Today, on the last day of her year, the Church commemorates St Andrew the Apostle, first, with Peter, to be called. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv v and vi for this saint, and images of main points of his life.

Find out here, an entry at Dominicanus, which is a blog by an Australian priest who says the (old) Domincan Rite of Mass. His profile has a photo; is it of one of his Masses?

On this day in 1757, William Blake was born in London, the third of five children. He died in poverty in 1827, his attempts at a printshop a failure, eking out a living as an engraver an illustrator. There is a general review of his life, techniques, poetry and illustrations at Art 4 2 day (you'll need to page down), and the William Blake Archive is worth a visit. Images below the break.

The Daily Telegraph has a brief article today on the attraction of the cloistered life for educated women of Rome. Two years ago, 350 women of Rome withdrew to closed convents. In 2005, 550 have done so. Roman women are converts to convents.

From my ScrapBook grab of the catholichaven.org site, here is part of Dom Guéranger's commentary.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at Hebdomada Prima Adventus Dominica.

Today the Church commemorates Pope St Martin I. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv v and vi for this saint, and some information about, and images of, the church in Rome where he is buried, San Martino ai Monti.

For a list of popes and where they are buried, see Quick Reference: List of Pontiffs and Antipopes.

Nicholas Trandem encountered some problems when he was 'tweaking [his] Fedora Core 4 install' (Please Excuse Me While I Geek Out), which is a good reason to point to the Newsforge article from November 11, 2005, Free Software's surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine. The comments are tiresome, though.

I don't know much about distributism, so can't say whether it is consistent with a gift economy. Some aspects of free software, and arguments by its advocates draw upon the operation and benefits of such an economy, or at least of transactions within it.

Today the Church commemorates St Martin of Tours. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv v and vi for this saint, and images of frescoes from the chapel at Assisi dedicated to him, illustrating the main points of his life.

Today the Church commemorates the church of Saint John Lateran.

From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv v and vi for the Dedication of the Archbasilica
of the Most Holy Savior. The adjacent palace was the papal residence for a thousand years, from Pope St Miltiades to Pope Clement V.

Hugh Hewitt's post Richard John Neuhaus on Something Completely Different refers to the First Things blog (which I don't read, so thanks are owed to Hugh) post on the Benedictines and their monastery Our Lady of the Annunciation of Clear Creek (link is to a site of friends of the monks, who themselves have no official web presence).

Mass at Clear Creek is in Latin and according to the 1962 Roman Missal. It is celebrated with a solemnity that is redolent with the numinous*, and in sharp contrast to many current liturgical practices. Some view Clear Creek as an exercise in nostalgia, or as a protest against changes initiated after the Second Vatican Council. I suppose that is inevitable. It is more accurate, however, to view Clear Creek as a communal embodiment of an irreplaceable part of the Church’s liturgical heritage, and as a powerful witness to the attractiveness of a way of life that proposes to the Church and the world a more radical form of discipleship.

Source: Fr Richard Neuhaus's post November 7, 2005. You'll have to page down a bit to reach the section on Our Lady of the Annunciation.

* numinous: filled with or characterized by a sense of a supernatural presence, spiritually elevated; sublime.

Update: Amy Welborn's post Clear Creek mentions the First Things post, but also has good comments on the Integrated Humanities Program at Kansas University, and one on the 2003 blessing of the foundation stone at the monastery

Today is a ferial day, but the Church does commemorate the Four Crowned Martyrs. From breviary.net, here is the alternate Lesson ix for these saints, some images of the martyrs and the church in Rome dedicated to them, and of the chapel there dedicated to the pope during the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine, built during the time when the Church was asserting her authority over temporal rulers..

Zadok the Roman, in his post Vicipaedia·Latina!, points to the Pagina prima. Inviso, or whatever the imperative is.

The fourteen Benedictine monks of Prinknash Abbey, in the Cotswolds, are contemplating selling the new abbey and returning to Saint Peter's Grange, the old abbey, reports The Daily Telegraph in Abbey with only 14 monks may be sold off.

