will be easy, or that every question will disappear. It doesn’t claim that the women making it can see the road ahead.

It says only that every part of that road will belong to Him.

Minutes before the prostration, each Sister had been called by name.

The answer took only a moment.

But it carried every smaller yes which had brought her there: the first quiet stirring of a vocation; the questions; the discernment; the leaving; the waiting; the years of formation; the ordinary mornings when the extraordinary call of God became the work of getting out of bed and saying yes again.

Final profession is not one heroic yes that erases all the others.

It is a thousand hidden yeses gathered into one.

After rising from the floor, the Sisters knelt before Mother Mary Concepta and professed poverty, chastity and obedience. Then came the vow particular to their community: to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life.

They received rings as signs of their perpetual union with Christ.

And at the altar, their offering was drawn into His.

It would be easy to see only the beauty of the ceremony, the habits, the music, the sweep of the cathedral, the embraces and tears that followed.

But the vows point far beyond the sanctuary.

They were born from a wound.

The story reaches back to 1975, when a priest named John O’Connor went to pray at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau before assuming an enormous new responsibility as Chief of Navy Chaplains.

There he encountered a place where human beings had been stripped of everything except the suffering inflicted upon them.

Inside the crematorium, he placed his hand into one of the ovens.

O’Connor later said the experience changed him radically. Confronted by the horror of what had been done there, he left with a conviction that would remain with him for the rest of his life: every human life is sacred, and he would do whatever he could to defend it.

Years later, as Archbishop of New York, Cardinal O’Connor preached, advocated and worked tirelessly for life. Over time, he became convinced that the crisis confronting human dignity was not purely political.

It was spiritual.

And a spiritual wound required a spiritual response.

In 1989, he published an article in Catholic New York beneath an improbable headline:

“Help Wanted: Sisters of Life.”

Hundreds of women wrote to him.

On June 1, 1991, eight entered the new community.

Thirty-five years is a long time by ordinary standards. But by Catholic math, the Sisters of Life are still in their infancy. Yet the founding community of eight has grown to more than one hundred Sisters, with communities from New York to Toronto and Rome; in 2004, the Church formally established them as a religious institute of diocesan right.

But those facts describe growth.

They do not yet explain the Grace.

God’s Love does not change. But that does not mean His Love is motionless.

It enters history. It meets particular people in particular wounds at particular moments, providing the Grace needed for that hour.

In that light, the Sisters of Life appear as one such answering Grace.

They were not founded merely to oppose something.

They were founded to offer themselves to Someone, and, in doing so, to make His Love visible to anyone who has forgotten that his or her life is sacred.

The phrase “culture of death” can sound enormous and impersonal.

Its wounds are not.

They are borne by the pregnant woman who is frightened and believes she has nowhere to turn; by the person carrying sorrow after an abortion beneath years of silence; by the elderly or dying person who wonders whether dependence has left him a burden.

They are the wounds of fear, pressure, isolation and the haunting suggestion that some lives matter less than others.

The Sisters answer with something radically simple.

Presence.

Their lives begin in prayer, but they do not remain behind convent walls. They accompany women through unexpected pregnancies. They help locate medical care, housing and practical support. They walk beside women and men seeking healing after abortion. They lead retreats, work with college students, evangelize, pray with families and offer end-of-life outreach.

But their mission cannot be grasped through a directory of programs. It’s lived one person at a time.

I’ve spent countless hours with the Sisters of Life over the past decade.

Long enough to know that a camera naturally favors decisive moments, while real charity usually begins after the moment everyone notices.

A woman’s decision to continue a pregnancy may happen in an instant.

Living that decision takes years.

There are appointments to keep. Apartments to find. Jobs to hold. Children to care for. Relationships to untangle. There are fears that do not vanish simply because the loving decision to choose life was made.

The Sisters do not disappear when the crisis appears to be over.

They stay.

And that staying may be one of the most important things their vows become in the world.

A promise spoken before an altar becomes a telephone answered.

A ride to an appointment.

A place to sleep. Help with paperwork. A meal shared.

A friendship that remains after everyone else has stopped watching.

I saw something of that Grace in an old parish gymnasium on East 66th Street.

It was last December, and the Sisters were holding their annual Nativity celebration for mothers and children they had accompanied.

The brightly lit gym went dark.

Then a little drummer boy appeared, moving through the crowd and striking his drum with the wholehearted enthusiasm of a child who had no interest in dramatic restraint.

A tiny angel reached into the manger and tried to take Baby Jesus.

Another child repeatedly made a break for freedom while her grandmother gave chase. Near the stage, a novice served as a gentle but remarkably effective goalkeeper, keeping children from launching themselves into the audience.

It was not polished.

It was alive.

Untidy. Comic. Vulnerable. Exhausting.

And holy.

The families gathered with the Sisters were not case studies, and the children were not statistics or evidence waiting to be deployed.

They were children.

They laughed. They cried. They escaped their costumes. They pulled every adult around them into the beautiful disorder of loving another human being.

That is what the Sisters protect.

Not an idea of life.

Life itself.

They were not there as exhibits in someone else’s vocation story.

They were there as friends.

As part of the community of love which had grown from promises like the ones being spoken before them.

A perpetual vow may appear far removed from the fears of a pregnant woman sitting alone with a decision.

It is not.

The Sister’s yes does not make the mother’s decision for her. Her availability can help create a space in which fear is no longer the only voice the mother can hear.

Her surrender becomes availability.

Her availability becomes accompaniment.

Her fidelity carries a promise: You will not have to walk alone.

That’s what a vow becomes.

Not an achievement offered to God by someone strong enough to impress Him.

An answer to Love already received.

Long before these women offered their lives, Christ had offered His.

Long before they called themselves His, He had called each of them by name.

Their profession was not the beginning of His Love.

It was their answer.

The vows spoken inside St. Patrick’s would not remain there. They would travel into homes and hospitals, convents and retreat houses, college campuses and city streets. Into the hidden places where someone wonders whether her life, or the life entrusted to her, is worthy of love.

Not because the Sisters have solved the sorrows of the age.

Not because every story ends neatly.

But because God has not abandoned this changing world to itself.

Sometimes that Love looks like a woman lying facedown upon a cathedral floor.

Then rising.

Then spending the rest of her life standing beside someone else.

Every yes is an answer to Love already offered.

Two millennia before the words spoken at St. Patrick’s, a young woman in Nazareth received an invitation. She could not see everything it would ask of her.

She knew only the One who was asking.

And she answered.

The Sisters’ yes echoes hers. In their fidelity, other women may discover that they, too, can answer God freely, without having to answer fear alone.

Their Yes.

A mother’s Yes.

And behind them both…

Mary’s Yes.

And a note before you leave :-) I’ve also created an immersive words-and-photographs feature edition of this story, featuring an expanded gallery and a presentation designed to let the images and text unfold together. If you’d like to experience it, enter The Answering Grace here.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

​

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Dreams have a strange way of surviving.

Even when the structures built to protect them collapse.

Even when the people who first carried them are scattered by war, exile, and disappointment.

Even when prayers once spoken freely are driven underground again.

Maryland’s early experiment did not survive untouched. Churches closed. Catholic leaders were pushed aside. The Mass that had risen openly beneath the trees was forced back toward silence.

To those living through it, the dream must have appeared finished.

But there is a difference between something being broken…and something being erased.

What happened along the Potomac remained part of history.

A real attempt had been made there. Catholics and Protestants had occupied the same civic space without immediately destroying one another. Law had attempted, however imperfectly, to restrain persecution.

Maryland did not create modern religious liberty.

But it demonstrated a possibility.

And possibilities have power.

Long before principles are written into constitutions, they live as intuitions, experiments, habits, memories…and wounds.

They are tried.

They fail.

They are remembered.

They return.

By the time the American colonies moved toward revolution, the question of liberty had become about more than taxation or representation. Beneath it all remained a deeper question:

Can a people really be free if their conscience belongs to the state?

In 1791, the First Amendment offered an extraordinary answer.

Something that once had flickered uncertainly along the shores of the Potomac began to blaze.

Part IV of Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath follows a wounded dream across generations, and traces the idea which refused to die.

ENTER PART IV: THE IDEA THAT WOULD NOT DIE

Part V, Returning to the Island, arrives Thursday, August 13.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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For a time, it worked.

That may be the most surprising part of the story.

Along the quiet shores of the Potomac, Catholics and Protestants lived beside one another. The Mass was celebrated openly. Fields spread into the forest. Children were born who would know Maryland not as an experiment, but simply as home.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it was real.

And then the old fears began crossing the ocean.

Civil war erupted in England. Religious identity hardened into a political battle line. Questions of faith became questions of loyalty, power, and trust.

The thunder of that conflict eventually reached Maryland.

In 1649, the colony passed what became known as the Maryland Toleration Act, an extraordinary attempt for its time to protect Christians of different denominations from persecution.

But laws can restrain fear.

