Ecuador-Bound

I got very busy this past semester and didn't get to visit as many churches as I would have liked to. I'm looking forward to finishing the project during the 2012-2013 school year, since I will not be in Washington for the Spring 2012 semester. I'll be studying Spanish language and Ecuadorian culture in Quito, Ecuador from January until May. 

I'll be keeping a blog while I'm down there. Follow me at:

www.msalinquito.wordpress.com 

God Bless, Friends. 

Holy Comforter/ St. Cyprian Church

I finally visited another church in December, after a long, hard semester which kept me too busy to work on Capitol Catholic. I took my friend Dan to Holy Comforter/ St. Cyprian Church in the Capitol Hill area. I knew a bunch about the history of the parish because I studied it as part of a paper I wrote on black Catholic parishes in Washington, D.C. From my paper:

The parish formed as a result of increasing black migration into Washington, providing a large enough base to support another parish. Between 1880 and 1890, Washington’s black population increased from 48, 377 to 75,572, or 40.1% of the city’s population. Many settled in the Capitol Hill area, east of the Capitol, where the African-American Catholics attended St. Peter’s parish. They were forced to sit in the rear of the church and were offered few services, since the parish priests considered them technically part of the colored parish, St. Augustine’s. This policy engendered complaints as early as 1878, when a letter was sent from Catholics in east Washington to Archbishop of Baltimore James Gibbons, bemoaning the “deaths of a number of colored Catholics without the last sacraments because the other reverend fathers, considering them as parishioners of the distant St. Augustine’s, would not attend to their spiritual needs.”

            Eventually, the voices of these Catholics were heard, and James Cardinal Gibbons sent a Maryland priest, Father James R. Matthews, to St. Peter’s, to work with the black Catholics. He initially held Masses in the former parish hall, and the new parish was organized in 1893. While credit is due to the initiative of the St. Cyprian’s parishioners and the hard work of Father Matthews, it is evident that the most important factor in forming St. Cyprian’s was the increase in black population in Washington and the Capitol Hill area in particular. The St. Joseph’s Advocate noted at the St. Cyprian’s cornerstone-laying that there was a “need long felt of this second church in a section of Washington abounding with colored people having a large percentage of Catholic families for generations accommodated at St. Peter’s.”

St. Cyprian, facing decaying facilities and a smaller parish, merged with nearby Holy Comforter parish, formerly a majority white parish, in the 1960's. Today, the Mass at the merged parish features a large Gospel choir and a very passionate service. The priest gave a sermon which discussed how we develop in our faith, and told stories about working as the only African-American in a small farming town in California. The Mass closed up with a performance of one my favorite Gospel pieces, "I Opened My Mouth To The Lord," a fiery piece which requires that three parts of the choir sing different pieces of the hymn at the same time. It was great, and a great way to end the semester. 

St. Francis Xavier Church

These are some pictures from my visit to St. Francis Xavier Church in Southeast D.C. in September. I have delayed doing this so long that I have lost my notes and honestly couldn't tell you much about the service. There was a small choir and they incorporated a few Gospel hymns into the Mass, but it was much more low-key than churches like St. Teresa of Avila. I also brought my friend Hunter, who enjoyed the Mass.

Our Lady of Victory Church

Hey friends! It's back to D.C. for another semester of church visits. Yesterday I went to Our Lady of Victory Parish in Northwest D.C. It's in a cute neighborhood east of Georgetown which is also home to George Washington University's Mount Vernon campus. Instead of taking the shuttle to Mount Vernon, I walked to OLV along the C&O Canal path.

Our Lady of Victory is a relatively small church perched on top of a grassy hill. The brick building had a pentagonal facade and had relatively bare walls on the inside. Colorwise, the church was dominated by blue, white and brown, with blue carpet, a blue velvet apse, and brown support beams. There was a very cool looking medieval-style painting near the front as well.

Music was provided by an organ and a choir of about half a dozen people. It was refreshing to hear their traditional hymns after slacking off on church attendance this summer. In his homily, the priest discussed the beginnings of the Church, and said that it formed a "body" of which the Pope was the "head." He compared the body of the Church to a symphony, which despite being made up of diverse "instruments" and "voices," is able to make beautiful music because they read from Christ's score.

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