New writing

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding, the US Catholic bishops organized a Eucharistic procession from Florida to Maine. (In a Eucharistic procession, Catholics walk behind a priest holding the consecrated host—the Eucharist— aloft in a monstrance, a vessel whose name derives from the Latin monstrare, “to show.”) I joined the nine “perpetual pilgrims” traveling the whole route when they came through Richmond on June 4. The pilgrims wore t-shirts printed with the procession’s theme, “One Nation Under God.” For The Lamp, a delightful Catholic literary journal, I wrote about marking American unity with a walk through the secessionists’ capital, where those who believe what the pilgrims do have always been a small minority:

The procession began on Church Hill, across the street from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, where in 1775 Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. In the shadow of that famous church is Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, built in 1860 for Irish immigrants, who would join the Confederate cause as enthusiastically as anyone else in the South. I joined a small crowd milling around on the sidewalk outside Saint Patrick’s, where weeds grew up between the bricks. When the door opened and the priest appeared on the porch with the golden monstrance, a cloud of incense wafted out and mingled with the florals of early summer and the garbage and exhaust fumes of the city. Everyone knelt. As the priest stepped carefully down to the street, the only sound was the house sparrows chirping in the gutter.

Read the rest at The Lamp.