Catholic Fire

1.  "As a Father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who trust Him." - Psalm 103:13 2.  “To be a good father, the first requirement is to be present in the family. To be close to his wife, to share in everything, joy and pain, burdens and hopes." - Pope Francis, General audience, Feb. 4, 2015 3.  "A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty." - Unknown. 4.  “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” – John Wooden 5.  “Any man can be a father but it takes someone special to be a dad.” -Anne Geddes 6.  "Dads don’t need to be tall and broad-shouldered and clever.  Love makes them so." - Pam Brown 7.  "Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritance." - Ruth E. Renkel 8. "Father!–to God himself we cannot give a holier name." - William Wordsworth 9.  "A father acts on behalf of his childre...

My earliest memory of my dad is when I was about 4 years old. I remember wanting to retrieve an item on the top of our living room fireplace and standing on the seat of my backless child-sized chair to do so. As I grabbed the item, I fell off the chair, with my underarm sliding into one of the two steel rungs that would have held up the linoleum back on the chair. The blood was pouring out as I cried out in pain and my parents ran over to inspect me. Somehow my dad made the bleeding stop and soon afterwards he repaired the back of the chair. I forgot all about my injury when he fixed my chair so that it was good as new. I knew that I had nothing to fear from that chair anymore and that I had something to sit in that was like new. New anything was rare in our home – dad worked as an ironworker after he returned from World War II and work for him in the winter was rare. As a sergeant in the war with the Fifth Army, dad had been stationed in France and North Africa. He had earned a purple...