Category: religion
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint William
Back to a domestic church visit, today I went to the Saint William parish in the Mont Clare neighborhood of Chicago. The church building is a 1959 building with a very mid-century modern aesthetic to it. the tinterior, meanwhile, reflects the final days of pre-Vatican II architecture with side chapels and a sanctuary surrounded by…
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Today’s saint picture: Birth of Saint John the Baptist
Most Catholic religious feasts commemorate the death of the saint. As far as I know, there are only three births celebrated in the Catholic church: Jesus (Christmas), Mary (September 8th) and John the Baptist (today). Jesus and John are mentioned in the Bible and I suppose once we had a feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception¹…
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Today’s saint picture: Blessed Marie of Oignies
I was briefly excited when reading the biography of Marie of Oignies to read about her being married and convincing her husband that they should live in poverty and care for the lepers in Nivelles and this led to her foundation of the Beguines, a lay order that did not take formal orders. Then I…
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Today’s saint picture: Saint John Fisher
Thanks to a chance review of a book by Graham Greene, Louise Imogen Guiney’s Recusant Poets, I ended up doing a deep dive into the reformation and Catholic counter-reformation in England (I have a fairly deep collection of books about 16th–17th century English Catholicism and the poets of that era) so seeing that today’s saints included…
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Today’s saint Picture: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga
There’s a Saint Aloysius church in Chicago, but it doesn’t have a Saturday Mass so I’m doing a picture instead of my nerd pilgrimage today. Aloysisus Gonzaga was one of the generation of Jesuits who entered when the order had become established after Ignatius’s death and, although born an aristocrat and the heir apparent in…
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Today’s saint picture: Saint Silverius
Looking over the options for today’s saint, I ended up settling on Saint Silverius, who was one of the handful of popes without a roman numeral after his name (out of 267 popes, there are 41 without roman numerals). What’s more, his father was a pope, although he had married and bore Silverius before being ordained…
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Today’s saint picture: Saints Mark and Marcellinus
A pair of saints about whom nothing is known beyond their names which of course means that it was an opening to make things up. So tradition says that they were twin brothers in the Roman nobility who refused to apostosize and were beheaded as a result. The drawing I did here was based on…
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Today’s saint picture: Saint Albert Chmielowski
Albert Chmielowski is another one of these interesting figures, he was involved with the Polish independence movement in the 19th century and in a battle, was injured by a Russian grenade leading to his losing his leg. He went on to study engineering, but discovered he had a talent at painting so he dropped out…
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Today’s saint picture: Saint Lutgardis
Catholics have a tendency to overdo it with the priests, monks and nuns in their canon of Saints and Lutgardis falls into that category, although in her case, she originally entered the convent not out of any sense of vocation but because her dowry had been lost in a failed business venture. She was twelve…