Category: Catholic nerd pilgrimage

Today is the feast of St Columbanus (albeit superseded by the feast of Christ the King). A number of options today, including an actual Christ the King parish, but I went with St Moses the Black (whose building was originally St Columbanus) because I really needed some Black church in my life. And while the…

The shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini was built in response to pilgrimages of people coming to visit the room at Columbus Hospital in Chicago where she worked for a time during her lifetime. The hospital was closed and demolished in 2002 to be replaced with high rise luxury housing, but the shrine was left…

Saturday, I went to Mass at St Elizabeth of the Trinity, the new name of St Tarcissus church after the parish was merged with St Cornelius and St Thecla. All the Masses of the weekend celebrated the saint and used the readings for her feast rather than the regular ordinary time readings for the Mass.…

For All Saints Day, I went to Queen of All Saints Basilica on the far north side of Chicago. Queen of All Saints is one of three minor basilicas in the Archdiocese of Chicago, a title which, as near as I can tell, means that the church is quite attractive and entitles the clergy to…

For the feast of St Jude, I really had no choice but to go to the National Shrine of St Jude since it plays a central role in my story, “St Jude’s Medallion.” Of course, I’d never actually been there and relied on photos online for that story. The church is smaller than I had…

Thanks to having a spreadsheet with every parish church in the Archdiocese of Chicago along with the dates of the feasts of their patron saints, I would guess that I am one of a very small number of people who are aware that two of the churches in Niles have saints with the same feast…

Once again, I forgot to actually write up my visit to a church on the day it happened.  St Hedwig is the sister church of St John Berchmans in the two-church St Carlo Acutis parish that I visited on Sunday. But where St John Berchmans is a restrained church (designed by a protestant architect I’ve…

St Teresa of Ávila was my parish for a while around 2001–2 when I was involved with the music ministry for a while there. Add in that the feast of Saint Teresa is on my birthday and even though today was the first time I’d been to the church in almost a quarter century, I…

Carlo Acutis is not the first saint in this project whose life intersected with my own,  but he is the first whose life was entirely within my own (not to mention being the most recently canonized—the first I’d heard of him, in fact, was when I was making the spreadsheet of parishes, saints and feast…