Good Friday Tenebrae

Tenebrae Factae Sunt.

Holy Week for me will always be the good old days at Saint Agnes, located in the city named for the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Praying inside a glorious North American temple, amid the Classic Vitruvian canon of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders.  A church that was constructed in 1912 on a Baroque scale monumentally hithero unknown in the regions of the upper banks of the mighty Mississippi River.   With all the entablature and traditional motifs such as regular marble stripes and rectangular pattering with rising volutes and even a dome in the horizontal axis. 

Lots of fine memories there from my youth.  It was a great way to grow up, attending Tenebrae in choir to learn the chants of the Church.  And H.H.H., our deacon, always timed our Tenebrae each year, and it was almost always to the minute the same.   

There were many colorful personalities.  The great Fr. Z would arrive from Rome.  I miss the old holy cards he often had printed every Triduum.  They added a lot to the solemnity of the week.  The cards always made nice book markers in a Liber Usualis.  Was always kind of fun to look for cards from previous years kept away in the pages of old Libers on the sacristy shelf.  I always looked for the old Liber of Mons. Bandas to carry and hold and pray from during Tenebrae.  Mons. Bandas was one of the tallest trees in the forest before, during, and after the 1960s.  He evinced eminent priestly qualities one rarely encountered during the turbulent conciliar period and its immediate aftermath.  A prophet, really.    

Fortunate is the youth who gets to grow up being involved in a parish that is fortissimo (very loud) in the  Faith.  

Prayers for all readers and followers of this blog.

One word best describes the Passion of Our Blessed Lord: "mercy."

This word best describes God.  And what we are going to need when we pass from this world.   

Remember to speak often of the mercy of God.