Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Where will you be...

...on the evening of |December 16th? If you are in Sussex, why not come to English Martyrs Church, Goring, and hear about "Sussex saints and martyrs"? (Scroll down on that link under "Events" to find out more).

3 comments:

Victoria said...

Some years ago you posted that you were sending some gold chocolate coins to your nieces and nephews for the Feast of St Nicholas of Bari. I thought this was a lovely idea and as I now have a 2 1/2 yo great niece I sent her a bag of gold coins. When she is a little older I will enclose in the parcel the story of St Nicholas and I hope to have grandchildren to send the coins to also.

Thank you for posting about this lovely idea. Traditions and pieties add colour to the cloth of the Faith. It is a pity that so much of the genuine colour was done away with after Vatican II e.g. Corpus Christi processions, May Crownings etc and when people began to hunger for they knew not what the traditional pieties were replaced by clown Masses, giant puppets and liturgical dancing.

Joanna Bogle said...

Thank you for this. Last week I posted three bags of chocolate coins to three nieces, together with a box of turkish delight and a note about St Nicolas...

Corpus Christi processions are back - and in some cases never disappeared - at least in London. Just the other day we were discussing plans for our local one in 2010 in the suburb where I live. South London has several, organised by deaneries or by parishes. Oxford has a large one, and in central London there are some notable ones, including one with crowds of young people, through the streets of Soho, starting from St Patrick's in Soho Square. A good number of Catholic primary schools to my knowledge have May crownings of Our Lady.

I think clown Masses attracted publicity but were never really a loved or deeply-rooted feature of most churches, and were a passing fad, now over.

Greetings from one auntie to another!

Joanna

Malcolm McLean said...

I Have to say that, in 40 years of being a Catholic, I've never attended a single inappropriate Mass. That's to say, a Mass where a priest does something grossly silly or extreme, such as dressing up as a clown, or allowing the congregation to hold samples of wine in plastic chalices, which are then mass consecrated as the precious blood. I've heard of such happenings, of course, but I've never actually seen it with my own eyes.