Mass Times

Two early morning Masses this weekend.

Saturday morning was the (6:15 am) Rorate Caeli Mass at the gorgeous Blessed Sacrament parish here in Birmingham.

(Those of you vaguely familiar with the area or with EWTN might confuse it with the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Not the same place – the latter is north of here, in the community of Hanceville. And not to hurt anyone’s feelings, I’ll just say that in IMHO, this church building – beautiful early 20th century Romanesque with a hint of Art Deco – is far more appealing.)

This was a Traditional Latin Mass, with a nice schola. It was darker outdoors when Mass began than the photo indicates, and the whole element of the sun rising by the end of Mass was not in full effect partly because a rainstorm rolled in and partly because the windows of the church are not only stained glass, but smallish.

Nonetheless it was a lovely Mass with a pretty full church.

There will be another Rorate Caeli Mass at our Cathedral next Saturday, but I won’t be here for that.

From a friend who was also at that Mass, I learned that a parish near me had added a 7am Sunday Spanish Mass to the lineup. Since, due to old age I suppose, early morning Masses are starting to be my jam, I decided to check it out, not expecting a big crowd since the Sunday afternoon Spanish Mass was still in place.

Wrong!

The place was packed!

Those of you who read my Substack will be amused to hear that one of the hymns was set to the tune of Blowin’ in the Wind….

I was just impressed that they had music at a 7am Mass!

A couple more church-notes from outside my area. Saw this on Instagram from a Georgia parish, but will link to the FB post here – the parish held a painting activity/contest for children to paint copies of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe – and had over 70 children participate – I thought this was a great idea and worth sharing.

Secondly – and I just realized I haven’t written much about the Colorado trip, sorry but while the whole trip was great, I guess I’ve still got some PTSD from my drive through constant snow on Monday and Tuesday morning – we went to Mass last Saturday night at the Cathedral in Denver and one of the minor elements that struck me was that in this era in which hand sanitizing before distribution of Communion has become another purification rite was that this parish has created a fitting way to accommodate that – a bit (I suppose) of hand sanitizer is put in a small covered silver vessel on the altar into which the priest and deacon dipped their hands for a dose before distributing. Much more coherent in appearance and action than grabbing some from a big plastic bottle off to the side.