Varia

St Edmund Campion, Jesuit martyr, is recalled on his feast day by Thos Fitzpatrick.

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Here is Francis Parkman on the days of the Blackrobes in New France:

The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast about on lord and vassal and black robed priest; mingled with wild forms of savage warriors knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forest, priestly vestments in the dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild paternal sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nature, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.

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According to Google Trends, the top cities for searches on the phrase Latin Mass are Boston, followed by Cambridge.

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For purely selfish reasons, I am pleased about the move of Boston's Latin Mass to Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Parish in Newton Upper Falls because I can more readily attend. I would be interested to hear Tom Fitzpatrick's and Richard Chonak's opinions on the move. A number of comments have been left at Bettnet.

Now if they can restore the Newton sanctuary to its 1910 splendor. When the German Church in Boston is closed, will a home be found for that magnificent altar?

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Mencken on the poetry of the Latin Church:

Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

(Via TSO)