Bridget O’Brien
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bridgetemob.bsky.social
Bridget O’Brien
@bridgetemob.bsky.social
1.2K followers 340 following 3.6K posts
Philadelphian, Chicagoan, Catholic lay minister • she | her

“And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:”
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bridgetemob.bsky.social
yes well you know:
screenshot of the page for “We Are Many Parts” by Marty Hagen, published by GIA (and based directly on 1 Cor 12)
November 27, 2025 at 7:34 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small,
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day.
photo of pope leo holding a mic with his eyes closed, rocking out, question mark??
November 23, 2025 at 2:42 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
I watched clips of the Mamdani-Trump press conference, and:
Four panels, each showing a still of Sister Michael from Derry Girls with a different expression of confusion and horror. They are captioned: What’s happening? Am I dead? Is this my wake? Am I in hell?
November 22, 2025 at 2:24 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Guys I promise women have contributed to the Church.
November 20, 2025 at 8:04 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
look the easy route would be the cheesesteak, but for TRUE philadelphia slop you’ve got to go with scrapple.
Two browned-by-frying rectangles. Looking at them, you might wonder: is this french toast? it looks too moist to be a weirdly angular hash brown. It is, in fact, scrapple: a breakfast meat made of pork scraps, flour, and spices, which is formed into a loaf, then sliced and pan fried.
November 19, 2025 at 3:37 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
www.vatican.va/content/leo-...
The Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking. Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges. She knows that her proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community. At the side of the least among us 76. Christian holiness often flourishes in the most forgotten and wounded places of humanity. The poorest of the poor — those who lack not only material goods but also a voice and the recognition of their dignity — have a special place in God’s heart. They are the beloved of the Gospel, the heirs to the Kingdom (cf. Lk 6:20). It is in them that Christ continues to suffer and rise again. It is in them that the Church rediscovers her call to show her most authentic self.
November 17, 2025 at 1:34 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
This is just a straight-up quote from Dilexi te, NY Times.
Across the Hudson River in Manhattan, at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, Rev. Kenneth Boller also addressed the bishops’ letter during Mass. “The church is like a mother. When the world sees threats, she sees children. When walls are built, she builds bridges,” Father Boller said. “She knows that her proclamation in the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself.”
November 17, 2025 at 1:32 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Amazing, no notes, I do not desire to learn anything else about this story, for it would only detract from the perfection on this headline.
A screenshot with a photograph of a light brown cat whose smooshed face has the effect of making him look grumpy. In the blurry distance is a drawing of this same cat, with a sadder expression. Under the photo, text reads: "Meet Gary, the cat who ended a friendship and cost $25,000 in legal fees" A calligraphic "I" (the logo of the Philadelphia Inquirer) is in the bottom right corner of the image.
November 16, 2025 at 4:37 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
I don’t find Christopher Hale to be a good source. He doesn’t seem to have his own sources, and he packages others’ reporting in maximally partisan ways. Take this headline: you assume Homan said it, right? No, that quote’s from a someone who spent two years in Congress before being defeated.
A screenshot showing a photo of Pope Leo next to a photo of Tom Homan, reading: “Pope Leo is a Tool of Our Enemies”: Homan Leads MAGA Attacks as Hayworth, Others Pile on It’s the latest MAGA attack on Pope Leo’s pro-immigrant stance. Disgraced border chief Tom Homan — caught
November 16, 2025 at 2:23 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
“[Judith] came close to [Holofernes’s] bed, took hold of the hair of his head, & said, “Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel!” Then she struck his neck twice with all her might, and cut off his head.” (Judith 13:7-8).
A photograph of a black linework tattoo on the upper bicep of a fat white woman. The tattoo depicts Judith holding a sword downward in her right hand, with the point touching the ground, and the severed head of Holofernes in her left hand, with three drops of blood falling from it. Her head is turned slightly to the right, and she looks at the viewer with indifference. AMAZING tattoo by artist Aiden Appleford of Chicago IL; queerwitchtattoo.com
November 14, 2025 at 10:56 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Yesterday I made 100 whistle kits to alert neighbors when the federal government’s masked forces are out to abduct people; today I’m getting a tattoo of a woman who cut off the head of an invading general.