They cannot convert the human heart.

The fragile balance eventually gave way. Catholic leaders were driven from power. Chapels closed. The Mass was pushed back toward silence. Father Andrew White, who had celebrated that first Mass on St. Clement’s Island, was arrested and forced into exile.

To those who lived through it, the dream must have appeared finished.

But there is a difference between something being broken…and something being erased.

A failed experiment disappears.

A wounded one leaves a scar.

And scars tell stories not only of pain, but of survival.

Part III of Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath follows Maryland’s fragile experiment into the storm, and discovers an idea still glowing beneath the ashes.

ENTER PART III: WHEN THE DREAM MET HISTORY

Part IV, The Idea That Would Not Die, arrives Monday, August 10.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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The island was never meant to be the destination.

St. Clement’s was the threshold.

Within days of celebrating that first Mass, the settlers crossed the river again and began establishing a permanent settlement along the shoreline that would become St. Mary’s City.

Now the dream would be tested.

Not in declarations or constitutions, but in mud, timber, weather, work…and the complicated reality of human beings trying to live together.

The land was already home to the Yaocomico and other Native peoples whose knowledge of its waterways, seasons, and resources would prove critical to the survival of the newcomers.

Trees were felled. Fields were planted. Rough buildings rose among the forests.

And somewhere within that fragile settlement, Catholic life began to take root.

A priest carried what he needed to celebrate Mass along woodland paths. A chapel slowly emerged. Children learned their prayers without fear.

Things that might appear ordinary to us today were anything but ordinary then.

Because before religious liberty could be protected in law, it first had to be lived—in small, vulnerable places where its survival was anything but certain.

Part II of Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath moves beyond the island and into the fragile experiment beginning along the Maryland shoreline.

ENTER PART II: THE SHORE BEYOND THE ISLAND

Part III, When the Dream Met History, arrives Thursday, August 6.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

Several years ago, I pushed a kayak into the Potomac River and aimed it toward St. Clement’s Island.

The island looked close.

It wasn’t.

What followed was a crossing I’ll never forget…and the beginning of a journey into a story that unfolded nearly four centuries before I ever touched the water.

On March 25, 1634, two ships arrived off the shore of that small island carrying more than settlers.

They carried faith.

They carried hope.

And they carried the fragile beginnings of an idea that would eventually help shape the nation itself.

Today, I’m releasing Part I of Before the Nation Drew Its First Breath, a new five-part words-and-pictures series exploring the overlooked Catholic origins of religious liberty in America.

This is also something of an experiment.

The story doesn’t live here on Substack. Instead, I’ve created an immersive, cinematic home for it. One designed to bring you into the wind, the water, the uncertainty, and the extraordinary events that began unfolding along the Potomac nearly four hundred years ago.

And it begins with a crossing.

ENTER PART I: THE CROSSING

Part II, The Shore Beyond the Island, arrives Monday, August 3.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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Today, July 28, 2026, marks the third unofficial anniversary of the day I truly began publishing on Substack.

It’s been three years of stumbling along…learning to write, photograph, and find my way through stories that I’ve had the unbelievable privilege to cover.

There were the big ones…

The Conclave. The National Eucharistic Pilgrimages. Ordinations. Final vows.

There were the stories closer to home…

Ribbon cuttings. American Catholic history. The lives of the saints. Hometown events.

And there were the quieter ones…

And the reflections of a guy who has been on an unexpected journey through faith and life.

And it’s certainly been an adventure.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

When you surrender your life to Christ…hang on.

It’ll be wild.

And it’ll be amazing.

I’d like to offer my profound thanks to all of you who subscribe. Thank you for your prayers, your messages, and your support.

And to the 106 paying subscribers… you know who you are… you are a tremendous part of what makes it possible for me to continue telling these stories.

Thank you.

From the bottom of my heart…thank you.

There are several big projects in the works, one of which will be released this coming Thursday.

It’s an experiment in visual storytelling unlike anything I’ve ever attempted before. It’s immersive. It’s cinematic. And it traces the origins of religious liberty in America back to one of my favorite places on earth.

St. Clement’s Island.

It’s meant to be a lasting piece, something that will hopefully serve as a touchstone for anyone wondering how the nation's early Catholics played a critical role in establishing the religious liberty we enjoy today.

So stay tuned.

But in gratitude of this third anniversary, I’d like to return to the piece that marked my first real attempt to begin this whole thing.

I’d actually written it the summer before, while sitting on the beach. And it was written while reading the manuscript of Sister Mary Magadalene OP which now famously is a book. But I had almost no confidence in it so I put it away.

And nearly a year passed.

Then in the weeks leading up to July 2023, as I began again seriously considering whether I could do this, I found it again.

I read it.

And I thought:

“What the heck? Time to roll the dice…”

So I published it.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So once again, thank you for all of your messages, prayers, and support; it means the world to me. And know of my prayers for each and every one of you.

God Bless,

Jeff

Oh, and here’s that first piece :-)

Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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108.

At least that’s what my car told me the temperature was.

Well, at least it’s consistent.

After all, it was 101 in St. Augustine when the 2026 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage kicked off. And at every stop I’d covered along the way, it was either north of 90, or raining, or both.

There was Savannah. Rain-soaked, swampy Savannah. There, as the pilgrimage moved through sheets of rain and Southern humidity, the road stripped away any illusion that this was simply a beautiful Catholic event. Wet socks, soaked shirts, fogged lenses, and water running down ones back have a way of clarifying things.

Anyone can walk when the weather’s pleasant.

But it takes a pilgrim to keep walking when comfort’s left the room.

Baltimore brought the rain again. In the nation’s first Catholic diocese, with the old stones of Catholic America underfoot, the pilgrimage moved through water, prayer, history, and the particular peace that rain brings to city streets.

And in Annapolis, the procession began in rain and ended in sunset adoration beneath a rainbow which seemed like a gift, or perhaps a brief reprieve.

Rain has a way of stripping an event down to its essentials. The decorum relaxes. The polished edges disappear. People stop worrying about looking dignified and start helping one another keep going.

Then came Washington, D.C., and the return of the heat. In the capital, where marble and monuments seem designed to project permanence, the day became another lesson in human frailty as pilgrims once again endured the sweltering heat.

So by the time the Pilgrimage reached Philadelphia on Independence Day weekend, all I could do was smile. 108.

The city had canceled its big parade for America’s 250th. Streets that would normally be overflowing with tourists sat empty and still beneath the burning summer sun. But the pilgrims came.

And it became crystal clear that the weather wasn’t an interruption to the story.

It was part of the story.

And a very distinct reminder that a pilgrimage isn’t a vacation.

It’s an act of love made visible through effort.

For three years, the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage has made that effort visible across the American landscape. Across cities and deserts, bridges and fields, mission churches and cathedrals, highways and coastlines, the Eucharist has moved through the country not as a symbol, but as the living Presence of Jesus Christ.

That’s why its arrival in Philadelphia on Independence Day weekend felt so fitting.

At the Independence Day Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, Bishop Keith Chylinski, an auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia, spoke of a nation founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty. But he also pointed beyond any merely civic understanding of freedom.

Freedom, he said, is not simply the ability to do as one pleases. The Church sees something deeper: an interior freedom rooted in Christ. A freedom that makes us capable of love, forgiveness, peace, and seeing the dignity of every person.

That’s the freedom that Jesus Christ offers.

And it’s the freedom every nation needs.

America knows how to celebrate its founders. Their names are carved into stone, repeated in speeches, preserved in paintings, and taught to children.

And on the streets of Philadelphia, at the end of three years of Eucharistic pilgrimages across the nation, the question isn’t only what America has been.

It’s what America is willing to become.

A country can receive many gifts on its birthday. It can receive fireworks, concerts, speeches, medals, parades, and pageantry.

But a nation that receives Christ receives the one gift that doesn’t fade when the music ends, when the flags are folded, when the crowds go home, and when the heat finally breaks.

It receives the One who is still pursuing it.

The One from Whom all freedom flows.

And the only One who can heal what we have broken, gather what we have divided, and take our highest ideals and make them flourish.

The only One who can turn “One Nation Under God” from a phrase we recite into a reality we live.

The Lord who has crossed bridges, deserts, fields, cities, rivers, rainstorms, coastlines, and overheated streets in the Blessed Sacrament isn’t finished pursuing the nation He loves.

He is still walking with us and is offering us the Greatest Gift of all.

Himself.

So, Happy 250th, America.

May your best days lie ahead, as truly one nation under God, because with Him, your greatness knows no bounds.

A few photos from the weekend…

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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I don’t often interview people.

And in thinking about it, I’m not exactly sure why.

Perhaps it’s because in most cases I think I have a grasp of what’s before me. But as a man at a Catholic Womens Leadership Forum, I confess, I was out of my depth. And so, I did what every man does when he’s a bit lost.

He asks for directions.

Well, not exactly directions, because that’s not what guys do…ever.

