My English Tour

From June 30 to July 17 I was on a tour of England. My visit was entirely recreational, taking me in a circuit around the country from London to Kent, then on to Dorset and Cornwall, then Somerset, Oxford, and the Midlands and then up to Northumbria and back down to Norfolk. Here are some of my reflections from the trip that you may find of interest.

California Days

I recently took a trip out to Southern California and had a very edifying time visiting various churches and religious sites. Though Southern California is obviously a hotbed of progressive nonsense politically, for the devout Catholic, it's also a rich paradise of cultural, historic, and religious sites.

Last Friday in particular I devoted the entire day to pilgrimage. I began by making a drive into the hills up to Silverado in Orange County to visit the Norbertine monastery of St. Michael. The monastery grounds were gorgeous; unfortunately the building was from the 1970s and not very aesthetic. But a brother I met in the parking lot quickly told me about a new building they were soon going to be moving in to, one in the more traditional style. He invited me to attend mid-day prayers in the chapel, which was a huge grace. While I waited for the prayers to begin, the brothers quietly emerged from various doors and passages and glided into their choir stalls. I was surprised not only at their number (I counted 30), but also their relative youth. Of the 30 brothers I saw, I counted 14 that looked to me to be in their twenties. I also noticed a few novices and postulants sitting off to the side who were also all young men. 

They began their prayers, all chant, all Latin. It was lovely. I am pretty sure this was a Novus Ordo community, but how nice it was to see youthful brothers in their full traditional habits chanting the office in Latin. And to see their community was growing and would soon be in better quarters! After prayers, one of the older members of the community, a priest named Fr. Steven, spoke with me at length about the new building and asked me to take a drive out to the new location and take a look at it. I followed his advice and took a picture of the new St. Michaels. The brothers will be moving in before Christmas, Lord willing:

If you want to do more research on the Norbertines of St. Michael, their website can be found here.

After my morning with the Norbertines, I drove down to San Juan Capistrano to visit the mission there, one of the famous California missions founded by St. Junipero Serra (1713-1784). I had been to the mission before, but it had been several years. When I was last here I was in a group and had to stick with the group, so now I was looking forward to exploring it alone and at my own pace. The mission architecture and grounds are of course beautiful, as is the case with all the historic California missions. I had a great deal of peace and spiritual refreshment exploring the grounds, stopping to pray or just sit in the various little corners of beauty, and strolling the porticoes. The weather was fine, sunny but cool and breezy. 

The mission chapel is particularly noteworthy. Though much of it is reconstructed, the reconstructions were done using materials from the same period taken from other similar structures and based on historical drawings and photographs. It is a very accurate representation of what St. Junipero must have seen when he offered Mass here:

I was able to spend quite a bit of time in here in prayer. The mission was a little quieter than usual due to Covid I was told and I had the place to myself for some time. What a grace!

After this I wanted to make a trip up to the San Gabriel Mission, but I was informed by a docent that it had regrettably been destroyed over the summer in an apparent act of anti-Catholic arson. 

Now it was late afternoon and I drove  from San Juan Capistrano over to Costa Mesa, where several friends had recommended I visit the parish of St. John the Baptist, a Norbertine parish that was reputed to have a very beautiful sanctuary and a Perpetual Adoration chapel. I was disappointed to find when I arrived that the Adoration chapel was closed due to Covid restrictions. So I went to pray in the church instead. As I walked in, I noticed there was an old woman kneeling on the sidewalk praying the Rosary. I was like "Um...okay I guess that's what they do here" and went past her. When I got into the church, I was blessed to find there was a wedding going on. I obviously kept my distance as not wanting to intrude on their special moment, but I walked in at the very end when the Bride and Groom are kneeling and getting ready to receive the final blessing from the priest after Communion. I snapped a picture of it because I thought it was such a lovely scene:

After the Bride and Groom left, I was able to spend some time praying alone in the sanctuary, just myself and some Filipino ladies who were saying the Rosary. I also walked about the parish grounds a bit and found this charming statue of Our Lady of Lavang, which is one of my favorite non-European depictions of the Blessed Virgin:

As I saw this image, I was really struck by the Catholicity of the Church. Here I was visiting a parish in the United States, an English speaking country. The bride at the wedding and her whole family seemed to be native Spanish speakers, while the groom and his side seemed to be native English speakers. Then there's these Filipino ladies praying in the chapel and a statue of a Vietnamese depiction of Mary in the back. 

