O’Flaherty House
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This winter at O’Flaherty House (our residential house where the
community sleeps) we offered hospitality to six men. Our resources
and the conditions at O’Flaherty House are very basic, but given the
extreme inclement weather we were due in charity to offer our beds to
those in need of shelter. Much works remains to be done to renovate
O’Flaherty House and bring it up to standard. Please pray to the Lord
will send us more community members so that we can continue this
important work this coming winter and that the funds required to heat
the house during the cold winter months, will come come forth.
O’Flaherty House is named after Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish
priest who worked at the Vatican and gave hospitality to people at the
Vatican during World War II. We will have a feature article on
Monsignor O’Flaherty in one of our coming issues.!
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-Tomas Murray !
Joshua Casteel’s “Returns” continued from page 1…!
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Returns is a searching, spiraling, splintering cry from an anguished heart and from the wilderness
of the desert where war deals suffering to young soldiers, prisoners, families and children alike.
This cry to God and humanity shatters and razes the wall of silence that we build around wars,
those who wage them and those who suffer in or because of them on every side of the battle lines.
Returns is unmistakably a lament which rises up from the stage to God, but it is also a plea which
radiates out begging the audience to listen - to truly listen - to the testimony being spoken.
In 2010 Joshua was a testifier at a Truth Commission on Conscience in War that the Catholic
Peace Fellowship co-sponsored in New York City. One of the other testifiers at the event was a
veteran named Tyler Boudreau who wrote in his book Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine,
“War is the foyer to hell.” Boudreau described the
attempting to journey home from war as even more
hellish than darkness of combat. Joshua’s giftedness as a
playwright allowed him to make art out of a brokenness
that marks the lives of far too many and to challenge
many, many others to see more clearly what they would
rather not see and to truly listen to what they would rather
not hear. The way Joshua Casteel wrote and spoke and
the way he lived and died not only bore witness to the
evils of war or the trials of attempting to return from the
inferno of combat, it did something far greater – it pointed
us out of the violent “hells” we devise and toward the
peace and heaven that our loving God desires for all His
children.
By: Shawn T. Storer of the Catholic Peace Fellowship