Treasures of the Sewing Room at St. John Cantius
An uplifting glimpse of the immense love our forefathers had for the Faith and especially for the Mass
I can’t wait to share with you galleries of images of this 1863 altar missal, replete with hand-painted illustrations. But first…
Big Announcement
My next book, Turned Around: Replying to the Most Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass, is now available for pre-order from TAN. The estimated release date is October 22. (Copies could very well ship sooner.)
Here’s the publisher’s description:
In this often surprising book, Dr. Kwasniewski takes nine objections Catholics make to the traditional Latin Mass, and turns them around in jiu-jitsu fashion: “You are right — but you don’t realize how right you are!”
To the objection that “the priest has his back to me. I can’t engage with him,” he replies: “Yes, he does, and no, you can’t — that’s exactly how it should be, and here’s why.” Or “at Mass the priest is doing everything and I’m just watching him”: “Yes, he alone does everything in his proper priestly way, and that makes it possible for you to do everything in the way proper to you.” Or: “It’s all fancy, like a royal court, which doesn’t fit with a democratic society like ours”: “That’s right, because we are in a royal court, the most royal and most courtly of all, and we have left democracy far behind.”
And so with six additional objections, having to do with:
the use of a a non-vernacular, ancient language;
kneeling to receive Communion on the tongue;
repetition in prayers, gestures, and readings;
the “limits” of the one-year lectionary;
fixed rituals governed by strict rubrics;
the inability to understand everything, even after long exposure has opened one door after the next.
By turning the tables around, Dr. Kwasniewski helps us to savor the Holy Spirit’s wisdom in forming over the centuries this venerable rite for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — the way that countless saints prayed the Mass day in and day out — and shows how we, too, stand to gain from its peculiar non-modern, even anti-modern features. Ultimately, fidelity to tradition guides us to deeper conversion: the turning-around to God that is the most important of all conversions.
Dr. Kwasniewski’s Turned Around: Replying to the Most Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass transforms challenges into gateways, perplexities into fresh insights, brick walls into garden paths. Find out why it is exactly the paradoxical and countercultural aspects of the Latin Mass that powerfully draw increasing numbers of the faithful, young and old, to this mysterious and luminous rite of divine worship.
(The book may be preordered here.)
St. Martha’s Room at St. John Cantius
My readers likely know already about the very famous St. John Cantius Catholic Church in West Chicago (pictured above; all photos in this post are mine), staffed by the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius. Boasting one of the most ambitious and luxuriant sacred music programs in the country, set within a gigantic and beautifully renovated Baroque Polish church, welcoming congregations in the thousands, Cantius is truly one of the most flourishing communities in the entire Archdiocese of Chicago, nay, in the United States of America. I was at Cantius last weekend for the world premiere of my motet “Ego Dilecto Meo” by His Majesty’s Men, alongside premieres of motets by my friends Nicholas Lemme and Mark Nowakowski (I will share recordings as soon as they become available).
But behind the grand liturgies are the quiet labors of dedicated individuals who work on the many types of labor required: the musicians and singers, of course; the clergy who prepare bulletins, schedules, homilies, trainings; the janitors who keep the church spic and span. It seems to me that the ones who are most easily forgotten are the seamstresses who patiently repair the glorious old vestments that are donated to the Canons Regular, who make a point of bringing them back into circulation if at all possible. These women, skilled with their hands, work in the St. Martha’s Room of the St. Joseph’s Building, using old sewing machines they say work far better than newer models.
(Those of you reading this article via email, remember that if you click on this article’s title, you will be brought to the Tradition & Sanity Substack online where you can then click on and enlarge each photo — well worth it with all the galleries to follow!)
The vestments they are repairing are most impressive. As one of the sewers mentioned to me, one can hardly find vestments like this any more, with (e.g.) gold-wrapped threads densely mounted over leather patterns, or with such density and delicacy of embroidery. It is worth taking hours and hours to fix them. We can only stand in admiration of our forebears, hoping one day that our cultural Dark Age will end, and a new Middle Ages be born from the ruins.
