I was able to get to Mass at St. Etheldreda's, Ely Place, this evening. I was looking at the beautiful stained glass, and the statues, and it struck me that these images, and the decoration of the vestments, were the "textbooks" in times past, when the majority of people couldn't read, or didn't have access to books.
How could we possibly have forgotten that all this beauty was
practical as well as aesthetic? Why were churches stripped of all their statues and pictures? - and I'm not referring to the Reformation, but to the wreckovation which happens in parishes even today!
Anyway, I thought I'd share...
The stained glass windows, vestment decorations and sermons on the Faith were indeed the 'textbooks' of the past but are they less needed today when the media and many 'Catholic' books and homilys have served to make the Catholic of the 21st century as illiterate as his forebears.
ReplyDeleteJoanna Bogle, in one of her EWTN programmes, gave a fascinating and informative 30 minute talk about St Etheldreda which is repeated a couple of times a year.
ReplyDeleteOooh; Mac, did you meet a Priest with glasses?
ReplyDelete