Category: Catholic nerd pilgrimage

There are certain parishes in the archdiocese where knowing that’s where someone goes to Mass regularly tells you a whole lot about them. Saint Sabina, Old Saint Pat’s and Saint John Cantius are three which spring immediately to mind. The last one on this list is the hyper-traditionalist parish. When I attended Mass at Holy…

St John of the Cross parish has a Sunday evening Mass, a practice which has a sentimental attachment for me. Arriving at the church in the darkness of December, the first thing I noticed was a collection of handicapped spaces that rivals the size of some parishes’ entire parking lots. The liturgy itself was solidly…

I’ve been trying to give priority to shrines when they’re an option, so for Our Lady of Guadalupe, I drove up to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe which claimed on its website that it would be holding a 7p Mass. As near as I could discover on arrival, there was no Mass taking…

Today is the feast of St Columbanus (albeit superseded by the feast of Christ the King).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…