As I was leaving, I noticed the old lady was still kneeling outside praying the Rosary. Then I saw other people were kneeling in the grass, in the parking lot. It was super bizarre, so I turned to see what they were all kneeling towards. That was when I noticed the Blessed Sacrament was being displayed from the second story window of a building next door to the Church, presumably the Rectory. When Covid restrictions closed the Adoration chapel, the pastor had moved the sacrament to the rectory, which allowed people to adore from the parking lot. I immediately dropped to my knees, embarrassed that I had walked back and forth across this area multiple times without realizing what was going on. I took this picture, which I found profoundly moving:

After the day was over, I felt a great peace in my soul. This was only a few days after the election, and everything nationally seemed to be in chaos. None of that seemed to matter though. It was so refreshing to see Catholic life going on as usual in all these places: monks chanting the Divine Office as they have since the time of St. Benedict; sitting in prayer before an altar upon which Masses were said before a United States of America ever existed; quietly fellowshipping with other Catholics of diverse backgrounds in the worship of the King of Kings in the Blessed Sacrament. Basically, experiencing the cliché but very true maxim that "God is still on the throne."

Of California Missions and St. Joseph

Grace and peace to you friends! I will be out of commission for awhile; my wife and I are taking a long overdue vacation to sunny California. We will be visiting many of the historic Spanish missions, starting in San Diego and heading up the coast to end at Sacramento. I am particularly excited about getting a chance to venerate Bl. Junipero Serra only a month ahead of his canonization by Pope Francis in September. We will be stopping in San Diego, Laguna Beach, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Sacramento and everywhere in between. If you are in the area and have any recommendations for masses or attractions, please let me know in the combox or email at uscatholicam@gmail.com.

When we return home, my family and I will be making another major transition - we have sold our house of nine years and are moving to another part of Michigan. We will thus be very busy in September and I do not anticipate I will get a chance to post much. There may be some guest posts and my co-bloggers Noah and Maximus may post, but I doubt I will be around much. Please pray for us during this transition.

As a side note, I never had too much confidence in the practice of burying the statue of St. Joseph upside down to sell a house. It just sounded...well, really weird. We were confident our house would sell quickly; its a cute house, very well maintained, and with lake access - and homes are moving quick right now in Michigan. But we were very disheartened when a month and then two went by without even so much as a single offer on the home. Even lowering our price did nothing. Then we started into our third month with no activity. We began to think we'd be here all fall.

Then my wife suggested I buy the St. Joseph Home Seller Kit (I still don't like that name); we prayed the prayers, buried the statue, started saying the novena. Three days after the statue was buried, the house sold. And we found and purchased our dream house the next day.

Deo gratias!

A Visit to the Solanus Center

Today my family and I made a visit to the Solanus Center in Detroit. The Solanus Center is part of St. Bonaventure's, a Capuchin monastery in downtown Detroit famous as the home of Ven. Solanus Casey. Solanus Casey (1870-1957) was the son of Irish immigrants from the midwest, the third oldest of a family of sixteen. He was ordained a Capuchin priest in 1903, but because of his poor grades in theology and latin, he was ordained as a "simplex priest", meaning that he remained permanently without the faculties of hearing confessions or preaching theologically complex sermons. He spent a few years in Huntington, Indiana and Brooklyn, New York, but most of his life as a Capuchin, fifty years, was spent at St. Bonaventure's in Detroit.

He was assigned the very humble office of porter in the monastery, which, however, brought him into contact with hundreds of people and their problems. He became a familiar face locally; he began the practice of praying for the people he met and keeping a journal of answered prayers. Over the several decades he was porter at St. Bonaventure, he logged thousands of answered prayers, everything from miraculous healings to simple things like men finding employment (his prayer logs were on display at the Center). Once, when Chrysler had shut down in 1925, he had the whole company enrolled in the Seraphic Mass Association and had 500 Masses said for the company; a month later the factories were back in business and were even working overtime. At the time, it was popularly believed that his prayers saved Chrysler. By the 40's and 50's people regularly waited hours to see the "Holy Priest." When he died in 1957, 20,000 people attended his funeral. He is buried outside of the chapel in St. Bonaventure's.

I really do not know how well Ven. Solanus Casey is known outside of Michigan, but around these parts there is great pride in our local saint. Our visit there was very moving; I was able to pray right on Fr. Solanus' coffin, attend Mass in the chapel where he worshiped and walk through the great doors where for decades he served humbly as a porter, in addition to seeing his violin, habit, sandals, prayer logs, etc.

