Category: religion
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Queen of All Saints
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…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: National Shrine of St Jude (Our Lady of Guadalupe Church)
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…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint John Brebeuf
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…
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“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story
I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: St Hedwig (a day late)
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…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Teresa of Ávila
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…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Carlo Acutis (St John Berchmans)
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…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Holy Angels (Our Lady of Africa)
The parish of Our Lady of Africa was formed from the merger of five parishes on the south side, with worship consolidated to the former Holy Angels church which has been renamed to match the new parish name, but since there was no other possible Mass for today, I went to Bronzeville for the 10.30a…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Jerome
Chicago has two St Jerome churches but only one had Mass in the evening so I went to Rogers Park. I rushed to get there for the 6p start time and arrived a few minutes to what I assumed was the beginning of the Spanish Mass, but noticed that there was no priest in the…