Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Adalbert, 2009

-

Today is, simply put, my favorite liturgical feast. The fervor and devotion of our parishioners is what brings life and energy to this day.

In 1531, when Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego, Mexico was in darkness. The indigenous had been conquered by Spanish invaders. Their world, as they knew it, had collapsed. Imported diseases wrought a horrific toll on the indigenous population. Indeed, there was darkness, and Our Lady was a light that shone in the darkness. She brought new purpose to the people of Mexico. Now, almost five-hundred years later, she brings light to the Americas and people the world over. She, like her Son, calls us to be light to the nations, to push back the darkness.


Even before Mass began, the church was full of the faithful.


The choir sang the traditional Marian hymns. This feast is a Feast of "Flor y Canto," Flower and Song. The choir is essential to this celebration.
Likewise, La Sociedad Guadalupana is essential to this Feast. They promote devotion to Our Lady throughout the year. They plan and organize the celebration. They lead the novena in the days leading up to the feast.
Location: 2420 West Huron Street, South Bend, IN 46619, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Más sabe el diablo. . .

-
Image
It's a phrase of Mexican origin, I'm told:  " Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ." It translates to "The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil." Often, proverbs in our native tongue do not surprise us as they are so common. We may not think twice about an expression like "The apple does not fall far from the tree," but its use in another language requires an explanation of what the phrase implies. Because a phrase is well-known to us, it may not captures us quite the way that one from a second language might. Sometimes expressions are so particular that they only can be understood in a particular context. [Another wonderful Mexican phrase, " No me cae el veinte ," refers to a 20 peso coin getting stuck in a pay phone. The adage is a means of expressing that the speaker does not understand a concept that the other has shared-- just as the coin is stuck in the payphone and one cannot yet proceed with
Read more

The Marvels of Murdoch Mysteries: Characters, History, Science, and Faith

-
Image
I do not watch much television. I have a few favorites like The Daily Show. I watch news. I am not heavily invested in television series. Nonetheless, I love Murdoch Mysteries . I got into it when I spent some time in Canada last year. Subsequently, Mom DVRs it each week on the local PBS station, and we have watched other seasons borrowed from the public library. Murdoch Mysteries is a Canadian television drama series aired on both City and CBC Television, titled The Artful Detective on the Ovation cable TV network, featuring Yannick Bisson as Detective William Murdoch, a police detective working in Toronto, Ontario, around the turn of the twentieth century. Murdoch Mysteries was initially adapted for television from Maureen Jennings ’s popular Detective Murdoch series of novels as three made-for-TV films broadcast in Canada in 2004 and 2005. The series first premiered in Canada in January 2008. Detective Murdoch is conspicuously Catholic. As he arrives at the scene of each hom
Read more

Time for "Just Mercy"

-
Image
Alongside Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and john a. powell's Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society , another extraordinary book on race and the criminal justice system is Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. A public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor and the incarcerated, especially the condemned, Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative , an Alabama-based group that has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. In an historic win for EJI, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Florida , 2010 , that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are uncon
Read more