Photo of mosaic depicting the biblical (deuterocanonical) character Judith, shown from the waist up. A woman wearing jewels holds the grey severed head of a bearded man by his gathered hair in one hand. The mosaic includes the word “Judith,” written as IV / DIT. (This is not a direct reference for the tattoo I am getting but it gives you the vibe.)
November 14, 2025 at 1:32 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
A Zoomer taught me & some other middle aged neighbors how to origami a single sheet of paper into a little zine and then we made 100 whistle kits together.
Bright yellow sheets of paper, small plastic bags, and metal whistles with bright yellow cords on a table. The sheets of paper are divided into rights with text on them in English and Spanish. Most visible is a drawing of a whistle, a 6-pointed star, and a crowd with fists raised. The text under that drawing reads “FORM A CROWD. STAY LOUD.”
November 14, 2025 at 2:12 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
(The USCCB is not only made up of Roman Catholic bishops; "Roman Catholic" does not mean "Catholic in communion with Rome.")
By Elizabeth Dias Elizabeth Dias reported from Baltimore, where the Catholic bishops held their annual fall meeting. Nov. 11, 2025 Updated 6:29 p.m. ET As the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign continues, and Pope Leo XIV urges support for migrant families, America’s Roman Catholic bishops redoubled their focus on immigration while electing new leaders at their annual meeting on Tuesday.
November 11, 2025 at 11:58 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Relatedly, here is a piece of graffiti written on the wall of a former hotel, which until November housed immigrants from Venezuelan who were bused from red border states to Chicago in the dead of winter with only the clothes they wore, after walking hundreds of miles & through the Darién Gap.
The words “Blessed are they” written in black marker on a gray concrete wall; a photo taken on my walk to work this morning.
November 11, 2025 at 2:23 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
For that matter, I ALSO often think of this vision of heaven from Tony Kushner's Angels in America which in its context functions as a parable: it's a description of heaven, but the Roy Cohn character assumes it is hell.
Like San Francisco. … Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens. … Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cow spit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, [mixed race], brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. …
November 11, 2025 at 2:09 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
I very often think of this prayer written by Cole Arthur Riley, from her book Black Liturgies.

The natural world is not the only thing that can draw us into contemplation.
For the Skyline Divine Architect, It is far easier to marvel at the landscape of the field or forest than the streets and neighborhoods that surround us daily. The familiar is the most necessary but most neglected of beauties. Train us to behold what structures and buildings we pass each day. Allow us to marvel at the miracles of our own hands; that the human imagination has dreamt a way out of stone, wood, glass, and brick. We have carved faces into ornamented crown molding. We have hand-hewed wood for beam and table. We have cut stone and melted sand and painted with gold. Remind us that beauty can collide with service, not that we would reduce art's value to its utility, but that we could celebrate when it provides shelter to those who behold it. As we stare out at the skyline, draw our eyes to materials, to shapes, to reflections, and so too draw our eyes toward the meek and simple of our own neighborhoods. The buildings that remain even in our neglect of them--a sacred defiance in a world that has not cared well for those who dwell there. May we marvel at that which has endured decay and abandonment and stands, however solid or frail, in resistance. Amen.
November 11, 2025 at 1:57 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Watching a near-opaque wall of snow outside my windows, with the end “The Dead” ringing in my head.

”His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
The final paragraph of "The Dead," by James Joyce: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
November 10, 2025 at 3:45 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
“I thought I knew what it meant to love Chicago. … I love this place, and I thought I knew how much, until you made me love it more.”
