Category: religion

I first heard of Padre Pio through Graham Greene’s memoir where he talked about being offered the chance to meet the friar but opted not to because he didn’t want his life changed by meeting a saint. Padre Pio Parish was formed through the merger of two northside parishes, St Hilary and Transfiguration of Our…

St Thomas of Villanova is one of those saints that people would have to look up to know anything about. To me, the name Villanova will always be connected to the pizzeria of my childhood, owned by the uncle of the kid who lived on the corner, said uncle, I was later to learn, was…

(I forgot to do this yesterday.) I arrived at the grounds of St Matthew church in Schaumburg right at the start time of the Mass and saw a large group of people gathered around a cross outside along with a pair of priests, an altar boy or two and a bunch of men in Knights…

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…