Regina is a new Catholic online magazine dealing with religion, culture and contemporary life.

http://www.reginamag.com/

The current issue deals with Catholicism in England. It’s worth a look!

(After battling with assorted computer problems the last two weeks we are glad to report the site is fully operational. While getting organized, we found the following missive in the mail from our dear friend Mr. Screwtape. We definitely don’t want to antagonize him – so we belatedly present to you his astronomical observations on the Feat of St. Lawrence.)

Originally from the city of Huesca in Spain, where, thanks to his inspired intervention, the sacred chalice used by Our Lord at the Last Supper reposes, Lawrence was an archdeacon of the Roman Church charged with the responsibility of managing the material goods of the pious patrimony of Saint Peter, and the devoted distribution of alms to the poor of the City. During the persecution of the Emperor Valerian, as the holy bishop of Milan, Ambrose, relates that when a pushy Prefect asked for the “treasures of the Church” the intrepid Iberian brought forward the poor and divinely declaimed: “Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the church’s crown.” The furious functionary was not amused, to say the least, arrested the cleric and had a great gridiron prepared, with pounds of fiery coals beneath it. Lawrence’s body was then petulantly placed on the ignited instrument. After some undetermined but objectively painful time elapsed, the lovely legend concludes, he made his famously cheery quip, “It is well done on the one side. Turn me over!”

From a July 2013 NASA press release: “We have found that one meteor shower produces more fireballs than any other,” explains Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It’s the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on August 12th and 13th.” Using a network of meteor cameras distributed across the southern USA, Cooke’s team has been tracking fireball activity since 2008, and they have built up a database of hundreds of events to analyze. The data point to the Perseids as the ‘fireball champion’ of annual meteor showers. A fireball is a very bright meteor, at least as bright as the planets Jupiter or Venus. They can be seen on any given night as random meteoroids strike Earth’s upper atmosphere. One fireball every few hours is not unusual. Fireballs become more numerous, however, when Earth is passing through the debris stream of a comet. That’s what will happen this August. The Perseid meteor shower comes from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Every year in early- to mid-August, Earth passes through a cloud of dust sputtered off the comet as it approaches the sun. Perseid meteoroids hitting our atmosphere at 132,000 mph produce an annual light show that is a favorite of many backyard sky watchers. Cooke thinks the Perseids are rich in fireballs because of the size of the parent comet. “Comet Swift-Tuttle has a huge nucleus–about 26 km in diameter,” comments Cooke. “Most other comets are much smaller, with nuclei only a few kilometers across. As a result, Comet Swift-Tuttle produces a large number of meteoroids, many of which are large enough to produce fireballs.” Cooke recommends looking on the nights of August 12th and 13th between the hours of 10:30 PM to 4:30 AM local time. Before midnight the meteor rate will start out low, then increase as the night wears on, peaking before sunrise when the constellation Perseus is high in the sky. For every fireball that streaks out of Perseus, there will be dozens more ordinary meteors. “Get away from city lights,” advises Cooke. “While fireballs can be seen from urban areas, the much greater number of faint Perseids is visible only from the countryside.”

Since the Perseid meteor shower, which has been observed for two millennia, occurs around the feast the magnificent Martyr they have been nicknamed “The Tears of Saint Lawrence”.

Therefore this sounds like the optimal opportunity for a Catholic camping excursion. And don’t forget to bring the barbecue!

Mr. Screwtape

When a church dies – the end of the parish of Mary Help of Christians on East 12th street. Only the wreckage of the church itself is left – the surrounding buildings have aleady been razed.

(Above and below) The inscription greeting the congregation as it left Mary Help of Christians: “This is my House from here my Glory will go forth” (In latin: Hic Domus Mea inde Gloria Mea”). This is the motto given to the original basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin, Italy by St. John Bosco (this New York parish was also a Salesian parish)

Solemn High Mass at St. Gabriel Church, Stamford , CT for the
Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Thursday, Aug 22 at 7:30 PM
Reception to follow in the Parish Meeting Room

CHRIST AMONG THE MEDIEVAL MENDICANTS

Friday August 23, 2013

8:30am-6:30pm FREE ADMISSION (suggested donation $8)

Please Register http://christ.eventbrite.com/

Room 9204 Graduate Center City University of New York 365 5th Avenue

Christ Among the Medieval Mendicants commemorates the 750th anniversary of the establishment of Corpus Christi as a universal feast day (1264) and the 750th anniversary of the Barcelona Disputation between Dominican Friar Paul Christian and Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (1263). 2013 is also (arguably) the 750th anniversary of St. Thomas Aquinas’ composing the Summa Contra Gentiles, as well as the Office and Hymns of Corpus Christi. His Dominican superior, St. Raymond of Peñafort, is said to have been the inspiration for both the SCG and Disputation. Various experts will present on Eucharist and Evangelization.