“I thought I knew what it meant to love Chicago—to feel something settle inside of me when I saw her skyline from the expressway, or her lights from the window of an airplane, after crossing the cloud line. I thought I knew what it meant to love her brick and steel towers, her annoying street preachers, her chorus of accents and the poetry of her activists, the grit of her workers, awaiting buses and trains in icy air, her guerrilla gardens, bookshops, bucket boys, and crashing winter waves becoming shelves of ice—so many corners that feel like home, even though you’ll never live there. I know this place. I love this place, and I thought I knew how much, until you made me love it more. When you check your alerts, when you rush to the corner knowing you probably won’t get there in time, when you film the abduction you couldn’t prevent, or hold onto someone the fascists would rip away—or get ripped away yourself, because you tried—you are reminding us what we owe to each other, and what it means to fight fascism.”
November 8, 2025 at 4:37 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
I am constantly fed this ad by instagram, and it just baffles me. Who wants this?! Why. If “Celebrate Thanksgiving but make it British” is appealing to you, who are you, I just want to talk.*

*no I don’t; don’t @ me.
a photograph of roast beef and some kind of pastry—idk, maybe beef wellington maybe not—as well as a roasted garlic bulb and some potatoes? turnips? on a plate with the words “THANKSGIVING WITH A BRITISH TWIST”
November 7, 2025 at 2:32 AM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
when we venture to pray into a silent darkness and know that in any case we are heard, although there seems to be no response from there about which it would be possible to reason and argue, when we get away from ourselves unconditionally and experience this capitulation as the true victory, when falling becomes standing firm, when despair is accepted and mysteriously experienced as assurance without any easy consolation, when man entrusts all his knowledge and all his questions to the silent and all-sheltering mystery which is loved more than all our individual perceptions that turn us into petty lords, when we practise our death in the course of ordinary life and then attempt to live in the way that we wish to approach death, calmly and with resignation, when . . . (as we said, it would be possible to go on for a long time), then God is present with his liberating grace. Then we experience what we Christians describe as the Holy Spirit of God; then an experience occurs that is inescapable in life (even if it is suppressed) and is offered to our freedom with the question of whether we want to accept it or to barricade ourselves against it in a hell of freedom to which we condemn ourselves. The mysticism of everyday life is there, God is found in all things; here is that sober intoxication of the Spirit of which the Church Fathers and the early liturgy spoke, which we may not reject or despise simply because it is sober. Let us look ourselves for such an experience of our life,
November 3, 2025 at 10:45 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
When, over and above all individual hopes, there is the one and entire hope that gently embraces all upsurges and also all downfalls in silent promise, when responsibility is undertaken and sustained, even though no evidence of success or advantage can be produced, when someone experiences and accepts his ultimate freedom, of which no earthly constraints can deprive him, when the fall into the darkness of death is accepted with resignation as the dawn of incomprehensible promise, when the sum total of all life’s accounts, which we cannot work out ourselves, is seen as good by an incomprehensible ‘other’, although this cannot be ‘proved’, when the fragmentary experience of love, beauty, and joy is felt and accepted as promise of love, beauty, and joy purely and simply, and not regarded with deep cynicism and scepticism as facile consolation in face of ultimate bleakness, when the bitter, disappointing, and fleeting monotony of ordinary [203] life is borne with serene resignation up to its accepted end out of a strength whose ultimate source cannot be grasped and so cannot be brought under our control, when we venture to pray into a silent darkness and
November 3, 2025 at 10:44 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
Here is someone who is utterly lonely, for whom life is drained of all its colour, for whom everything tangible on which he could rely fades into an infinite distance, but who does not run away from this loneliness which is felt as the last moment before drowning, but endures it with resignation in an ultimate hope. Here is someone who sees that his clearest ideas and the most intellectual operations of his thought are disintegrating, that in the breakdown of all systems the unity of consciousness and what is known consists only in the pain of not being able to cope with the immense variety of questions and yet of not being allowed and not being able to cling to what is clearly known from individual experiences and from learning. Here is someone who suddenly notices how the small rivulet of his life winds