ResourceShelf has two posts, each with links to different museums:

• Art Museums: A Collection of Searchable Databases and
• Art Museums: A Collection of Searchable Databases #2.

Urbanex has an extensive post with links to search engines, Creative Commons images, free stock image collections, historical images, directories of museums and art galleries, builidings and other architectural images and various aggregated art image collections at How to find images on the mighty internet.

Christine of Mirabilis.ca posts about a 54-minute video here on youtube, put there by a person in Great Britain with the pseudonym trady. It's a Solemn High from 1941 by a Servite priest, narrated by then-Mgr. Fulton J. Sheen.

Trady states:

Unfortunately due to size restrictions at Youtube around 20 mins have been cut from the original. However, I hope to upload a full version at Google soon or perhaps here when Youtube improves its director accounts. In addition to the cuts I have added new captions and edited the opening credits. The credits had deteriorated quite badly in the original. I retyped what I could see of them and faded them in at the beginning and at the end. Other than this the film remains largely unchanged.

Solemn High Mass, St Patrick’ Day, 1941, Old St Patrick's, Chicago
(not the youtube Mass nor the youtube church)

Epact 'is an electronic catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums'.

There are a number of crucifix dials on the site, which where used to give the hour, as a sundial would. (Most examples at Epact do not look to have a corpus, so they don't satisfy the narrower definition of 'crucifix'.)

The interiors of such instruments may have been used as reliquaries. Sphaera has an article here on crucifix dials. This post's title contains a quote from the article. Images are listed here (google search). The images at Epact are copyright The British Museum, so I don't reproduce them.

Dom Guéranger visited England in 1860.

The tour ended in London where they [Dom Guéranger and Dom Laurence Shepherd, monk of Ampleforth and chaplain at Stanbrook] were the guests of [Henry Edward Cardinal] Manning and visited [Fr Frederick William] Faber. Their conducted tour of Westminster Abbey caused some anxiety to Dom Laurence, as Dom Guéranger expressed his feelings by kicking the tomb of Elizabeth I, and praying at Mary Stuart’s and that of Edward the Confessor.

From Dom Gueranger: prophet of Ecclesial Renewal.

Textkit, an all free language education website, bills itself as 'the Internet's largest provider of free and fully downloadable Greek and Latin grammars and readers. With currently 146 free books to choose from, Greek and Latin learners have downloaded 664,717 grammars, readers and classical e-books.'

The Campus Mawritius blog links to the site.

Tuesday past 'was the 1,700th anniversary of the proclamation of Constantine as Emperor of Rome, possibly at the location of the Roman fort where the [York] Minster now stands.' Christian celebration to remember tolerant emperor Constantine. Hat tip to Dennis of Campus Mawritius, in his post Happy Anniversary.

That ninth century psalter found in Irish bog was open to Psalm 83.

Now, if you were around before the asteroid hit, you'll know that Catholics used a different system then for numbering the psalms, compared to what is used now.* (Remember the Vulgate, the Douay, the Confraternity edition?)

The book from the bog was open to Psalm 84 according to contemporary numbering.

Daniel Mitsui's entry Great Clocks of Christendom, part I with the image of the one inside Strasbourg Cathedral, brought to mind the MetaFilter post Audio versions of articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic and more.

Brian Hayes had an article, 'Clock of Ages', on the history, features and operation of the current clock, in the November/December 1999 issue of The Sciences (this link is to the .pdf of the entire issue).

There is an audio file of the Hayes article (mp3 format file here) on the web site of AssistiveMedia. Assistive Media is a a non-profit organization providing audio access to spoken-word recordings of short-subject literary works for people with visual and text reading barriers.

From the article:

The original clock had three mechanical Magi that bowed down before the Virgin and child every hour on the hour.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Clock of the Three Kings was no longer running and no longer at the leading edge of horological technology. To supervise an upgrade, the Strasbourgeois hired Conrad Dasypodius, the professor of mathematics at Strasbourg, as well as the clock maker Isaac Habrecht and the artist Tobias Stimmer. Those three laid out the basic plan of the instrument still seen today, including the three-turreted case and most of the paintings and sculptures. A curiosity surviving from that era is the portrait of Copernicus—a curiosity because the planetary display on the Dasypodius clock was Ptolemaic. The second clock lasted another 200 years or so.