But for guidance and insight.

And it led to some conversations with some women who were steeped in both.

This was a journey of discovery. And many of the truths revealed, the insights, are actually bigger than the forum, the participants, or even the Institute itself. Many were universal, just as the Church.

And it was breathtaking to behold.

The Given Institute Forum, now in its tenth year, brings together Catholic women from across the country for several days of prayer, formation, and fellowship, encouraging them to discern and live out their unique gifts in service to the Church and the world.

This year’s Forum, held on the campus of the Catholic University of America, moves through three stages: receive the gift you are, realize the gifts you’ve been given, and respond with the gift only you can give. Over several days, though, that framework started opening up into something deeper.

Leadership at GIVEN was never talked about on its own. It was always tied to identity, receptivity, spiritual motherhood, and the quiet work of receiving love before trying to give it away.

The interviews that follow reveal what that looks like in practice. Different backgrounds. Different vocations. Different journeys. Yet woven through each conversation was the same trusting confidence that God was inviting them to something more.

MacKenzie Warrens: Receptivity and the Vocation of Being

MacKenzie Warrens, one of the first perpetual pilgrims on the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and now a consecrated virgin living in the world, came to GIVEN seeking formation in leadership. She recognized a leadership charism in her life and wanted to steward it well, especially as a woman.

“Everything I do is done as a woman,” she said. “So how do I live out of and lead out of my feminine genius?”

What surprised her was how often the Forum returned to identity rather than technique. “I didn’t expect it to be about identity,” she said. “That’s been really beautiful and fruitful.”

For Warrens, vocation is first about being. As a consecrated virgin, she is not required to have an apostolate. “It’s a vocation of being,” she said. Any apostolic work must flow from that primary identity.

“I am a bride of Christ,” she said. “That is my vocation. If the Lord calls me to some kind of apostolic work, great, but that has to flow from my identity as a bride of Christ, which is built on my identity as a beloved daughter of the Father.”

That order, daughter, bride, mission, shaped how she understood leadership. Doing something for Jesus, she said, leads to burnout because “you’re not yoked to him.” When work comes from striving rather than received love, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are often missing. But when something is done “from Jesus and through Jesus and in Jesus,” a person senses a Grace beyond human effort.

She’d seen this during the pilgrimage. Prompted to make 650 rosaries for the pilgrims, she told the Lord that if the idea was truly from him, he would have to provide. In four weeks, a community she called her “rosary warriors” made 781 rosaries, and the funds appeared. She called it “supernatural superabundance.”

That experience reinforced what GIVEN later made explicit: mission begins in receptivity, trust, and obedience, not frantic self-reliance.

“It’s that receptivity,” she said, “that radical receptivity, receiving the gift that you are. And making a sincere gift of yourself.”

Sister Gabrielle: “You Don’t Have to Do to Be”

Sister Gabrielle, a religious sister from Baltic, Connecticut, came to the Forum through an invitation from the Sisters of Life. What struck her most was the spiritual hunger in the women gathered there.

“There’s this hunger for Jesus, wanting to love him through their gifts,” she said. She saw them asking, “What is it that you have given me, Lord? And how can I give back?”

The women weren’t seeking leadership in a worldly sense, she observed. They wanted to bring their gifts into the world “for Him, through Him, for the world.” When asked what she saw in them that they might not yet see in themselves, she answered simply: “The light of Christ.”

“There is so much hope for the Church,” she said, “as you see all these women who reflect the beauty of God’s love in a way that they themselves might not know.”

That inability to see one’s own dignity, she continued, often stems from wounds and cultural lies absorbed over time. The Forum helps women remember “who they are, whose they are,” so they no longer see themselves as objects or performers who must prove their worth.

“They can see themselves not as objects or as they have to perform to be someone,” she said, “but that they can just be beautiful daughters of the Father and just bring the gifts that God gave them.”

For Sister Gabrielle, this is the beginning of spiritual motherhood. “All women, no matter what their vocation in life is, we are called to be mothers,” she said. “We mother whoever is around us in our own backyard.” That motherhood, physical, spiritual, or both, means bringing care and compassion to those who are hurting and reminding them they are children of God.

She pointed to the Blessed Mother as the model. Mary was a leader, Sister Gabrielle said, “because she followed the Lord and also because she was humble.” Her power came through surrender and an unwavering gaze fixed on the Lord. “She always gazed on the Lord,” Sister Gabrielle said. That gaze teaches women “to lead as we follow.”

When asked what young women most need before responding to God’s call, she returned to identity.

“I feel like a lot of us have this spiritual amnesia where we forget who we are,” she said. “The first thing you have to do is to understand that you’re a beloved daughter of the Father. No matter what you do, you’re still loved. What you don’t do, you’re still loved. You don’t have to do to be. You already are beautiful.”

Jackie Mulligan: Drawing From an Empty Well

Jackie Mulligan, founder of Reform Wellness, brought a different but related emphasis: the need to care for body and soul as part of mission. Her own work began when she realized that true wellness couldn’t be separated from Christ.

“When I started Reform, it was because I understood that in order for me to be well physically and spiritually, Christ had to be at the center of my life,” she said. Without Christ at the center, even healthy habits can become disordered and short-lived.

At a leadership forum, she argued, care for the body and soul is not a side issue. “I think it’s one of the most important parts of mission.” Leaders shape the health of those around them. If the Church is to be healthy, its leaders must be helped to remain healthy.

When a woman tries to give her gifts while ignoring the needs of her body and soul, Mulligan said, “She ends up giving of herself at the cost of becoming exhausted, rather than giving of the Lord within her.”

“If our bodies are suffering and our souls aren’t being tended to,” she continued, “we’re drawing from an empty well.”

She was quick to distinguish this from a consumer version of self-care. Caring for oneself, she said, is ordered toward becoming “a healthier, available vessel for the Lord.” Each morning, she encouraged women to notice the state of both body and soul rather than running on autopilot, treating health like a bank account that requires regular deposits of sleep, nutrition, prayer, silence, movement, and the sacraments.

“Sometimes we get really comfortable being at a four (out of ten), and that becomes the norm because it’s common,” she said. Leaders teach by the way they live. “People who you are leading watch you.”

For someone who doesn’t know where to begin, her advice was simple: “The first place is just to begin poorly. Even if it’s not perfect, just take a step forward.” Often that first step is one of the basics: eating well, sleeping enough, or really praying.

“I think that we miss the greatest gift of leadership,” she said, “which is letting the Lord lead us. And then other people benefit from that leadership.”

Empty Hands Before God

At the Forum’s closing Mass, Most Reverend Keith J. Chylinski, Auxiliary to the Archbishop of Philadelphia, spoke of the paradox at the heart of Christian discipleship: the one who loses his life finds it. This runs directly against the logic of the age, which promises fulfillment through control and self-reliance.

One of the great temptations, he said, is the temptation to handle things ourselves even while knowing God loves us and offers grace. The answer is not greater self-mastery but childlike trust. A child knows his need for a parent; Christians must learn again their need for the Father.

Drawing from St. John Paul II, the Bishop reflected that the dignity and vocation of women find their ultimate source in union with God, and that no one attains fulfillment apart from communion with Him. “To serve means to reign,” he said; a phrase that captured much of what GIVEN had been teaching.

Leadership in the Christian sense, he suggested, does not begin with domination or performance. It begins in communion with God and becomes service.

Near the end of the homily, he offered an image that could stand as a final word for the Forum: empty hands before God.

God cannot give Himself unless our hands are empty.

For the women leaving with Action Plans, vocational questions, new friendships, and a year of mentoring ahead, the challenge was not simply to go home and do more. It was to go home having received more deeply the love from which mission must flow.

Before Mission, Identity

Sister Gabrielle, MacKenzie, and Jackie approached the Forum from different vocations, yet their reflections converged on the same foundation. A woman must receive before she can respond.

She must know she is loved before she can give herself away freely.

She must care for the body and soul entrusted to her, not for comfort’s sake, but so she can become a vessel of grace. She must reject the lie that her worth depends on performance.

And she must learn to lead not by imitation of worldly power, but from identity, humility, receptivity, and love.

That’s the deeper principle of GIVEN. It’s name isn’t accidental. The Forum is built around the conviction that a woman’s life is first a gift… her talents, her vocation, even her mission.

These are not things she invents from nothing but something she receives, discerns, and offers back to God.

For Sister Gabrielle, that begins with beloved daughterhood. For MacKenzie, it’s the foundation of consecrated identity and feminine genius. For Jackie, it’s the only way mission avoids becoming exhaustion. At the closing Mass, the Bishop named the source of it all: empty hands before God, childlike trust, and the Grace to let oneself be loved.

Catholic women’s leadership does not begin with doing more.

It begins with receiving Love Himself, and allowing that Love to become a gift for the world.

Learn more about the GIVEN Institute and thier incredible program by visiting their website.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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I love the sea.

