At 1:52 AM on October 31,1999, a Boeing 767, EgyptAir Flight 990, plunged at almost Mach One into the ocean 60 miles south of Nantucket. Among the 217 persons on board were two friends with whom we had dined only four nights before.

Our friendship with this couple had begun through mutual interest and significant involvement in providing financial and volunteer support to St. Martin’s Ministries on the Delmarva Peninsula. St. Martin’s is a social service agency that distributes food and clothing to persons in need and also provides transitional housing and support services to at-risk mothers and their children. Over 20 years ago, Roman Catholic Benedictine nuns, who remain active at the core of the enterprise, originally founded St. Martin’s.

A major topic of conversation at our dinner together was the excited sharing of our friend’s plans for their long awaited, up-coming trip to Egypt. On October 31, the clock radio news awakened us, as it does each morning. Halfway through the news broadcast we realized that the plane crash being described was the aircraft our friends were riding. They were dead.

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Last weekend I was involved in two conversations – one brief, one extended – touching the reassertion by Pope Benedict XVI of the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the one true church possessing “the fullness of the means of salvation.”

The brief conversation was the recounting to me of an exchange between a Roman Catholic priest from the Vatican and an American nun in which the two were reported to have agreed that the Pope might best be described as an “ass.”

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