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The 16 Carmelites martyrs of Compiegne have become famous not only for their martyrdom, but for singing while at the scaffold. William Bush, in his book To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne Guillotined July 17, 1794, draws from eyewitness accounts and archival material to describe what exactly the sisters sang. The first song to note is a parody of La Marseillaise, written by one of the sisters, and sung when the sisters were in prison awaiting trial.

In James Hitchcock’s 1979 work Catholicism and Modernity, there is a quotation that particularly interested me: One of the choicest of all the ironies of the postconciliar era presented itself here, since in its decree on communications, Inter Mirifica, the Council warned severely against precisely those misuses of the media which the conciliar excitement was in the process of inspiring. There developed an almost universal conspiracy of silence about that document.

My grandmother, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, left behind a beautiful photo album of her childhood and college years. I digitized it recently, since it’s ancient and crumbling. After cleaning the photos, physically and digitally, the fun has been researching the photos to see if I can find out where they were taken. This is complicated by the fact that my grandmother was very literary and clever, so sometimes the captions are puns or poems or places.

Most of my content is fairly dense, so today I decided to take a break and have fun with some lighter content. The National Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM) has made freely available most of the issues of their magazine Pastoral Music: https://npm.org/pastoral-music/ To get a sense of what musicians, liturgists, cantors, academics, priests, and others were talking about in the years following the Second Vatican Council, I collected some excerpts from the first five volumes, from 1976-1981.

Continuing the theme of Catholic fact-checking, today’s exploration is of Pope St. John XXIII and fresh air. As the story goes, when Pope John XXIII was asked why he called for a council, he walked over to his window, threw it up, and said something like, “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.” This is cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations1 but it is the only quotation of his that has the dubious label “attributed.

Every so often, a quotation attributed either to St. Basil the Great or St. Peter Damian circulates. The quotation reads: Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he shall be disgraced by spitting into his face, bound in iron chains, wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week put on barley bread given him toward evening.

There is an anecdote that circulates in the Catholic blogosphere about the promulgation of Pope John XXIII’s apostolic constitution Veterum Sapientia. In one example, the story goes: “Veterum Sapientia is proud to announce its Fourth Annual Latin Conference for priests, deacons, religious (male and female), and seminarians, hosted this year at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. from July 31 to August 6. The program is called Veterum Sapientia after the Apostolic Constitution which Saint John XXIII signed at the high altar of St.

This post is an exploration of seder meals as they appeared in the Catholic News Archive. How was the topic described? When did it peak in usage? Did its connotations or associations for Catholics change over time? Methods: Search terms “seder meal” “seder meal”~10 passover meal “Catholic seder”~20 Results The most useful search was “seder meal”~10. Almost all of the early (1880s-1950s) results for “seder” were false hits - a result of the OCR.

“When a severe plague was raging in the city of Trent in 1546, it is reported that the fathers of the Council of Trent devoutly wore certain characters arranged in the form of a cross collected by S. Zacharias, ancient Bishop of Jerusalem. In fact, they found that wearing and venerating these characters as signs of various devout ancient and spontaneous prayers to ward off the evil of contagion (as described by their explanation), was an advantageous remedy against the plague.