Its mystery and drama, its promise of adventure…the way the horizon seems to stretch forever, blurring the line between what is and what might be.

Which is why, sitting alone on a rock jetty on Kent Island, and gazing out over the Chesapeake Bay, I began to wonder if I had made the wrong decision.

An hour earlier, I’d stood in Annapolis with the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, watching as pilgrims processed with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament down a wooden pier and onto a waiting trawler. It was one of the more unusual scenes I have witnessed during this year’s pilgrimage.

A Eucharistic procession is not something most people expect to see.

A Eucharistic procession boarding a boat is rarer still.

The boat would cross the Chesapeake to Kent Island. My heart wanted to be aboard, to feel the lift of the water, to smell the salt air, and watch the shoreline recede, as Christ crossed one of America’s great waterways.

But instead, I rolled the dice and drove ahead to the other shore, hoping that the image of their arrival would be worth seeing.

So there I sat, alone among the rocks, listening to waves slap against stone and staring into an endless horizon. The boat was nowhere in sight. Only sky. Water. Wind. And waiting.

There is a kind of waiting that belongs to faith. Not the brittle impatience of a delayed flight or a traffic jam, but the deeper waiting of a heart that knows Someone is coming, even when there is still nothing to see. It’s the waiting of Israel, of the disciples in the Upper Room, of Mary in Nazareth carrying Christ within her while the world went on unaware that its Savior was already near.

That thought lingered as I watched the bay. This crossing was only one leg of a much larger journey. For weeks the pilgrims have carried Jesus across America by road, by foot, by bridge, by boat. Through cities and countryside, bright sun and soaking rain, past homes, restaurants, government buildings, monuments, churches, and ordinary corners of the nation that became extraordinary the moment He passed by.

“One if by land. Two if by sea.” The phrase belongs to the American Revolution, yet on the Chesapeake, it took on another meaning. No signal lanterns in a steeple, no warning of war. Only the visible witness of a Eucharistic Lord being carried into a country approaching its 250th birthday.

This pilgrimage, under the theme “One Nation Under God,” is more than a journey to Philadelphia. It is a prayer stretched across the Eastern Seaboard, a plea for healing, a procession for unity, a reminder that the American story, with all its greatness and all its wounds, still needs Grace.

And along the way, people have responded. Families kneeling on sidewalks. Strangers stepping out of restaurants and offices. Tired pilgrims singing in the rain. Children waving from the edges of processions. Silence falling as Christ moved through the public square. Again and again, the reaction has been the same: hope, wonder, joy.

In the days ahead, the pilgrimage will continue toward Philadelphia for Independence Day weekend, bringing the Blessed Sacrament to the city where the nation’s founding was declared. The symbolism is impossible to miss. Two hundred and fifty years later, another procession approaches. Not with muskets or proclamations, but with prayer.

Not to conquer.

To bless.

And then, just when I began to wonder whether my gamble had failed, something appeared on the horizon. Tiny at first. Almost imperceptible. But growing steadily larger against the vastness of the bay.

The pilgrims were coming.

And with them, Christ.

As the trawler entered the channel, the afternoon sun caught the monstrance and flashed across the water, golden and alive, like a beacon carried on the waves. The crowd moved toward the dock.

The waiting ended.

In that moment, I knew I hadn’t chosen the wrong shore. Sometimes the story isn’t found on the crossing. Sometimes it’s found in the waiting and in the quiet, overwhelming joy of receiving Him for Whom we wait.

Some photos…

Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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It was cold, dark, and rainy as the jet, almost an hour delayed, began its taxi toward the runway at JFK.

I looked through the tiny raindrop-covered window and thought about where I’d been and where I was going.

That morning, in one small corner of New York, I had stood among a group of young people robed in red as a bishop traced the sign of the cross with sacred chrism on their foreheads and spoke the timeless words: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Confirmation.

The third sacrament of initiation into the Catholic faith.

How fitting.

On the eve of Pentecost, in one small corner of the world, Christ was still breathing life into His Church. And while the skies over New York seemed dark and foreboding, full of clouds, rain, and fog, the sky above them was anything but.

As the jet climbed over the city, it pierced the veil of weather and rose into a deep Marian blue just as the sun began its descent. Watching the sun set from 30,000 feet above the clouds is one of the most breathtaking sights in the world: a molten sphere resting against a cottony horizon, its upward rays carving the heavens into a luminous landscape of vapor and light.

By the next morning, Pentecost Sunday, I was in St. Augustine, Florida, standing beneath a very different sky.

There was no rain. No fog. No cold. Only the sweltering Florida sun, a field altar, and more than a thousand Catholics gathered at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche at Mission Nombre de Dios for the launch of the 2026 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage.

The umbrellas came first.

They stretched across the shrine grounds like a sea of small canopies, held by families, religious sisters, elderly pilgrims, children, clergy, and young adults who had come to celebrate the start of a six-week journey with Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

The Mass was the center, as it must be. Then came the procession. The Blessed Sacrament was carried across the shrine grounds to the Rustic Altar, then to the Historic Chapel, where adoration continued throughout the day. In the blazing heat, people followed. They sang, prayed, knelt, walked, endured, and adored.

And Christ was among them.

It would have been enough to say that the pilgrimage began in St. Augustine. But that wouldn’t be enough.

Because this was not merely a location. It was a beginning returning to a beginning.

St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in what is now the continental United States, founded in 1565 when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed on Florida’s coast and as soon as the Spanish landing party came ashore, they celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving, after which Menéndez shared a meal with the native Seloy people who occupied the site.

Before there was a United States, before there was a Declaration, before there were colonies stitched into a republic, there was an altar.

There was the Cross.

There was the Mass.

Mission Nombre de Dios and the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche now stand near that sacred memory. The shrine describes its grounds as the place where the 1565 Mass of thanksgiving occurred, and the site is home to what is widely recognized as America’s oldest Marian shrine.

The pilgrimage did not begin in a random city under a sunny sky. It began where Catholic life in this land first took root in a lasting way. It began where missionaries came ashore carrying not merely culture or ambition or empire, but the Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. It began where the first Catholic prayers of a new settlement rose over an unknown shore.

That’s the story the landscape tells if one slows down long enough to listen.

There’s the field altar. The little chapel. The Great Cross. The bay. The salt air. The old streets. The coquina stone of the Castillo de San Marcos, built by the Spanish to defend Florida and the Atlantic trade route, now preserved as the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States.

All of it speaks of arrival, danger, endurance, longing, and mission.

In his Pentecost homily at the opening Mass, Bishop Erik Pohlmeier of St. Augustine drew the line between that first missionary impulse and the present moment.

“We should be compelled to speak the message of the Gospel,” he said, “to take up our part in the grand work of the Church.”

Reflecting on the Catholic missionaries who arrived on Florida’s shores in the 16th century, he said that “from that beginning, they centered their life around the Eucharist.”

That sentence is the key to the whole thing.

From that beginning, they centered their life around the Eucharist.

And now, 461 years later, Catholics have returned to that same heart.

The 2026 National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, whose theme is “One Nation Under God,” will travel the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Route from St. Augustine to Philadelphia, carrying the Blessed Sacrament along the East Coast during the nation’s 250th anniversary year.

And that’s the thing.

Because America was missionary territory once.

It was missionary territory when Spanish priests landed in Florida. It was missionary territory when Father Andrew White, the Jesuit called the “Apostle of Maryland,” arrived with the Ark and the Dove and celebrated a Mass of thanksgiving at St. Clement’s Island in 1634.

It was missionary territory when George Calvert imagined Maryland as a haven for persecuted Catholics and, however imperfectly, a place where religious toleration might take root.

It was missionary territory when St. Isaac Jogues and the North American Martyrs entered the forests and waterways of New France, serving in remote missions in eastern Canada and New York amid disease, hunger, danger, and isolation.

It was missionary territory when St. Junípero Serra walked the long roads of the West and founded the first nine of California’s 21 missions, carrying the Gospel along what would become El Camino Real.

And it remains missionary territory now, today.

Perhaps that’s the part we forget.

We speak of revival as though it were a program or an event. But at the heart of the Eucharistic Revival, and at the heart of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, is something older and more dangerous and more beautiful: holy adventure.

The kind of adventure that sends people out.

The kind that makes them leave the upper room after Pentecost.

The kind that carries missionaries across oceans, rivers, forests, mountains, and cities.

The kind that moves ordinary families to stand under a brutal sun with umbrellas in their hands and prayers on their lips because Jesus is passing by.

The question is not, “Is there a revival in the Church today?”

The question is, “How could there not be?”

Because just as in the days of old, when Jesus walked the streets of Galilee and Jerusalem with His followers in tow, His Divine Presence touched the hearts of those who encountered Him.

The Creator of the very roads upon which He walked. The Creator of the sea, the clouds, the sun, the city, the child, the pilgrim, the sinner, the saint.

And now He goes again.