8:30 Registration/8:45 Welcome

9:00-10:00 Barbara Walters, PhD (CUNY, Kingsborough)

“The BNF 1143 Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi: Making the Implicit Explicit”

10:00-11:00 Rev. Joseph Koterski, SJ, STD, PhD (Fordham University)

“Expressing Theological Concepts in Popular Devotion: Skill in Aquinas’s Corpus Christi Hymns”

11:15-12:15 “The Disputation” (film featuring Christopher Lee)

12:15-1:15 lunch on your own

1:15-2:15 Robert Chazan, PhD (New York University)

“The New Christian Missionizing & the Mendicants”

2:15-3:15 Edmund Mazza, PhD (Azusa Pacific University)

“Not Everybody Loves Raymond: Dominicans & Jews, Sin & Tolerance”

3:30-4:30 Lori Pieper, PhD, OSF (Tau Cross Books and Media)

“Conversion, Dialogue, or Dhimmitude? St. Francis, the Sultan, & Relations with Islam”

The Morgan Library & Museum* 225 Madison Avenue (at 36th Street)

5:15-6:30 Roger Wieck (Curator, Medieval Collection)

“The Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon”

“Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art” http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=73

*Free Admission for Registered Conference Participants. Open late. Refreshments available for purchase.

Note from the organizers: We conclude the day with sacred music sung by members of several scholae. Time and place TBD. 

The Feast of the Assumption at Holy Innocents parish, New York, now under new management: Fr. George Rutler (the celebrant of yesterday evening’s liturgy).

Above, the restored Brumidi painting; below, the innumerable votive candles and this church.

Above and below: the gospel.

Fr. Rutler preaching: the relation of the Life of Mary and the Assumption to pressing “life issues” of the present day.

A large congregation was present this Thursday evening.

Holy Innocents – one of the most splendid Victorian interiors remaining in New York.

There will be a Solemn Requiem Mass at 7:30pm tonight (Monday August 5th) at St. Mary Church, Norwalk, for the repose of the soul of Fr. Kevin Fitzpatrick. This marks the fifth anniversary of his untimely death. Oremus pro eo.

(From: Le Forum Catholique)

Connecticut:

St. Gabriel, Stamford: Low Mass with Organ at 12 noon

St Stanislaus Church, New Haven.Low Mass  at 5:30pm

St. Mary, Norwalk: Solemn Mass at 5:30 pm

New York:

Immaculate Conception, Sleepy Hollow: Low Mass at 5 pm

Holy Innocents, New York:  Low Mass at 8:30 am; Solemn Mass at 6 pm (Fr. George Rutler, the new administrator of Holy Innocents, will celebrate that Mass).

Demolition of Mary Help of Christians begins (Photo from Ginsburg’s old apartment by Daniel Maurer)

No sooner had we reported on the impending fate of Mary Help of Christians in New York than the scaffolding goes up to implement the razing of the church.

One very unlikely source, however, was impressed by the role of this parish in a very tough time for this neighborhood. According to Daniel Maurer:

I imagine that view – and the cheap rent, of course – was part of what kept Ginsberg on the block during its darkest days. In “Notebook: 1983-1984,” he wrote about summer on East 12th: “the heat smog humidity stench and sulfur color of sky and street dust gave me to think I was living in Hell City – the inhabitants violently inclined to each other on my street.”

He described a heroin shop, a cigarette smuggling storehouse, a stolen car ring, and an abandoned garage from which someone shot him in the arm with a BB gun. But in the middle of the block’s madness was Mary Help of Christians, where “Sunday mornings a crowd dress’t in white and fresh lace Sunday pants and hats goes up & down the church’s front steps into the big wooden doors.”

Looks Like It’s Time to Give Up Allen Ginsberg’s Old Apartment

For another report see here (with pictures).

More photos from today: how to demolish a church.

The end of the school (from the rear).

The statue of Our Lady is already gone.

As in many New York churches only the facade was “finished” in stone.

A view you could never have had from the building of the church until now: the rectory has already been torn down.