If Father Solanus serves as an example of holy simplicity for our age, it was a real let down that the monastery where he served offers a contrary example of everything that is worst about modernity.

The humble monastery itself had been converted into a very modern facility with information desks, interactive computer displays and all the bells and whistles. Relics of the Capuchin lifestyle were displayed behind glass cases. Educational panels described that the lifestyle of the monastery in Father Solanus' day was "almost medieval" and remained so from its founding "until the 1960's." But that austere way of life had vanished. You felt like you were in a modern museum in which the past was respected, but the way one respects an exhibit; it was no longer a living way of life. The doors where the humble Father Solanus had once answered as porter were now watched by a privately contracted security guard. The rest of the center was like some sort of social justice shrine. Like so many other orders, it seemed like the Detroit Capuchins had kind of switched their focus over the decades from contemplation to social work. There were statues of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero, among others. I did not see a Martin Luther King Jr. icon, but one would not have seemed out of place.

When we got to the chapel, I noticed that, while much of the original neo-gothic high altar and wooded reredos where Solanus Casey said Mass had survived, the chapel had been renovated in the modern round orientation with the tabernacle way off in the back in a small little room about as far away from the altar as it was physically possible. As we prepared for Mass, we were distracted by the "praise band" rehearsing loudly with piano and flute, and the sanctuary was astir with people walking to and fro chatting as if it were coffee and donuts after Mass. I am afraid to say that the Capuchin friars did nothing to discourage this. In fact, several of them walked around mingling and chattering away as well.

As Mass began, I noticed that the celebrant was wearing rose-colored vestments, despite it being the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time. He explained that these pinkish-rose vestments were for "breast cancer awareness."

Music was very disappointing. It was a combination of piano, flute (which somehow always manages to be too loud in a liturgy) and three women with suit-pants and short hair who sung with great emotion and gesticulation. Everything was turned into a hymn; the Gloria was a hymn where the first line was a refrain; the responsorial psalm was turned into a hymn with a bridge and conclusion; Lamb of God and Sanctus were likewise performed as hymns, which is very common in NO parishes. Hymn selections were your standard fare; "Blest are They", "Unless a Grain of Wheat", etc.

The "praise band" was situated immediately to the right of the table altar (the massive neo-gothic altar Fr. Solanus used sat unattended in the back like a monolithic relic of a bygone age). I ought to mention that while the praise band occupied center stage to the right of the altar, an impressive choir-loft featuring a gloriously large pipe organ also remained conspicuously unused.

Readings and homily were on the rich young man. Capuchin celebrant mentioned some story from "the Zen tradition" that he had picked up "back in the seminary" and tried to relate it to the Gospel.

Let's talk about the passing of the peace. We have all heard of the ubiquitous people "jumping over pews." No one here jumped over pews, but they came pretty darned close. People left their seats and walked across the sanctuary; band members left the band area; priest stepped out of the sanctuary and mingled with the crowd. In went on for quite awhile. My daughter said, "Daddy, why are those people walking all over the place?" I couldn't come up with a good answer, so I just said, "They're being naughty," which maybe was the best answer after all.

During the Eucharistic liturgy not a single person kneeled at all at any time. They stood up until communion, and then after communion they just sat down. My family were the only ones kneeling.

As can be expected, there were an inordinate amount of Extraordinary Ministers. I counted seven. Seven EMHCs plus the priest for a congregation that had maybe seventy people in it. It was clear that the EMHCs are not for necessity, as the rules state, but more for the promotion of a kind of inclusive ecclesiology where lay people give the sacrament to themselves. With one priest and seven EMHCs, that means one attending this Mass only had a 12.5% chance of receiving Holy Communion from the hands of a priest, and that largely based on the accident of where you were sitting. As I suspected, the priest shuffled off to distribute on the other side of the sanctuary to a place where there were only ten people in line, leaving everyone else to go to the EMHCs. Well, I thought to myself that if they didn't mind people running all over the sanctuary for the passing of the peace, they wouldn't mind me doing so at communion time. So I grabbed a couple of my kids and sauntered off across the circular sanctuary to get in the line to get communion from the priest.

At one point I saw four EMHCs each with a chalice of the Precious Blood attending only a single line of communicants.

After communion, but before the last blessing, the priest gave some "announcements" that went on almost as long as the homily. Everyone with a birthday or anniversary that week was encouraged to stand up, state their birthday or anniversary, and everyone would give them applause.

