Most of the time when I go to a weekday Mass, it’s no more than a dozen people present, St Rita being the main exception thusfar, but today’s trip to Marytown, home of the National Shrine of St Maximilian Kolbe was the most packed Mass I’ve seen, including Sundays. I arrived just as the Mass was beginning to find the church filled to standing room only.
Marytown is a convent¹ of Franciscan Friars, and was designated the national shrine to Maximilian Kolbe in 2000. Apparently, this was enough to spark a huge attendance for today’s Mass.
- Fun nerd fact, a “convent” is a communal residence for members of a mendicant order, such as the Franciscans, and not, as many would assume, where nuns² live. Presumably this distortion of the term is a result of most parish-based orders of religious sisters being some variant of Franciscans, but a convent can just as easily be where a group of Franciscan priests and lay brothers live.
- Of course, “nun,” strictly speaking, would refer only to a cloistered religious woman and not the majority of religious women who do not live in a monastery (not a convent—see the footnote above). The religious who do things like teach or engage in various social ministries are sisters, not nuns.
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