Through St. Augustine. Through mission grounds and cathedral streets. Through old cities and new suburbs. Through places that remember Him and places that have forgotten Him. Through the highways and byways of a nation approaching its 250th year, still restless, still wounded, still promising more than it has yet become.

Perhaps this is how the soul of a nation is healed: not first by policy or politics, but by encounter.

A priest raises the Blessed Sacrament in the Monstrance.

The people kneel.

The bells ring.

The sun beats down.

The pilgrims rise and follow.

Christ is carried into the world again, not as an idea, not as a memory, not as a symbol, but as Himself.

And that’s all that matters.

It’s all that ever mattered.

Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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“Hurry up! They’ll leave without you!”

The woman barked the words through a thick Polish accent and glared at me with the annoyance of a mother who’d had just about enough of a petulant child.

“Pool Zero?” I asked, sheepishly.

“YES, YES. Now hurry!”

And with that, I was off on one of the many misadventures of my life as a photojournalist.

There was a tiny voice in my head that whispered, Maybe you should check again.

But it was 4:00 in the morning. It was dark. The group of journalists I was apparently supposed to be with was already far ahead of me, their flashlights bobbing and fading into the distance like fireflies disappearing into the Polish countryside.

So I told the tiny voice to pipe down.

I’ve got this.

We walked for roughly thirty minutes, stumbling through the dark, through trees and uneven ground, following the glow of lights and the low murmur of people who seemed to know exactly where they were going. Eventually the wooded path opened into a massive field.

The sun was just beginning to rise.

Ahead of us, in the half-light, stood the enormous stage and altar where Pope Francis would celebrate the closing Mass for World Youth Day in Kraków, the city forever tied to Saint John Paul II, the pope who gave the world World Youth Day.

It was vast.

Even in the dim light, before the crowds fully emerged, the scale of it was staggering. The altar seemed to rise out of the field like some kind of temporary cathedral built for a nation of pilgrims. Everywhere there were barriers, scaffolds, security lanes, press areas, military personnel, volunteers, radios, cables, and the quiet electricity that comes before a major papal event.

At the first security checkpoint, I was searched and waved through.

Then another checkpoint.

Then another.

Then another.

Each time, I presented my credentials with the confidence of a man who had no idea he was walking deeper and deeper into a problem. There were conversations between our security escorts, nods from officials, quick glances at badges, and then gates opening.

No one stopped me.

No one said, “Sir, you are absolutely not supposed to be here.”

No one grabbed me by the collar and said, “American photographer, turn around before this becomes a story you will one day have to write.”

So I kept going.

By then, the sun had risen, and I had settled into the rhythm of the work. That strange photographer rhythm where you stop thinking like a normal person and start thinking in angles, sightlines, access, and light.

Where can I shoot from?

Where will the Pope be?

Where will the procession enter?

I wandered around the enormous altar area for hours, looking for perches, studying the structure, making mental notes, and slowly convincing myself that somehow, against all odds, I had landed in exactly the right place.

Then my phone rang.

“WHERE ARE YOU?”

I smiled.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, trying not to sound too pleased with myself. “I’m standing right beside Pope Francis’ chair on the altar.”

There was silence on the other end.

Not ordinary silence.

Cathedral silence.

The kind of silence where you begin to realize that whatever you just said has not had the effect you intended.

Then came the words.

“You’re supposed to be with the Popemobile!”

I laughed, because clearly there had been some kind of misunderstanding.

“No, no, no,” I said. “It’s fine. They told me this is where I’m supposed to be.”

“WHO told you?”

“The person at the security tent I asked for directions.”

Even as the words came out of my mouth, I could feel the tiny voice returning.

This time, it was no longer whispering.

It was lighting flares.

Another silence.

“Well,” he finally said, “if you’re already there, there’s nothing we can do now. Just do what you can and we’ll talk later.”

And for the first time that morning, the bright little fantasy I had built around my amazing access began to dissolve.

Maybe I wasn’t a highly resourceful photographer who had somehow navigated the system with brilliance and instinct.

Maybe I was just plain ‘ol lost.

This possibility was confirmed almost immediately when a security guard approached me.

He looked at my credentials.

Then he looked at me.

Then he looked back at my credentials in a way that suggested my day was about to change.

“Come with me, please.”

He brought me to a more senior official, who examined my badge with the weary disappointment of a man who had seen this kind of thing before, probably from Americans.

“This is not the credential for this area,” he said. “You’ll have to leave.”

Mass was about to begin.

My life didn’t flash before my eyes, exactly, but my assignment did. My coverage. My access. My editor. Every photo I had imagined making that morning. Every frame I was now not going to make.

And after hours of wandering around like I owned the place, the full horror of the situation finally began to dawn on me.

I had been in the wrong place for hours.

Not just a little wrong.

Not “wrong gate” wrong.

Not “wrong press riser” wrong.

The kind of wrong where men with radios start talking about you in another language.

I begged.

Then I pleaded.

Then, for good measure, I begged again.

The senior official listened for a moment, which was more mercy than I probably deserved. Then he said I would need to speak to his boss.

That sounded hopeful.

It was not.

They began escorting me toward the exit, and with each step, another wave of panic rose in me. The altar receded behind me. The place where I thought I was supposed to be, the place I had spent all morning preparing to shoot from, was slipping away.

Then I saw the tent.

It was surrounded by armed Polish soldiers.

Out of the tent came a man with the kind of authority that does not need to raise its voice. He walked toward me with military precision and the expression of someone who had absolutely no interest in hearing a long explanation from a sleep-deprived American photographer.

“So,” he said. “What is this?”

At this point, I abandoned all dignity.

I explained. I apologized. I gestured. I probably pointed at things that didn’t need pointing at. I may have looked like a man trying to negotiate international law using only panic and hand movements.

He stared at me.

I continued.

He stared some more.

Finally, perhaps because he understood my situation, or perhaps because he simply wanted me to stop talking, he asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“The altar,” I said.

Then, because desperation makes theologians of us all, I added, “Please?”

He turned to another soldier and barked something in Polish.

A yellow wristband appeared.

The commander fastened it around my wrist.

Then he barked at another soldier near a truck and ordered him to drive me back.

As I climbed in, the commander leaned toward me.

“You better hurry,” he said. “Mass will be starting soon.”

I don’t know exactly what prayer I offered in that truck, but I know it was sincere. I had received mercy from a Polish military commander, and I wasn’t about to waste it.

When I arrived back near the altar, I stepped out with the confidence of a man wearing a cheap plastic yellow wristband that he now believed to be the key to the Kingdom.

I was back.

I was legal.

I was saved.

Or so I thought.

I made my way toward the altar area and joined another photographer who seemed to know what he was doing, which is usually a good survival strategy. The choir began. The entrance procession was forming. The great movement of the liturgy, the security operation, the global broadcast, and the press pool all began moving at once.

Then I heard a voice to my right.

“Can I see your credentials?”

I turned with confidence.

This time I had my badge and my yellow wristband.

I presented both like a man producing diplomatic immunity.

He looked at them.

“These are the wrong credentials for here.”

My heart stopped.

Not again.

I began explaining about the tent, the commander, the truck, the wristband, the mercy of God, the whole epic tale of my morning.

But just then the Vatican pool photographers arrived.

The VAMP, as they’re referred to.

The people who were actually supposed to be there.

And in that instant, the entire scene broke open.

The procession was moving. The Pope was arriving. Cameras lifted. Bodies shifted. Security attention scattered.

So I did what any calm, reasonable, well-credentialed professional would do.

I bolted into the chaos and started taking pictures.

For a few blessed seconds, I was free.

Pope Francis approached the altar.

The crowd sang.

The music swelled.

The Holy Father kissed the altar.

Then security caught on.

Of course they caught on.

One does not simply vanish into a papal Mass wearing the wrong badge and a suspiciously miraculous yellow wristband.

They began moving toward me again.

That might have been the end of it, but my friend and fellow photographer Paul Haring saw what was happening. Paul, who knew exactly what he was doing and was exactly where he was supposed to be, gestured to one of the officials, and somehow, by the slenderest thread of goodwill, I was allowed to remain a little longer.

A few more moments.

A few more frames.

A little more mercy.

But all good things must come to an end.

As Mass began in earnest, I made myself scarce.

There is no elegant way to say this.

I hid.

Not in a criminal way. Not in a dramatic spy-movie way. More in the way a photographer hides when he knows that visibility is currently not his friend.

The altar structure was massive, with scaffolding, stairs, platforms, supports, and dark little pockets where a person could disappear if he had enough motivation and a long enough lens.

I tucked myself into the structure and tried to become part of the architecture.

When I saw security, I moved.

When they moved, I moved somewhere else.

I darted, ducked, paused, photographed, waited, and prayed that nobody had the energy to make a serious project out of removing me before the Mass ended.

For the next stretch of time, I was less a member of the press corps than a raccoon in a tuxedo at a state dinner.

