Category: religion
-
Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Paul
Today being the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, I had a variety of options for where to go, but I opted for Saint Paul’s church in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. I just checked the website to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken, and there was nothing there to indicate what I discovered when…
-
Today’s saint picture: Saint Heimerad
Looking over the options for saints for today (and discovering too late that it’s the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), I stumbled upon Saint Heimerad who, despite his weird name has a kind of cool story, most notably with his nickname, “Fool for Christ.” He apparently had difficulty with living in community, was…
-
Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Sacred Heart
The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus takes place on the Friday after the feast of the Holy Trinity which makes it one of those movable feasts in the Catholic liturgical calendar (most of these are based on the date of Easter, with the only exceptions I’m aware of being Christ the King and…
-
Today’s saint picture: Saint David the Dendrite
Early saints often ended up with rather—eccentric—biographies. The holiness of these figures drew people to them when they just wanted some alone time and in the case of Saint David the Dendrite, his solution to his was to climb an almond tree and live there for three years, thus his title (dendrite coming from the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…