I’m going to Scranton today to discuss with Fr. Cassian Yuhaus some material on Fr. Theodore Foley, who is being proposed as a candidate for canonization. Someone asked me yesterday, “Why him?”

I said he was a man devoted to the common good and devoted to the future of the church and his community at a time when it looked as though everything was falling apart–the 1960’-70s.  He was thoroughly grounded in the past, personally conservative in his thinking and in his habits of life, yet willing to engage others and trust in them and their ideas.  He trusted in God’s plan when it was hardly visible.

In a time of “expressive individualism” he believed in the basic institutions that support so much of our lives and he gave himself to shepherd them through dark valleys of change.

We need people like him today. Shepherds for changing times. It’s a holy, saintly task.