But I kept shooting.

And slowly, impossibly, I made it through.

When the choir began the recessional and Pope Francis rose to depart, I knew the day was nearly over.

Then I was spotted.

This time, there was no explaining. No tent. No commander. No yellow wristband miracle. Mass was over, and I had only one remaining strategy.

Run.

I scrambled down a long scaffold stairway with a voice somewhere behind me telling me to stop.

I did not stop.

At the bottom of the stairs, I saw a door.

I grabbed the handle, twisted it, threw it open, and ran through.

And then I froze.

Standing before me were hundreds of Polish soldiers in formation.

All of them looking directly at me.

My eyes went wide.

Their eyes went wide.

For one impossible second, I thought, This is it. This is how it ends. Not with a photograph. Not with glory. But with an international incident and a very uncomfortable phone call home.

Then their eyes shifted.

Not to me.

To a door just to my left.

It opened slowly.

The soldiers snapped to attention and raised their hands in salute.

And out stepped Pope Francis.

He turned.

He saw me.

And he raised his hand in blessing.

Now, it’s entirely possible that he was blessing the soldiers, the people behind me, the general area, the nation of Poland, the entire Church, or some combination of all of the above.

But I was closest.

So I’m going to believe it was for me.

He smiled, stepped into the Popemobile, and blessed us again.

And there I was.

After all of it.

After the wrong directions, the checkpoints, the panic, the pleading, the military tent, the yellow wristband, the truck ride, the second expulsion, the hiding, the scaffolding, the stairs, and the door I was never supposed to open.

I had ended up beside the Popemobile.

The very place I had been told I was supposed to be in the first place.

If I had tried to get to that exact spot at that exact moment, it would have been impossible.

No credential would have gotten me there.

No plan would have gotten me there.

No carefully mapped route, no perfect command of Polish, no cleverness, no professional instinct would have placed me on the other side of that door at the precise moment Pope Francis walked out.

But the wrong directions did.

And perhaps that’s what has stayed with me all these years.

I was in Poland to work. That was the truth of it. Long days. Little sleep. Thousands of photographs. The constant mental arithmetic of a photojournalist trying to be in the right place before the moment disappears.

I had very little time to experience the thing I was covering. I rarely do.

That’s one of the strange burdens of this work. You can stand in the middle of history and still be thinking about shutter speed.

But at the end of that long, ridiculous, grace-filled morning, I was given something I couldn’t plan for and didn’t deserve.

A Pope’s blessing.

Literally.

And maybe figuratively too.

I had spent the whole day trying to get where I thought I was supposed to be.

And somehow, in the end, I arrived exactly where I was meant to be.

In the loving embrace of God’s Mercy, with a wink and a smile.

Which is why, whenever I think back on that morning in Kraków, I don’t remember it first as a security failure, a credentialing disaster, or the closest I have ever come to being tackled by the Polish military.

I remember it as the day God used bad directions to lead me to a moment of Grace.

And why I may never ask for directions again.

But then again…

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Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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“My photographer canceled!!! Are you available?”

Not exactly the way one hopes to be asked to cover an event.

But given the person who sent it, and the work she does, the answer was easy.

Galas are interesting things. They’re sort at the crossroads of where a wedding meets an awards ceremony. There’s dinner, laughter, music, speeches, applause, and that unmistakable buzz of people dressed up for an evening they hope will matter. Everyone knows the cause. And everyone has come, in one way or another, to support it.

But this gala felt different.

Not because it lacked any of those familiar elements. It had all of them.

What made it different was the reason beneath it all.

Life.

But in a rather specific area.

Life is a word that can evoke a lot of reactions. In public arguments, it’s often reduced into a political category or a slogan. The pro-life movement is often thought of as a single issue, but the reality on the ground — and in the hearts of the people who drive it — is something far more wide ranging and far more misunderstood.

Because at its heart, the pro-life movement isn’t centered on laws or rights.

It’s centered on love.

And then that love is lived out in a thousand concrete ways: care for mothers, medical help for children, shelter for families, food for the hungry, support for the poor, companionship for the frightened, and a refusal to abandon those the world would rather leave behind.

Sometimes it’s obvious.

Sometimes it’s not.

And sometimes it appears in the middle of a ballroom, beneath bright lights, in the face of a little girl with a once-broken heart.

At the center of the evening was Hearts of Joy International, founded by Lauren Costabile, a young woman I have known for years and whose work I deeply believe in.

Lauren has one of those rare hearts that doesn’t remain at a safe distance from suffering. When she sees a child in need, especially a child the world might be tempted to overlook, she moves.

That movement became Hearts of Joy International.

The organization helps provide life-saving heart surgery for children with Down syndrome, many of whom are born with congenital heart defects and live in places where specialized care isn’t available. Its work has reached places such as Uganda, the Philippines, and India, where poverty, limited medical access, and cultural stigma can make life even more fragile for children with disabilities.

In some places, children with Down syndrome are rejected. Misunderstood. Dismissed. Treated as though their lives are somehow less worthy of protection, investment, or joy.

Lauren’s work says otherwise.

It says these children are beloved.

It says their lives are worth fighting for.

It says their hearts are worth saving.

During the gala, a presentation about the organization’s work in Uganda revealed the depth of that mission. This is not abstract charity. It depends on people on the ground: medical professionals, advocates, families, local partners, donors, and friends who understand both the clinical need and the dignity of the children being served.

Real charity isn’t performance.

It’s relationship.

It means learning names. Knowing families. Building trust.

And at this year’s gala, one of the children helped through that mission had not been born a continent away.

She was born in New York City.

Her name is Violet.

Violet appeared on the stage with her mother and Christiana, a cardiac nurse connected with Hearts of Joy. Beneath the lights, in front of a room full of supporters, she wasn’t a concept, a statistic, or a name in a fundraising appeal.

She’s a beautiful little girl.

Healthy.

Loved.

The belle of the ball.

Then her mother took the microphone.

Her first words opened the deeper story.

“I’d like to thank the Sisters of Life…”

And with that, the whole room seemed to lean in.

Violet’s mother spoke about learning of her daughter’s diagnosis while she was still pregnant. She spoke about fear, uncertainty, doctor’s appointments, surgery, and the terrifying weight of not knowing what the road ahead would hold.

That’s where the Sisters of Life entered the story.

According to Violet’s mother, the Sisters walked with her through the process. They accompanied her to doctors’ visits, stood beside her in the uncertainty, contacted Lauren and Hearts of Joy, and helped create the circle of support that would carry mother and child through Violet’s surgery and beyond.

A mother stood on a stage with the daughter she had once feared for, thanking the women who had not left her alone. Beside her was Violet, alive and loved, surrounded by the people who had helped make that moment possible: the Sisters of Life, Hearts of Joy, doctors, nurses, donors, friends, and a hidden army of Grace.

It wasn’t only that Violet had received the care she needed. It was that her life revealed what the Christian claim about human dignity actually requires.

Love does not remain theoretical.

It goes to the doctor’s appointment.

It makes the phone call.

It finds the surgeon.

It sits with the mother.

It raises the money.

It prays through the fear.

And it remains.

The Sisters of Life profess a particular vow to protect and enhance the sacredness of human life. That vow isn’t lived only in public statements or pro-life language. It is lived in rooms where women are afraid, in conversations filled with tears, and in the quiet accompaniment of a mother who needs to know she’s not alone.

Hearts of Joy carries that same conviction into the medical crisis faced by children with Down syndrome around the world.

And that night, in Violet, the two missions met.

The Sisters of Life had walked with a mother through fear. Hearts of Joy had helped surround a child with the care she needed. A nurse stood beside them. Donors filled the room. Friends applauded through tears.

And Violet stood beneath the lights.

A little girl with a once-broken heart.

Alive.

Loved.

Smiling.

Because every life is sacred.

And sometimes that truth doesn’t arrive as an argument.

Sometimes it arrives as a little girl beneath the lights, with a mended heart, and a whole room rising to its feet.

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Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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[Read Part I and Part II of this 3 Part Series]

Two long days later, after the last prayers, my bags packed, and I took a long look at the tiny cabin high up on the hill that I would depart from in the morning, I stepped outside for some air.

The valley that had been wrapped in fog on that first morning now lay under a clear sky adorned with stars. The dome of the church caught the moonlight, softer now, but still impossible to miss if you knew where to look.

Down by the river, the ruins of the mill were just barely shadows and edges against the faint glow of the town.

It struck me how easy it would be to drive past all of this and never know what you were missing.

From the highway, Baltic is just another name on a green sign. From a distance, the Motherhouse could be mistaken for any large brick building on a hill.

But if you step inside, if you rise at 4:45 a.m. and fumble for coffee and watch the fog lift off the valley, if you listen to the bell, sit in the chapel, follow a Sister through her day, you start to see something else…

“What do you want people to know about your life here?”

“That it’s real.”

Those words will forever live with me.

