Detroit, Mich., Mar 25, 2019 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- Maybe it was the classic sunglasses, the skinny jeans or the flocculent mustache. Maybe it was the vintage-style religious art, the men in embellished uniforms, or what looks like incense rising from the streets.
Whatever it was, a photo of a religious procession with a circa-1940’s aesthetic recently fascinated Catholics, who shared it on social media and other places around the internet.
Except the photo of a St. Joseph’s procession on the streets of Detroit wasn’t taken in 1945. It was taken last week.
“I guess what really makes it ‘epic’ in today’s terms is the steam from the city that…looks like holy incense,” said Canon Michael Stein, ICRSS, rector of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Detroit, which sponsored the procession.
“We dubbed it ‘city incense,’” he said of steam that can be seen rising up from the street in the already-iconic photo.
Canon Stein is a member of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a Roman Catholic society of apostolic life with an emphasis on the traditional Latin Mass. The Institute was invited to St. Joseph’s Church in Detroit in 2016 to revive what was then a struggling Church community.
(What is a “canon,” you ask? “In layman’s terms, if you take a monk on the one hand, and a diocesan priest on the other, and smoosh them together, you get a canon,” Canon Stein said.)
“When there was every material reason to shut it down (not enough funds, not enough faithful, a crumbling building), we’re very grateful that Archbishop Vigneron had a much grander vision (for the parish),” Stein told CNA.
“He created a win-win situation by unmerging St. Joseph’s (from a cluster of three parishes), making it its own parish within the archdiocese, and then inviting the Institute of Christ the King to come live here and breathe daily parish life back into it from scratch, and that’s exactly what we’ve done for the past two years,” he said.
One very visible sign of that new life in the parish is the beautiful St. Joseph’s procession, which the Institute has organized since 2017.
The appeal of the photo, and of the procession (which this year included 500 people), goes deeper than aesthetics, Stein said.
“I think it’s safe to say there’s a profound theological and spiritual reason why that photo resonates so much with our hearts,” he said.
“We are the religion of the Incarnation. God became man, the invisible God became visible, he sanctified the material world and elevated these visible, tangible signs to communicate invisible graces and to convey eternal truths.”
“This is my parish; this is what we do,” said Daniel Egan told The Detroit Catholic about the procession.
“This is a perennial St. Joseph Day tradition. St. Joseph Parish has been here for almost 150 years, so this isn’t new to this area. Maybe it fell out of practice for the last 30, 40 years, but we are showing we are Catholic, as we are called to,” he said.
“As Catholics, we’re told to live our faith in season and out of season, in the public square and in private, and that includes the city streets. If we’re not Catholic out there, we are truly failing to be authentically Christian.”
The photo of the procession includes the Knights of St. John in full uniform (a Catholic charitable organization with a very long history), as well as parish vicar Canon Adrian Sequeira, ICRSS, leading the procession in full choir habit, which is used when the order chants the Liturgy of the Hours together. The spots of blue throughout the photo symbolize the order’s total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Stein said.
St. Joseph speaks to the hearts of today as a gentle and loving man and father and worker, Stein told CNA.
Part of the homily from the feast day, he said, explained that God sends saints for the times – either holy people of the time who are witnessing to the Gospel, or saints of old who are re-presented and raised up as intercessors for the times.
“It only takes a quick glance around the world to see a fatherless society, and to see either a slothful or workaholic society, or a lack of an appropriate understanding of manliness,” Stein said.
“It’s neither brute nor effeminate, it’s faithful, it’s steadfast, it’s courageous and gentle. And we find all those things in St. Joseph, so I think that’s another part of the power of that picture.”
The procession, which traveled for less than a mile, stopped rush-hour traffic in the city, with the collaboration of Detroit police. It travelled to the Eastern Market, an iconic makers market in Detroit that has remained in the city since the 1800s, where workers can sell their wares and fathers can support their families – two things of which St. Joseph is the patron, Stein noted.
“So all the workers got to see their patron processing through the streets, whether they knew it or not,” he said.
The procession was part of numerous events celebrating St. Joseph that took place in both St. Joseph’s parish and throughout the archdiocese. In addition to the procession, St. Joseph’s parish had three Masses, an Italian dinner, and a running litany of other activities and devotions throughout the day.
