Category: religion

As an undergrad, I was fascinated by the English recusants so I ended up reading nearly everything by and about them and became deeply immersed in a lot of the politics and arguments around the counter-reformation vs the English reformation and the Catholic missionary movement to England at the time so as a consequence, Robert…

I often wonder what led to the choices for some of the more obscurely named parishes. From reading parish histories on their websites, I’ve found that occasionally, a parish might be nominally named for a saint but in reality the name was chosen because it was the name of the mother or some other relative…

Holy Cross Monastery isn’t on the list of archdiocesan churches, which kind of makes me wonder if there are other monasteries “missing” from the list. There are two Franciscan convents that I’m aware of that are on the list, but I guess that’s because they offer something approaching a traditional parish, although Holy Cross is…

Today is the feast of the Holy Name of Mary. In addition to the cathedral, there is also a parish with that name but they don’t do Friday Mass. It’s also the feast of Saint Ailbe but the parish of that name also doesn’t do Friday Mass. So the cathedral it is. I sang in…

One of the wonderful things about Catholicism is just how catholic, it can be. Come up with an assumption about what a parish will be like and the parish will say nope. Earlier this week, St Gregory broke my hypothesis about traditional architecture and traditional liturgy being inversely correlated, today, Saint Therese Chinese Catholic Church…

I had commented recently that it seemed like there was an inverse relationship between how traditional a church’s architecture was and how traditional the liturgy was. St Gregory the Great apparently decided that they should prove me wrong. I think probably the biggest indicator of traditional liturgy is the presence of lace: Lace mantillas on…

Saint Giles is my home parish, I guess. I’m actually registered elsewhere in Oak Park, but this is the parish where I do music, although for the Mass that’s held in the church hall or gymnasium, not actually in the main church. St Giles himself was a hermit who lived in the woods with his…

The normal tradition in the Catholic church is that saints are commemorated on the anniversary of their deaths, which makes the fact that the feasts of Saint Monica and her son Saint Augustine occupy consecutive days seem a bit suspect, although apparently, the day was shifted from May in 1969 so it’s not merely coincidence…

The icon of St Mary of Częstochowa¹ is one of a number of black Madonnas, showing both Mary and Jesus with dark skin. Tradition says that it was painted by the evangelist Luke and rediscovered by St Helena during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, although there is no attestation of its existence before the fourteenth century.…