Because what I had seen over the course of those days wasn’t an artifact of the past or a remnant of something fading.

It was life at its fullest.

The life of Grace.

A breathtaking gift from a Merciful and Loving God.

The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church are one small current in a much larger, often unseen ocean of Grace, lived out in places like this, far from headlines, and in every hidden corner of this vast world.

They didn’t save the mill. They couldn’t stop every factory closure or every family from moving away.

That was never their work.

Their work was, and is, to love…

To love God who called them.
To love the Church that formed them.
And to love the people placed in front of them in this little valley, in this particular sliver of time.

As I stood there looking at the dome and the smokestack, one gleaming, one crumbling, it was hard not to see them as a kind of parable.

Human projects rise, dominate, and fall. Technologies replace what came before. Brick and iron eventually crumble and rust away.

But the work of Grace, the daily “yes” whispered in convent chapels, over kitchen sinks, and in the middle of ordinary days, that’s what endures.

You could say Baltic is just a small town with a long-closed mill and a house full of nuns.

Or you could say it’s something else entirely.

That the life of the Church isn’t sustained by mills, wealth or any other worldly thing, but by those whose faithfulness, animated by Grace, persevere through it all.

So if you ever find yourself on a back road in East Connecticut and you hear a bell cutting through the fog at dawn’s early light, don’t be too quick to keep driving.

Slow down. Look toward the hill.

Because somewhere up there, the Church is awake and praying for you.

And the Hidden Heart of the world, is still beating.

The Sisters

The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church

Learn more about them on their website and follow them on Instagram and Facebook!

There’s one in every bunch

[Read Part I and Part II of this 3 Part Series]

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Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

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[Read Part I Here!]

If the town below tells you what was once visible, a day inside the Motherhouse reveals what’s hidden.

From the outside, the Holy Family Motherhouse rises above Baltic with a quiet authority. It’s not dramatic in the way a cathedral is dramatic. It doesn’tt overwhelm the senses. It simply stands there, solid and watchful, looking out over a valley that has seen smokestacks, immigrant families, schoolgirls, weddings, funerals, First Communions, and generations of Sisters moving through the same halls in white habits and black veils.

The Motherhouse is connected to the Academy of the Holy Family, the school founded by the Sisters in Baltic in 1874. The present school building, built in 1914, feels like part of the same long sentence, joined physically and spiritually to the Motherhouse beside it.

But inside, it’s less a building than a small world.

A corridor opens into another corridor. A stairwell turns unexpectedly. A hallway that seems to be leading one way suddenly reveals a chapel door, a sitting room, a relic case, a classroom wing, a kitchen, a dining room, or a quiet corner.

The Motherhouse is a labyrinth of passageways and sections, the kind of place where you begin to suspect that a map might just prove handy, if you were in any kind of hurry.

By the time I slipped into the chapel early on the second morning, the Sisters were already in place.

Rows of veils.

Heads bowed.

The soft rustle of pages turning.

“Lord, open my lips…”

“…and my mouth will proclaim your praise.”

The words rose and fell like breathing.

Above the altar, a great mural of the Holy Spirit seemed to gather the whole chapel beneath its wings. It felt like a presence. The dove hovered over the sanctuary, over the tabernacle, over the Sisters in choir, over the worn wood and folded hands and bowed heads.

And with every sunrise for over 150 years, the Sisters were doing what they do every day: standing before God on behalf of a world that mostly doesn’t know they exist.

Light from the stained-glass windows moved slowly across the floor.

A young Sister sang with her eyes closed. Across from her, an older Sister leaned heavily on the wood of the pew, her hands marked with age.

Two ends of the same rope.

Between them was the whole mystery of religious life: not escape from the world, but a long fidelity within it. A richer one.

After Morning Prayer and Mass, the silence of the chapel gave way to the gentle commotion of community life: cups being filled, chairs scraping against the floor, quick footsteps in the hallway, the low murmur of conversation, and laughter rising from somewhere just out of sight.

“Did you get your coffee yet?” one Sister asked, spotting me hovering with my camera, feeling a little out of place.

A few minutes later I was in the kitchen, fielding questions about where I’d come from, who I work for, how many kids I have. One Sister wanted to know why anyone would voluntarily live in New Jersey. Another assured me they would pray for me.

I’m still not entirely sure if the two comments were related.

That was one of the surprises of the Motherhouse.

You arrive expecting silence, and there is silence. Deep silence. Holy silence.

But there’s also laughter.

There’s teasing.

There’s the unmistakable sound of women who have lived together long enough to know one another’s habits, timing, weaknesses, favorite chairs, preferred coffee, and best jokes.

The day didn’t unfold like a program. It unfolded like a household.

One minute I was standing in a dishwashing room where steam rose from the machines. The next, I was in a hallway watching one Sister pause beside an elderly member of the community, adjust a blanket, offer a few quiet words, and draw out a tired but very real smile.

Elsewhere, school life continued on the other side of the connected buildings. Students passed through the same larger world of prayer, discipline, and formation that has shaped young women here for generations. The Academy is not a memory preserved under glass. It’s still a school. Still regular and boarding. Still alive with the ordinary hopes and worries of students who probably don’t realize, at least not yet, how much history surrounds them.

And then there were the relics.

Tucked within the Motherhouse is a remarkable collection as if the saints themselves had taken up residence in the walls. Tiny fragments of holy lives rested behind glass. Names from across the long story of the Church stood silently in their cases, not as curiosities, but as company.

That’s what the Motherhouse began to feel like to me.

A sacred community.

The Sisters in the chapel.

The students in the school.

The saints in their reliquaries.

The town below.

The river still moving silently through the valley.

And Holy Spirit overshadowing, protecting, and shining His Grace upon it all.

It would be easy to call this place a remnant of another age, but that would be the wrong word. A remnant is what’s left over.

This is not left over.

This continues to move, and remains.

“What do you want people to know about your life here?” I asked one of the Sisters.

She paused.

“That it’s real,” she said. “People imagine a museum. But this is very alive.”

That sentence stayed with me because it named exactly what I’d been seeing.

Inside the Motherhouse, hidden above a former mill town in eastern Connecticut, Grace was not only surviving.

It’s moving through the halls.
It’s laughing over coffee.
It’s singing beneath the Holy Spirit.
And it’s caring for the old, teaching the young, feeding the hungry and passing quietly from one generation to the next.

Faithfully.

And that’s been the story of Grace from age to age since the beginning. And in this sleepy town of Baltic, there’s no exception.

Before the Motherhouse begins to move, it gathers in silence.
Rows of black veils face the altar, each Sister hidden from view and yet fully present, joined in the prayer that has carried this community through generations. In the Motherhouse, the day does not begin with activity. It begins with Christ.

A Sister bows over her prayer book as the community prays the Divine Office, the kind of hidden work that leaves no noise behind, but somehow holds everything else together.

At the center of the house is not a memory, or a mission statement, or even the long history of the community. It is Christ himself, lifted above the chalice in the silence of the Mass, the source from which everything else flows.

An elderly Sister prays the Stations of the Cross daily from her wheelchair before the altar, framed by stained glass and morning light. In the Motherhouse, fidelity is not measured only by movement, but by remaining.

In the kitchen, the sacred and practical sit side by side: steel pans, an old scale, flowers, an American flag, and a small statue of Our Lady watching over it all. Here, Grace does not float above ordinary work. It settles in among the pots and shelves.

The life of the house moves through the kitchen as naturally as it moves through the chapel. Meals are planned, dishes are washed, questions are asked, and the ordinary work of feeding one another becomes part of the larger prayer.

On the school side of the Motherhouse, a Sister writes an equation on the board while students follow from their desks. The Academy of the Holy Family is not a preserved memory. It is still a school, still forming young women under the same roof where generations have prayed.

In the refectory, the pace loosens. Between prayer and work, there is the quiet companionship of women who have shared years of service, carrying in their faces the peace of a life given steadily, day after day.

The halls of the Motherhouse are not solemn all the time. Around corners and on stair landings, laughter breaks open the silence, revealing a community as human as it is holy.

In the food pantry, cans of food become a different kind of liturgy. Hands sort, stack, count, and prepare, making sure someone hungry will be fed. The prayer of the chapel does not stay in the chapel. It moves toward the next person in need.

A Sister prepares candles and devotional vessels by a window, the small mechanics of prayer laid out on a worktable. Even here, in the unnoticed tasks, the life of the chapel is being tended.

A Sister pushes an elderly member of the community down a long corridor beneath crucifixes and holy images. The hallway becomes a procession in miniature: one Sister serving, one Sister being carried, both moving through a house built on Love.

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Read more of the three-part series:

Part I: The Mill and the Hill

Part III: What Endures — coming next.

Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

4:45 a.m.

The glow of my phone cut through the dark as I groped across an unfamiliar nightstand and, in my half-awake state, hit dismiss instead of snooze. So much for fifteen more minutes of bliss.

