Calendar Class of October 10, 2025

A Carpe Diem Snapshot:

Just as every stone holds a story in Rome, even more so does every great villa, as well as the ghosts of villas that once inhabited spaces where now only a few pieces of masonry remain and, if they were important enough, a historic marker with an illustration of what once was. Such is the case with the Villa Il Vascello, which means in English, the Ship. Our neighbor to the south-east is a villa which houses the headquarters of the "Grand Oriente d'Italia," a member of the Inter-American Masonic Confederation, founded in 1947. Adjacent to it is an intriguing wall sculpted to appear as if it were rough rocks and caves along the seashore. Rising from this mysterious wall was a great ship-like building several stories high, so elegantly and whimsically designed and ornamented that it is difficult to believe it actually existed as it appears in historic sketches and paintings. This was the Baroque masterpiece of Plautilla Bricci, the first female architect of the pre-industrial era. The villa was utterly lost during the fighting that occurred on the Janiculum hill in 1849. The wall is all that is left of Bricci's exquisite masterpiece, after which our wooden ship-shaped home on School Section Lake is named.

Liturgical: Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Whoever is not with me is against me,

and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

Luke 11:15-26

Sanctoral: The Roman Martyrology (2004) commemorates St. Daniel Comboni (1831-1881), a missionary in Central Africa who combined the ideal with the practical, drawing inspiration from the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. His missionaries, known as the Comboni Fathers or the Verona Missionaries, have 4,000 members working in countries all over the world.

St. Paulinus of York (584-644) is also commemorated. He was a Roman missionary and the first Bishop of York. He was a member of the Gregorian mission sent in 601 by Pope Gregory I to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons from their native Anglo-Saxon paganism.

Human: 1871 The Great Chicago Fire is finally extinguished after three days, leaving approximately 300 dead, 100,000 homeless, and causing $222 million in damage.

In Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson pushed the button that relayed the signal to blow up the center of the Gamboa Dike that was keeping Atlantic waters from Pacific waters in the Panama Canal – 1913

1957 A fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria, England, becomes the world's first major nuclear accident.

An unidentified boom was heard in parts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine around 11:30 am. In some areas, shaking was also felt. An earthquake or military plane sonic boom were ruled out as possible causes. – 2021

Natural: Fall Allergy Relief: 7 Tips to Beat Ragweed, Mold & Seasonal Allergies

Italian: Cibo da asporto (take-away / take-out / to go)

A synonym for da asporto is da portare via which is a word-for-word translation of ‘to take away’. What’s more, the English takeaway has entered the Italian language, so if you can’t remember either of these expressions, you can always fall back on takeaway, pronounced with an Italian accent.

Quote: “Realize it, my brethren; —every one who breathes, high and low, educated and ignorant, young and old, man and woman, has a mission, has a work. We are not sent into this world for nothing; we are not born at random; . . . God sees every one of us; He creates every soul, He lodges it in the body, one by one, for a purpose. He needs, He deigns to need, every one of us. He has an end for each of us; we are all equal in His sight, and we are placed in our different ranks and stations, not to get what we can out of them for ourselves, but to labor in them for Him. As Christ has His work, we too have ours; as He rejoiced to do His work, we must rejoice in ours also.”

-St. John Henry Newman