As one final kicker, the priest, during the announcements, let everyone know that he would be leading a pilgrimage to Medjugorje and that there would be an informational video presentation after Mass.

After the liturgy was over, everybody started gabbing again immediately as the chapel emptied. I went outside, knelt beside the tomb of Ven. Solanus, banged my head on the coffin and prayed for the Universal Church.

On the way home, my wife asked me, "Why do they do that? When will people figure out how wrong that is and start doing it right?" I said, "Not until this entire rebellious generation dies in the wilderness."

Catholic Churches of the Keweenaw

On Sunday we went to Mass at St. Joseph's in Lake Linden. I am not sure about the history of this parish, as we arrived kind of late and had other engagements to go to after Mass and consequently had little time to explore. It was a beautiful parish; one of the locals told me it has a reputation of being the most beautiful Catholic parish in the Upper Peninsula. Here's a pic of the parish from across the street so you can get a view of how massive it is:

It is amazing that a town with a population of only 1,081 people should boast a parish this large and beautiful (and Lake Linden is one of the larger towns in the area). It is most likely a testimony to the large number of Catholic immigrants who came to the Keweenaw in the late 19th century to work in the copper mines and who have by and large vanished. The parish had a gorgeous two story high altar:

There is a tabernacle at the second level between the statues of Our Lady and St. Joseph. I believe there was another tabernacle at the main level. Is it usual for one altar set-up to have two tabernacles? Anyhow, this picture gives you an idea of how grandiose the place was (that is my son genuflecting, by the way). Here is another pic of the altar:     

The ceiling was beautifully decorated - French motifs were everywhere, calling to mind the French background of this region and its exploration by the Jesuit missionaries:

As you can see, the whole building has beautiful stained glass that is quite ornate. This was really nice because so many Catholic churches today, even when they make an attempt at stained glass, tend to skimp on it. It is nice to see stained glass that has some real depth to it:

                                                      

As you might guess, there was also an abundance of beautiful statuary, always a sign of a healthy spirituality.
I didn't get any pics of the choir loft, but there was a mammoth organ up there, the kind that probably costs more money than my house. The access to the choir loft was by a very simple but elegant winding wooden staircase:

This parish is a definite must-see if you ever go to Keweenaw. The priest preached a good, solid homily and music was decent. There was no chant and communion time saw an inordinate amount of EMHCs, but other than that it was fine. Everything here is very old and has been very well maintained. Speaking of things that are very old, even the restrooms at the parish had some real old-school accoutrements; check out this urinal - I don't think they are installing these kind of urinals new anymore!

At any rate, moving on from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Lake Linden, MI. we moved up north, further into the Keweenaw towards a long stretch of US-41 that is known for its many ghost towns. During the copper boom this area was thriving but after World War I the industry died and thousands left the area, leaving scores of abandoned factories and several ghost towns. The decline was drastic; Calumet, for example, once had a population of 60,000. Today it has only 2,000.

One of the real ghost towns is a place called Phoenix. All that is left of Phoenix now is one or two empty houses, a general store, some ruined foundations and an empty Catholic Church. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church was the local parish when Phoenix was a copper boom town. The church was situated along a row of churches (a Methodist church used to be next door). The parish was abandoned when the rest of the town was, but care of the parish was taken over by the Keweenaw Historical Society and the parish has been lovingly restored:

The parish is restored, but as it is in the middle of a ghost town, it is no longer an active parish. It is a very strange sight...a kind of "ghost town parish" that has been transformed into a museum. Here is what you see when you walk inside:

 

That is my wife with the hat on. You see when you walk into the door that the main entrance way through the Narthex has been blocked off by plexiglass so you cannot enter the church proper. The priest and altar server you see in the distance are mannequins. There was a place for donations. We put a $10 bill on with a note that said, "Please have processions and reopen this parish."

It was kind of eerie, this restored parish alone out in the middle of nowhere. But it was beautiful in a lonely sort of way. 

The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Phoenix was the only building other than some residential houses that was still standing. In the grounds near the church, you could see the foundations from the public school that used to be there:

Everywhere you went around the Keweenaw there was signs of the Catholic contributions to settlement here, whether it was the parishes that used to serve the Hungarian, Croatian and Austrian immigrants that came here to work in the mines, or just in the French names of many of the places that hearkened back to the age of the Jesuit explorers, like the town of Allouez, named after the Jesuit Fr. Claude Allouez, who was the first person to positively identify the presence of copper in the Upper Peninsula, among other things. There's much more I could say, but I think I can sum it up by saying it was a wonderful trip in a beautiful location. What more can one want? Deo gratias.