I rolled out of the unfamiliar bed and shuffled toward an unfamiliar kitchen, praying there was coffee and that I’d find it before I walked into a wall. Outside, somewhere beyond the thin pane of glass, a new day was already pushing at the edges of the night.

Baltic, Connecticut.

A tiny former mill village tucked into the rolling hills along a narrow river. A place you could easily miss if you were driving too fast on a gray Tuesday… and yet a place that has lived more than one life.

I peered out the east-facing window and watched first light arrive, that moment when the sky shifts from black to not-quite-black and the world remembers that morning is, in fact, going to happen again.

Down in the basin, a thick, white fog lay over the village like a blanket. The tall pines climbed out of it, their shadows stretched long by the low sun. Dew clung to every needle and blade of grass, catching the first stray rays and turning the hillside into a field of tiny stars.

And then, there it was.

The golden dome of the church rising above the trees, catching the sun head-on. For a few seconds it didn’t just reflect the light. It seemed to throw it back, a small sun of its own. The cross on top burned like a spark against the pale sky.

Somewhere below, the river moved quietly past the bones of what used to be one of the largest textile mills in eastern Connecticut, a sprawling complex that once drew workers from across the region, its brick walls humming day and night with the rhythm of looms. Entire families built their lives around it. Generations passed through its doors. The whistle marked the hours. The river powered the work.

This whole village rose and fell with that engine of industry. When the mill surged, Baltic filled with life, boarding houses, shops, children in the streets. When fire or decline came, and it did, more than once, the silence that followed settled just as deeply.

A distant train whistle cut through the stillness, thin and lonely.

A lone dove settled on the lip of the last standing smokestack…a soft gray comma against the red brick.

Up on the hill, the fog kept lifting.

And then another sound shouldered its way into the morning.

The bell.

6:30 a.m., and the bell of the Holy Family Motherhouse rang out across the valley…clear, insistent, unembarrassed. In a town where most of the old factory whistles have gone silent, the church bells still ring.

Inside, the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church were already moving down the halls, black habits brushing against polished floors, rosary beads clicking softly like distant rain.

I hadn’t come to Baltic as a tourist.

I came for the Sisters.

The Mill Town and the Motherhouse

I met the Sisters first in the chapel and the dining room—through their voices, their laughter, their joyful way of moving through a day. The town came later.

One afternoon, when there was a rare lull in the schedule, I took a walk into town.

From the hill where the Motherhouse sits, you can see almost everything. Rooftops, trees, the thin silver scratch of the river cutting through the valley. But it’s only when you start walking down the winding road that the past comes into focus: cracked pavement, sagging fences, old stone walls with nothing left to hold up.

At the bottom of the hill, the river slid by like it had all the time in the world. The ruins along the water suggested a different story. Brick foundations swallowed by weeds, rusted pipes jutting out of nowhere, two lone smokestacks punching into the sky like exclamation points from another era.

You could almost hear it if you stood still long enough.

The thunder of looms. The shriek of belts and pulleys. The constant hiss and clatter of thousands of spindles spinning cotton into thread.

Baltic grew up around that sound.

By the time I retraced my steps up the hill, I had more questions than answers.

The answers didn’t come all at once. They surfaced slowly, in conversation, in memory, in the way the Sisters spoke about the town as if it were still alive.

Later that day, I had followed two of them down to the food pantry at the edge of the property. It wasn’t large, but there was a steady movement of people coming and going. Out back, they showed me the truck they use to gather and deliver food, an old, retired rental, now pressed quietly into a different kind of service.

Nothing about it felt extraordinary.

And yet… everything about it did.

There was a constancy to it all.

A sense that while the town below had emptied of the noise that once defined it, something else had taken root in its place.

Not loudly.

But faithfully.

By the time I reached the top of the hill again, one thing was clear.

The mill had powered the town.

But on the hill, the bell kept ringing…

And alongside the old brick lines of the mill, the Motherhouse remains full of life. The daily life of the Sisters continuing just as steadily as the looms once did. And just beyond it, the worn gold dome of St. Mary’s still catches the light.

Before the valley fell silent, it looked like this.

Brick stretched across the horizon, row after row of windows catching the day’s first light. The smokestacks stood like sentinels, pushing out the work of a thousand hands.

And this wasn’t just a building…it was the reason the town existed at all.

And this is what remains. The looms are gone. The buildings are gone. The noise has long since faded. But two smokestacks still stand, rising above the trees like quiet witnesses to everything that once filled this valley with life.

The tracks remain. Steel lines cutting through the valley, pointing forward as they always have… but no longer carrying the weight they once did. No schedules. No urgency.

Just distance.

It’s hard to imagine what once filled this valley.

Where machines once roared and smokestacks marked the sky, the river now moves quietly between walls of green. The trees have returned, patient and unhurried, covering what industry once claimed.

The mill’s story was one of rise and ruin. But the Sisters’ story is something else entirely.

In the place of noise came prayer. In the place of smoke came song. And in the shadow of what was lost, the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church remain a living witness that God is still making something beautiful here.

READ: Part II: A Day Inside the Motherhouse

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Thanks for reading! This is a truly independent, reader-supported periodical. Your support is crucial. If you are able, please consider a paid subscription or making a ‘Patron of the Arts’ donation of any amount. By doing so, you are not just supporting this effort; you’re a vital part of this mission.

You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support, and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff

How could this not change the world.

I found myself asking it quietly as I stood there photographing the Communion line at St. Joseph’s on Holy Thursday this year. Person after person stepped forward. The line didn’t seem to end. It just kept coming. My arms were beginning to grow weary from holding the camera, but something else was happening at the same time.

A joy began to rise.

A smile followed.

Because one by one, they were receiving Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and then carrying Him back out into the world. Into the streets of New York. Into their workplaces and homes. Into their families and struggles.

And the thought came, almost without effort: how could this not change the world.

As the days passed and the memory of that Mass began to settle, my thoughts drifted toward something larger—something that had been building for years now.

A revival.

I remember when I was thought a little crazy for saying that out loud. And I remember exactly where that conviction first took hold of me: the center of Times Square.

I had gone reluctantly. A friend had mentioned that “some people” were gathering near Father Duffy Square for a Eucharistic procession. I had just finished covering an ordination at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and was exhausted. My batteries low in every sense, no pun intended. I didn’t make a bold decision to go.

I was dragged there.

Praise God, Grace has a way of doing that.

At first, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking at. There was a sea of people, but Times Square isn’t exactly a stranger to that. But as I began to study the faces, the shirts, the banners, it became clear.

These were the “some people.”

And “some people” turned out to be several thousand.

I remember pausing, taking it in, glancing upward, smiling, and quietly whispering, thank you… again…

That Eucharistic procession—the largest in New York City’s history—felt like an announcement. A signal that something had begun.

Looking back now, the pattern is unmistakable.

From that day forward, more and more Eucharistic processions began appearing throughout the city and beyond it. Uptown. Downtown. Across boroughs. Across states.

And then came 2024.

Four National Eucharistic Pilgrimages, each beginning at the edges of the country and moving inward—thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of people all converging in Indianapolis for the first National Eucharistic Congress in eighty-three years.

I had the privilege of covering much of that journey. Walking with pilgrims across cities and plains. Through San Francisco, the farmlands of Nebraska, the streets of New York.

All drawn by the same thing.

Not an idea.

A Presence.

And even after the Congress, it didn’t stop.

Another pilgrimage followed—through rural America, across farm towns, deserts, and reservations. Everywhere I turn now, I see it.

A growing, vibrant, emerging Church.

The headlines speak of record numbers of catechumens entering the Church this Easter. Parishes once quiet are now full. Lines once short now stretch.

We’ve gone, in what feels like a matter of years, from hand-wringing… to Hallelujah.

So what happened?

How did this come about?

Programs matter. Outreach matters. Evangelization matters.

But that’s not what’s at the heart of this.

At the heart of the revival is something much simpler…

Grace.

The Grace that has been carried across this nation—Jesus Christ Himself, present in the Blessed Sacrament—moving through highways and city streets, through quiet towns and crowded avenues alike.

Just as He once walked the dusty roads of Galilee…

He is walking again.

And that night, I saw it once more.

On Holy Thursday—the night the Eucharist was given—He passed once again through the streets of New York. Through Washington Square Park. Moving quietly through the ordinary life of the city.

Some noticed, some didn’t.

But that didn’t matter, because His Grace— a Grace that has an immediate effect—flowed out into the world.

And the question returned, no longer as a thought, but as something closer to an answer.

What is causing this revival?

In one word?

Jesus.

And how could that not change the world.

After all…

He made it.

This is a truly independent, reader-supported publication. If this piece resonated with you, I’d be grateful for your support—whether through a paid subscription or as a Patron of the Arts.

It allows me to continue telling these stories.

Thank you for being here. Please keep me in your prayers, as I keep you in mine.

God bless,

Jeff

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