The Story of the Black Lace Mantilla

St Biagio (Blaise), Maranello, Italy

This is a trip down memory lane that will probably not interest many of you but I'll tell the story since it shows that God provides for us even in the tiniest detail of our lives. 

Many decades ago when I was a protestant teenager I lived in Italy while going to school in Padua and Venice. The people I stayed with, Carlo and Ann, were friends of my parents from Florida. Ann was from Tampa and had met Carlo at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They married, lived and worked in Orlando a few years, then went to Italy where Carlo had received a research grant at the University of Padua. I was a teenager and less than happy with my school so my parents arranged for me to go to university in Italy and stay with Carlo and Ann. It was a glorious time although if I had been Catholic then I might have gleaned more from the experience. However, I look back and see how God has his hand in the course of our lives, sometimes even in the tiniest details. This is the story of the Black Lace Mantilla.

This Year's Beautiful Vatican Nativity - I love it!

Everyone in the world can have their own opinion about what speaks to them or what does not. I am allowed to have my own opinion of things. I will not follow the crowd. Just because Fr Z , Ann Barnhardt and Taylor Marshall (who thinks the ANGEL is Mary!!) don't like the nativity, does not mean that I have to not like it too. (The pieces on either side of the angel are too far from the figure. They are the angel's wings but the effect of wings is lost since they are not placed close enough to the figure. See the photo below of the wings correctly placed.)

Because I like the Vatican's nativity am I less Catholic? A degenerate person? Bad to the bone? Shall we all cancel Grandma Moses because she wasn't a Renaissance painter? Toss Van Gogh's paintings out the window? Change Williamsburg's Folk Art Museum to a museum containing famous American painters whose work more resembles acceptable societal images than simple folk art? 

Maybe I just appreciate art (I was an art major for the first two years of university, one of those years in Venice, Italy at the Accademia) - all art, including modern art, folk art, ancient art, European art, Asian art, African art, and most of all, the beautiful artwork my children made when they were small, like the "Turtles with Cupcakes on Their Head" and the "Zebra Standing on an Anthill" which I framed.

Our Lady Running to Meet Her Son, The Resurrected Lord

La Madonna che scappa, or the Runaway Madonna, is a pious ritual held every Easter Sunday in Sulmona, Italy. (A large statue of) Mary, dressed in black and keening while swaying back and forth, suddenly sees the resurrected Lord. As she sees the living Christ, her black shroud is cast off, exchanged for a garment of green (the color of life), and, as white doves fly up around her, she rushes to meet her Son. This spectacular theatrical re-enactment, one of the biggest events in Italy, has been acted out for centuries in Sulmona by the Confraternita di Santa Maria di Loreto. The full experience begins on Friday night and ends with Mary rushing to greet Our Risen Lord. So, next year in Sulmona?

St. Matthew's Cathedral in Salerno, Italy

Sometimes it is the unexpected that gives us the most joy.  This was the case for us last week when in Salerno, Italy we had a chance to visit the Cathedral of St. Matthew.  After visiting many old churches, I thought I had probably become a little ho hum about what I might find in the next one.  Statues and columns and grand works of art by the masters can be found in all of them.  What’s left to amaze you after you’ve seen the grandest there is to offer?  The answer is simplicity.  The kind of thing even a child could recognize and appreciate. 

We were in Salerno because it was one of the ports of call  our ship docked in for a day.  Many aboard went off on long excursions on buses that would take hours.   We opted to stay nearby and see what we could find on foot.  We were told to consider the Cathedral of St. Matthew, built between 1080 and 1085, so with no other particular goal, we took the shuttle from the dock to the center of Salerno and were told to follow the street we were on to the clock tower several blocks away in the distance, and then, turn left and go up the hill.  Italians always tell you, “It’s about a ten minute walk.”  I’ve learned their ten minutes means nothing. 

When we reached the tower I expected a large intersection and a street wide enough for passing cars, but what we found was hardly more than an alleyway.  Up the hill we went expecting some grand plaza in front of an imposing cathedral, but instead, tucked in among apartment buildings and shops there was only a well worn set of marble steps leading to the front door of the church.  Inside the doors we were then in an atrium.  Michael Rose describes it this way in his book, Ugly as Sin:

“On a much smaller scale than the piazza is the atrium, an open courtyard (recalling the forecourts of Solomon’s Temple) that’s more of an integrated element of the church building.  In the center of the atrium, which is surrounded by colonnades of a cloister, is a fountain, where our pilgrim

Taking the Family to Europe This Summer?

Multiculturalism! It's so great! 

Treat the family to a taste of it in Europe this summer!

EUROPE 2018

More fabulous scenic travel videos below!

Choose the country you want to visit with your family! 

Do your teenagers want to backpack through Europe for the summer?

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If I'd Gotten Off That Train, I'd Be Dead Right Now

Captured Christian white slaves being auctioned
in the Muslim Ottoman Empire

This is a true story about how dangerous Europe (anywhere really but especially Europe with its millions of recent Muslim arrivals and skyrocketing crime against women) is today for unsuspecting young girls and women. My granddaughter is going to Europe this summer, but when I give warnings for her to "be careful" my daughter's response is exactly the same as Carlo's wife's response all those years ago.

When I was 19 and young, naive and innocent I went to school in Padua and Venice staying with friends of my parents, Carlo and Ann. It was a glorious experience but often I think back to how I certainly was almost kidnapped, drugged and sold into the white slave market. (Today it's called human trafficking.) At that time people thought the destination of a white slave was a harem deep in Saudi Arabia where women were cosseted and plied with lotions and oil on their skin, watched over by a eunuch and called to the bed of the sheikh at his command. However, now a more likely fate occurs to me - I might have been pimped out by the Mafia or sold to a Neapolitan drug gang.

Giovanni Sartori: "Integrating Muslim Immigrants is IMPOSSIBLE"

Giovanni Sartori 1924 - 2017

Giovanni Sartori (d Apr 2017 in Florence, Italy), an Italian political scientist specialized in the study of democracy and comparative politics, said: "Islam is incompatible with the West"

Giovanni Sartori is one of the most critical thinkers on the integration of Muslims in Europe: "Those who do not accept our rules should be placed at the border."

And, "We are in the hands of ignorant politicians who do not know history and have no culture. Their only care is to keep their positions of authority. They spend the day listening to the views of the opposite side and thinking about what answer to give. Therefore nothing is built. There are no leaders and statesmen, and so it goes that the European Union is a poorly constructed building which is collapsing. The situation becomes disastrous as some have believed that they could integrate Muslim immigrants, and that's impossible."