Vacation in Sarasota

Tonight I am leaving with my family for along anticipated vacation to Sarasota, Florida to stay with some family. My wife has been begging to go somewhere warm for years; instead, I keep dragging her up to places like Petoskey and Paradise in northern Michigan! We'll be in Sarasota for about two weeks and will be attending Christ the King F.S.S.P. Parish for daily and Sunday Mass. If you attend Christ the King and read this blog, come up and introduce yourself to us - it would be nice to meet some good Catholic folks while we're down there. We will stick out like a sore thumb since our family is 67% red head.

I am taking my laptop and may blog while I'm down there, but don't be surprised if I don't.

Off to New Jersey

I am off to New Jersey for the weekend to speak at this homeschool conference. The conference will be on Saturday at a place called Mater Ecclesiae in Berlin, New Jersey. Berlin is right across the river from Philadelphia, so if you are in the Philly area or northern New Jersey, consider coming out to Mater Ecclesiae this Saturday. I'm giving a 45 minute talk on Catholic historiography and how to teach history to kids in a way that is interesting and memorable. I'll post the transcript of the talk and details about the conference when I get back on Monday.

Blessings!

Parishes in Sarasota area?

Next month my family and I are going down to Sarasota, Florida for a week and a half to stay with some family. Can anyone give me some recommendations of parishes to attend in the Sarasota-Bradenton area for Sunday and daily masses? The Extraordinary Form would be nice, but a reverent Novus Ordo would be fine as well. Last time we went to Sarasota we just went to the first Catholic Church we found in the phone book and wound up at some weird, roundish-shaped parish that was fairly progressive. Can anyone offer any input so this doesn't happen to us again?

Also acceptable would be a Uniate, Ukrainian, Maronite or Chaldean rite parish. I'm sure I could just Google these things, but just googling parishes and looking at their websites doesn't give you the kind of feedback that individuals can provide.

Blessings and grace!

There and back again

I rolled in from New York at about 4:45 AM yesterday morning and am still recovering from the subsequent exhaustion...but it was a wonderful trip, with a lot of blessings and a lot of snags, and when I get time I will post a full write up with pictures and everything.

As for the "Who Said It?" quote, I was surprised that nobody took a shot at it, since this is from one of the best books of all times, Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. It is taken from the Epilogue of the book, part IV, where Alyosha Karamazov is talking to some street boys about how preserving the memory of how "we were once good" can be enough to bring one back to grace, even though they may grow old and wicked.

There is so much to blog about this week: the Vatican's announcement of new guidelines for the reception of Anglicans, new directives on Medjugorje that further call the validity of the apparitions into doubt, the continuing disintegration of the country under BHO and much more; I also have a book review for a great new work on the liturgy that I am putting together. I hope to be back at it soon - now I have to go to Confession, so I'll catch up when I can.

Blessings.

Anselm's Pictures of Roma

Here are some of my favorite pictures from a recently concluded week long trip to Rome (with a day trip to Orvieto) in no particular order.

First up, Il Duomo - the centerpeice of Orvieto built to house the corporal stained with the Blood of Christ from the eucharistic miracle of nearby Bolsena in 1263 (said to have inspired the feast of Corpus Christi instituted for the universal Church in 1264). The facade is a masterpeice of mosaic, surely one of the most beautiful in Italy, perhaps in the world.

Next is a shot of a memorial to Card. Stanislaus Hosius in Santa Maria in Trastevere. Card. Hosius (Catholic Encyclopedia) was a leading figure at the Council of Trent and the leader of the Polish episcopate's fight against Protestantism in the 16th century. The inscription is pointed and succinct.

This is the interior of the best restaurant in Rome (perhaps in the world). When in Rome my wife and I eat bread/cheese/fruit and drink wine from the grocery stores as often as possible in order to afford a few good meals at this place.

Bernini's colonnade form inside Piazza San Pietro

Detail from the columns of St. John Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome. "The Holy Lateran Church Mother and Head of All the Churches of the City and of the World."

Next to the altar of St. Ignatius in the church dedicated to the Most Holy Name of Jesus (Chiesa Gesu), the headquarters of the Jesuits in Rome, is this piece entitled, "Religion Triumphs over Heresy," in which religion personified thrashes a couple of heretics (Protestants) while a child rips the pages out of their heretical books.