Also on display were magnificent processional banners, some in German (as one would have seen throughout the Midwest, in addition to Polish, Slovak, Czech, and many other languages of immigrant communities), and a whole box full of hand-colored miniatures of banners available from a church goods company. You could buy the box of miniatures and have it on hand for your future purchases. Here we catch a faint echo of the abundance of sodalities and devotions that marked Catholic life until Vatican II!
St. Martha’s Room also apparently contains items that simply don’t have a place anywhere else, as this gorgeous sculpted Calvary group:
Indeed, all around St. Joseph’s Building, you can find delightful works of art. Here’s a painting, located in a stairwell, of the rarely-depicted St. Hugh of Lincoln, whose iconography usually incorporates the affectionate goose that lived in his manor (Julian some years ago wrote a fine article about this saint).
I would be remiss not to share a few photos of the splendid private chapel on the fourth floor, the guestroom floor where I stayed, which sadly few people ever have opportunity to see:
Saving the best for last!
At the start I mentioned an altar missal. I had the opportunity to examine up-close a treasure kept by the Canons Regular. Printed in 1863 by the famous publisher Pustet in Regensburg, I have never seen its equal in the realm of printed missals (vs. hand-copied, illuminated ones). Quite apart from its handsome binding and elegant typography, this missal owes its extraordinary beauty to the unbelievable dedication of an anoymous painter, very likely a nun, who painstakingly painted every single illustration and drop cap in the entire book. One can see that they were painted both from the evidence of the strokes of pigment when you look at it closely, and from the fact that the same letters or illustrations are colored differently each time.
First, the binding and frontispiece:
Next, the title page and the incensation pages:
Here’s a close-up that shows the paint application:
Now for a generous selection of the smaller paintings throughout (I have had to brighten the images to bring out the details more clearly; the book is a bit darker than the photos make it appear).
For Advent:
For Christmas:
Now we move into Epiphanytide:
Throughout, larger illustrations occupy partially blank pages:
As one would expect, during Septuagesima and Lent, the images often reflect the Passion:
At every major juncture there is a full page with an image at the top, a drop cap, and scrollwork around the perimeter. We have seen some already; here is one for Maundy Thursday:
A close-up of the image at the top:
Good Friday and Holy Saturday, including part of the Exultet chant:
The pages for Easter, Ascension, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi:
Our Lady is given some of the finest art in the book (as she deserves!), and St. Joseph is not forgotten, nor St. Anne:
Nor are the lesser saints left behind. Here is the bold heading to the Proper of Saints:
Many times, our missal depicts specific saints with obvious attributes, such as St. Michael, who is given three different depictions:
St. John the Baptist is depicted twice:
The glorious company of the Apostles, including their instruments of martyrdom:
St. Mark is indicated by his lion, St. Leo the Great by his preaching, St. Ignatius of Loyola by his vision:
Otherwise the missal repeats the same design for a certain category of saint, e.g., confessor, virgin, holy woman, bishop, and the like. Here are depictions of male saints — prophets, kings, martyrs, pontiffs, priests:
Charmingly, a St. George-like knight shows up a few times (naturally, on the feast of St. George himself):
Here are depictions of female saints:
And now some odds and ends that didn’t fit into any other category:
For a 19th-century printed book, the sheer number, variety, and intricacy of these initials, with their ever-changing colorations, simply baffles the mind. I felt absolutely absorbed as I lingered over this missal, gazing at it page by page, imagining what it would be like to put this on an altar and use it for Mass; wondering even more about the soul of the anonymous colorist who must have done this work for love of the hidden Lord.
We shall close with a final image, showing the saints gathered round their crucified Lord and King, as indeed they do at every Mass:
Thank you for reading, and may God bless you!
Absolutely gorgeous!!!! Thank you so much for sharing all these incredible photos and details!
Fantastic! I could spend days in St Martha's, having done some liturgical sewing and repairing myself. But nothing like this with such antiquity. This is very hard and skilled work that they are doing here. And you are right - painstaking painting for sure for that Missal, but is sure was worth it! Thanks so much for sharing. And your new book looks very interesting, too.