through the desert of banal existence, apparently aimlessly and with the terrifying possibility of completely drying up. And yet he hopes, without knowing how, that this rivulet will find its way to the infinite expanse of the ocean, even though this is concealed from him by the dark sand dunes apparently stretched out endlessly before him. It would be possible to continue in this way for a long time and even then not to have visualized in particular that experience which for a certain individual is the experience in his life of the Spirit, of freedom, and of grace. For every human being approaches it in the particular historical and individual situation of his own unique life. Every human being? But he must admit it, dig it out, so to speak, from under the refuse of the ordinary business of life, and, when it becomes faintly visible, not irritably turn away from it, as if it only created uncertainty and disturbed the obvious course of his daily routine and his scientific clarities. Permit me to say it once more, although I am merely repeating the same thing with almost the same words:
November 3, 2025 at 10:43 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
silent pardon is taken for granted by the other party. Here is someone who is trying to love God, although there appears to be no response of love from God’s silent incomprehensibility, although he is not sustained by any feeling of enthusiasm, although he cannot confuse himself and his desire for life with God, although he thinks he will die of this love which seems to him like death and absolute rejection, which apparently calls him into the void and the wholly unknown: a love that looks like a terrifying leap into unfathomable depths, since everything seems to become intangible and utterly futile. Here is someone who does his duty even when it seems that he can do it only with a burning sense of really denying and annihilating himself, when he can do it only by doing something terribly stupid for which no one will thank him. Here is a person who is really good to someone from whom there is no sign of appreciation or gratitude, while the good person does not even have the feeling of satisfaction that he has been ‘selfless’, decent, and so on. Here is someone who is silent, although he could defend himself, although he is unjustly treated; who is silent without being able to profit by his silence as evidence of his supreme irreproachability. Here is someone who has to make a decision purely in the light of an innermost dictate of his conscience, a decision that cannot be made clear to anyone, in which he is quite alone and knows that it is a decision of which he cannot be relieved, for which he has to answer always and eternally. Here is someone who obeys, not because he must or because he must otherwise put up with some inconvenience, but merely because of that mysterious, silent, impalpable reality that we call God and his will. Here is a person who renounces something without thanks, recognition, or even any feeling of inward satisfaction. Here is someone who is utterly lonely, for whom life is drained of all its colour, for whom everything tangible on which he…
November 3, 2025 at 10:41 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
We may now at last begin to point to concrete experiences of life which, whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, are experiences of the Spirit, assuming only that we cope with them in the right way. In regard to these references to the concrete experience of the Spirit in the midst of the ordinary routine of life there can be no question of analyzing them in detail to their ultimate depth, which is in fact the Spirit. In this connection what was said in a formal preliminary outline of the real nature of all these experiences in general must suffice. Nor can the attempt be made here to offer a systematic chart of such experiences. All that is possible is to give a few arbitrarily and unsystematically selected examples. Here is someone who cannot get his life’s accounts to come out right, who cannot balance the entries in these accounts, consisting of good will, mistakes, sin and disasters, even if he tries (impossible as it may seem) to add repentance to these entries. The accounts simply do not add up and he does not know how he can insert God as an individual entry in order to strike a balance between debit and credit. And this person, unable to balance his life’s accounts, surrenders himself to God or, to put it both more and less precisely, to the hope of an incalculable final reconciliation of his existence, marked by the presence of him whom we call God; trusting and hoping, he gets away from his unfathomed and uncalculated existence and does not himself know how this miracle occurs, bringing no advantage to himself and not to be regarded as his own possession. Here is someone who can manage to forgive, although he gains no reward for it and the
November 3, 2025 at 10:38 PM
bridgetemob.bsky.social
furry little tyrant.
a brown tabby cat with a white snout and chest looks at the camera. he is lying on top of a blanket, which in turn lies on top of a white woman with dark curly hair. he looks innocent, but he is drunk with power.
November 3, 2025 at 4:17 PM