Benedictines have been associated with the land there since at least A.D. 1096. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he rented the property to the Kingstons, later granting them to the Bridges. In 1888 the property was bought by Thomas Dyer Edwardes, who converted in 1924 and who made a gift in 1925 to the Benedictine monks of Caldey Island (see The monks of Caldey Island), who had themselves converted in 1913. Thomas Dyer Edwardes died soon after the deed of gift, and the resulting death duties ('estate taxes' to Americans) meant that all the valuables in the house had to be sold.

The medieval heraldic stained glass made its way to the cloisters at Gloucester Cathedral. The cloisters there are the earliest known example of fan vaulting. They are quite lovely, as is the vaulting and glass thoughout the cathedral. There are countless images of the cathedral on the 'net, so I'll only point to the photogalleries on the cathedral's web site.

See below the break for some images.

More of the property's history is at Brief History of Prinknash at the web site of the monks, Welcome to Prinknash Abbey.

Today in 1678, Erasmus Quellin II, a student of Rubens, died, He was an artist who 'painted numerous altarpieces depicting Counter-Reformation themes for churches and monasteries throughout the Southern Netherlands'. His entry at Art “4” “2”-Day doesn't link to any of the altarpieces, but searching for 'Quellin' in this google page links to many churches with what might be his work.

The Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage has images of his work here (portraits and altarpiecese, search displays only in French or Dutch).

David J. Hughes has a post, Una Voce in Hungary?, at the Church Music Association of America's blog has a tantalizing reference to the Esztergom use. (Esztergom is a city in Hungary, and is the primatial see of the country. 'Use' here means a local variant on the manner of saying Mass. 'Una voce' is a common name for groups promoting the Missals of 1962 and before, coming from the Preface for Trinity Sunday.) I've only found one reference on the 'net to the Esztergom use, and it's behind a subscription-only wall.

Mr Hughes didn't post some parts of the item from Hungary, theses 17 through 27 'since they are chiefly concerned with the concrete pastoral-liturgical situation in Hungary, which differs in important ways from the American conditions.'

Juventutem pilgrim Julie Michelle Robinson made this remark (at Introibo ad altare...):

'Anglophones accounted for, the remainder of the 10% not-French people was largely Hungarian.'

I take that to mean that 90% of the Juventutem pilgrims were French,
and excluding Anglophones from the remaining 10%, the majority were Hungarian. She doesn't provide any more information.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope observes the universe in the infrared spectrum.. Because of the expansion of the universe since it began, light gets red-shifted, so light which might have begun in the ultraviolet reaches us in the infrared. (Insert fire engine siren, or locomotive whistle, example.)

The BBC and NASA carry stories about scientists' claims to have detected the 'first light' from the earliest stars. ('First light' usually refers to the first images received from using a telescope, but it's an appropriate secondary meaning here.)

Glow from first stars revealed for the BBC's story, and Scientists See Light that May Be from First Objects in Universe for the NASA press release.

Today the Church commemorates All Souls' Day. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv, v and vi for this feast.

The Golden Legend has an entry for the Commemoration of All Souls.

I noticed in the server logs that someone had saved this site to his del.icio.us page. It looks as if his is the only account with this blog, and I saw that he shares a number of lstings with another user at del.icio.us. This second user includes in his links a site by Prof Felix Just, S.J.: Illustrations of Gospel Stories, a book by one of the first ten Jesuits, Jerome Nadal. There is a table on that page associating the 153 woodcuts in the book with the liturgical order of the Roman Missal used in 1962.

The woodcuts are also available at Fr Joseph F. MacDonnell's page Gospel Illustrations. There they are displayed in numerical order.

Fr Just has a nice page with links to Biblical and Religious Art and Music, which is worth a visit and exploration.

Below the break is one of the woodcuts, Christ descends to the netherworld, and another image of William Blake's The Last Judgment, not from Fr Nadal's book.

Today one of the new files at the Internet Archive is a reading of the Venerable Bede's Sermon on All Saint's [sic] Day, translated from the Latin and as it appeared in English in William Jennings Bryan's The World’s Famous Orations (Great Britain: I. (710–1777). At the link are downloadable mp3 audio files and an Ogg Vorbis audio file.

The sermon's text is here at bartleby.com.

The first Mass in the chapel was on August 9, 1483. Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint its ceiling and Pope Julius II celebrated Mass in the chapel on All Saints Day, honoring the Church Triumphant in heaven, on November 1, 1512.