Other Detroit parishes had St. Joseph’s Masses and dinners, including San Francesco Parish, which held a Mass, Italian dinner and St. Joseph’s play, and Holy Family Parish, which held an Italian-language Mass.
Beyond being a photogenic opportunity, Stein noted, the procession and all of the festivities on the feast of St. Joseph are the fruit of a lively spiritual and liturgical life.
“It shows that we’re alive,” Stein said. “These things are the fruit of a daily sacramental life, these things are the fruit of a reverent liturgy, and the fruit of a solid catechesis. They’re the fruit of our young adults being committed…Detroit as a city is coming back, and a lot of millennials are staying after college to get their first career jobs here.”
To fill the needs of an increasing number of young people, St. Joseph’s offers teenage catechesis and young adult groups, Stein said. The parish also has daily Mass and confession, a schola choir, and active volunteer groups, among other ministries. Within just two years, it’s become a hub for millennials in the Archdiocese, he noted.
“We are predominantly young,” Stein said, and young people are hungry for an incarnational faith.
“We are body and soul, all these spiritual truths are meant to be communicated through our senses. We get to see our faith, hear our faith, taste our faith, etc., and that just appeals to us so much,” he said.
“Truth needs to shine in beauty…we’re not angels, we’re not just pure intelligences, we need to see, touch, hear; and that’s something the traditional liturgy has always done. That’s something that a reverent Mass or procession can do, these visible signs that the Church has used throughout her history to excite devotion and promote devotion.”
[…]
According to the report, the settlements will be funded through the diocese’s self-insurance program, a loan, and “contributions from other religious orders, where appropriate.”
“The settlements will not come from parish or school assets, the annual diocesan appeal, donor restricted contributions, or restricted endowments, the report states.”
With all the “confession, reconciliation, and repair” going on in the Diocese of Richmond, it seems that transparency and simple honesty did not make the list. The Diocese’s “self-insurance program” is a fancy way of saying it is funded by, wait for it, the unrestricted contributions of parishioners. The “loan” will be paid, principal and interest by, wait for it, yes, that’s right, the unrestricted contributions of parishioners. Why will the payments not come from “parish or school assets, the annual diocesan appeal, donor restricted contributions, or restricted endowments”? Because these assets don’t belong to the Diocese but to the separate civil and/or canonical legal entities involved.
The Diocese’s verbal legerdemain leaves me very skeptical that it is going to “meet victim survivors with support and compassion”. If that were the case, there never would have been 50+ rape or sexual abuse victims to begin with. I have had significant experience, professional and personal, with Catholic dioceses throughout the U.S. for over 35 years on sexual abuse matters. The experience has been a bitter one, with “support and compassion” present primarily in public relations releases like the one here that are intended to manipulate the credulity and trust of the victims and anesthetize the laity into believing the problem has been solved. It hasn’t. The Catholic Church in this country is massively corrupt and has been for decades and even today is heavily infiltrated by homosexuals at all levels up to and including the highest.
Look closely at the inscription on the architrave shown in this photograph:
https://travel.sygic.com/en/poi/cathedral-of-the-sacred-heart-poi:15150519
The Gilded Age New York millionaire Thomas Fortune Ryan who built this cathedral single-handedly knew what was most important. Sadly, the interior of this magnificent building has been vandalized by Vatican II liturgical Nazi’s and bears little resemblance to its original conception and design, a paradigm of the Catholic Church in Richmond and this country, if not the world.
Charles Flynn,
Exactly. Thank you for sharing that link.
In the end, money that could have been spent on worthwhile endeavors gets spent on attempting to fix injustices that should never have happened, and in many cases, most likely did not happen. The way these things are often described, it almost sounds as though they printed the money. The bottom line is that it has to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t matter if it comes from one’s front pocket, back pocket, left pocket, or right pocket.
Yes, I agree with you that the squandering of $4 billion by U.S. Catholic bishops, let alone the ravaged lives of innumerable Catholics, victims and loved ones, is a sordid tragedy of horrendous proportions, regardless of who pays for it. The even uglier reality is that the Satanic evil that underlies it has not diminished; in fact, it has metastasized. For over 35 years I have said that stories like this will continue as long as the priesthood continues to be a safe harbor for homosexuals and other psycho-sexual deviates. Make no mistake, they make up the predominant share of priests in today’s ape-Church.