Author Archives: Fr Kevin McKenzie LC

I swapped hats with the pope today! Yes! Browsing through some liturgical goods stores here in Rome yesterday, I found one that sold white zucchetos – papal hats. I got one and brought it to the Wednesday audience today, held … Continue reading →

There’s an old piece of advice given to priests: “Celebrate this mass as if it were your first mass, as if it were your last mass, as if it were your only mass.” Thinking back to my first mass almost … Continue reading →

It was Divine Mercy Sunday. I had just finished hearing confessions at a parish about an hour from home. The gas gauge in my car read “E” – the red side of “E”. So I pulled up at the first … Continue reading →

Last Friday the preschool students came to mass with all the other students at school. No one gave any warning, but I tried to make things as simple and short as respectfully possible. It turns out that one little boy … Continue reading →

“Hey, your car’s on fire!” shouted the man from the car beside me. It was mid-July and I was driving through downtown Chicago with a van full of boys headed for summer camp. And it did look like my car … Continue reading →

The other day I was playing soccer in our backyard with a group of boys. We were having a send-off party for a good friend, Father Timothy Walsh, who is heading on to a new assignment. I worked closely with … Continue reading →

A few years back I was traveling around northern Italy with another seminarian and we stopped to visit the Carmelite nuns in the town of Piacenza. They have a rather small and simple convent in the farmland outside town. At … Continue reading →

It was Corpus Christi in 2010. I was in Orvieto, a small hilltop town in the Umbria region of Italy. Orvieto is famous for its white wine and more famous for a relic of a Eucharistic miracle. During the middle … Continue reading →

It’s 10:30pm and I’m about to hit the hay. Just thinking back over today, I get this feeling that my life is enchanted or something… Maybe it was running across the soccer field for the umpteenth time, sun shining, wind … Continue reading →

Being a priest you receive so many gifts – spiritual ones. I spend a lot of time in the chapel at school. The other day I was there praying when one of the teachers brought the preschool children in. They … Continue reading →