The story of the third clock starts with an anecdote so charming that I can’t bear to look too closely into its authenticity. Early in the 1800s, the story goes, a beadle was giving a tour of the cathedral, and mentioned that the clock had been stopped for twenty years. No one knew how to fix it. A small voice piped up: “I will make it go!” The boy who made the declaration was Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, and forty years later he made good on his promise.

There was mild conflict over the terms of Schwilgué’s commission. He wanted to build an entirely new clock; the cathedral administration wanted to repair the old one. They compromised: he gutted the works but kept the case, and built his new indicators and automata to fit the old design. The new mechanism began ticking on October 2, 1842.

Schwilgué was clearly thinking longterm when he undertook the project. As I noted earlier, the leap-year mechanism includes parts that engage only once every 400 years—parts that will soon be tested for the first time, and then lie dormant again until 2400. ...

Other parts of Schwilgué’s clock look even further into the future. There is a gear deep in the works of the ecclesiastical computer that turns once every 2,500 years. And the celestial sphere out in front of the clock has a still-slower motion. In addition to the sphere’s daily rotation, it pirouettes slowly on another axis to reflect the precession of the equinoxes of the earth’s orbit through the constellations of the zodiac. In the real solar system, that stately motion is what has lately brought us to the dawning of the age of Aquarius. In the clock, the once-per-siderealday spinning of the globe is geared down at a ratio of 9,451,512 to 1, so that the equinoxes will complete one full precessional cycle after the passage of a bit more than 25,806 years. (The actual period is now thought to be 25,784 years.)

When Hayes mentions the 'ecclesiastical computer', he refers to this:



ecclesiastical computer of the Strasbourg Cathedral clock

are on the Juventutem blog:

• Tóchar Pádraig (1),
• Tóchar Pádraig (2),
• Tóchar Pádraig (3).

More information on the Tóchar Pádraig pilgrimage here.

The first discovery of an Irish Early Medieval manuscript in two centuries, by 'an exceptionally alert construction worker ... as he drove the shovel of his backhoe into a bog', is reported at various places yesterday:

• Ancient prayerbook found in Irish bog,
• Ireland Worker Finds Ancient Psalms in Bog,
• Irish bog yields 1,000-year-old treasure.

The manuscript is in cold storage and will be set upon by a restoration team.

The BBC have what are labelled as images of the find in situ.

This reminds me of the scene in A Canticle for Leibowitz where the monk scribe Francis Gerard is attacked on the way to the Mass canonizing Leibowitz.

At eight bells on Saturday, August 5, 2006, Fr Paul Robinson, of the SSPX, will say a Requiem Mass aboard the World War II battleship USS North Carolina. There may be some midshipmen at the Mass.

BB-55 was decommissioned June 21, 1947, slated to be scrapped in 1958, but saved by a statewide campaign in North Carolina. She arrived at her current berth on October 2, 1961.

Update August 8, 2006: A reader points out that I should update this to identify Fr Kenneth Novak as the priest who said the Mass, not Fr Robinson. See Mass aboard the USS North Carolina, on this blog.

Fred Fornello posted some nice images of the new tonsuratus at Tonsure Ceremony at Gricigliano.

The blog also has Mr Fornello's post showing the construction of the catafalque for the Requiem Mass for Fr Todd Reitmeyer, and of the Mass itself, in Rome on June 1, 2006: Requiem for a Priest of God.

Well, that didn't work well. When I substituted the 1.30 version blog for the old, 1.24 version blog, I began to be slammed by successful trackback spam: 300+ in about eight hours. Hence, the version 1.30 blog is offline and the 1.24 version is now the current blog.

Project Gutenberg has added the A.D. 1914, 83 page work Lourdes by Msgr Robert Hugh Benson. The list of Benson's works there includes Come Rack! Come Rope! and Lord of the World.

Today the Vatican Press Office announced that Mother Theodore Guérin, foundress of the Sisters of Providence at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, U.S.A., and others will be canonized this coming October 15.

Two days ago, the Internet Archive announced that the Life and life-work of Mother Theodore Guérin : foundress of the Sisters of Providence at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Vigo County, Indiana is available in .pdf, .djvu and FlipBook formats.