Friday 26 July – The Shroud of Turin Museum, Cathedral of St. John Berchmans, Shreveport, Louisiana

Source: Museum web page [LINK]

Yes – Shreveport, Louisiana.

Shreveport, Louisiana, possesses the third-largest collection of materials related to the Holy Shroud of Turin in the world. Which is absolutely amazing, when you think about it. How did Shreveport come to be the home of such treasures?

The tale can be told a couple of different ways. I will start it in Shreveport itself, with a happy confluence of events bringing together two individuals with longstanding interest in the Shroud.

Why was our tour of the Painted Churches a "Pilgrimage"?

Medieval Pilgrims [Source: LINK]

The web site of the Greater Schulenburg Chamber of Commerce (LINK) refers to visits to the Painted Churches around Schulenburg as “tours,” whether contracted through the Chamber with one of their guides such as was ours [LINK], or “self-guided.” In contrast, I call what we undertook a “pilgrimage.” What is the difference?

Wednesday 03 April -- 2019 Texas Painted Churches Day 3

Blue Bell and Bluebonnets -- It's Texas!

Today was the journey home, and although I hoped to squeeze in one more Painted Church, it was not to be.

We got Blue Bell ice cream, though!

Briefly, I slept in again until almost 08:00, then Anne and I went down to the lobby for breakfast. It was full -- a condition worsened by the hotel booking an 08:00 private meeting in a closed-off part of the dining area during the posted breakfast hours. Not cool! The worker minding the breakfast bar was very apologetic, and oversaw pulling together some of the lounge furniture as a makeshift expansion to the dining area that some of us used.

Some of our party had left already; others passed through on their way out as we ate; some visited with us. In all, I think we were probably all out of the hotel by 09:30 or so, going our separate ways.

Tuesday 02 April -- 2019 Texas Painted Churches Day 2

L-R: Sydney, Sonny, Susan, Sue, Rita, Gwen, JoAnn, Ray,
Jeff, Carol, Anne, Kent, and our guide Wanda
Church of the Assumption of Mary, Praha

Although it was very cool -- mid 30s F -- when we first got up, it was an almost cloudless blue sky and warmed up nicely into the low 70s. It was perfect weather for our pilgrimage tour of the Painted Churches

Our hotel had a complementary breakfast bar in the lobby from 06:00-09:00. I got to bed late, woke up a couple of times and took a while to go back to sleep, and then slept best in those early-morning hours.... Anne woke me up about 08:00. I hurriedly got ready and we headed down to breakfast, including the requisite Texas-shaped Belgian Waffle.

Yeah! Texas!

Most of our party had already been there, but we visited with a couple.

I had sent out a text that Anne and I were heading for the Chamber of Commerce/Tourists' Center for 09:30, with the tour to begin at 10:00. We settled up with the Chamber and met our tour guide, the delightful Wanda, as our group assembled there. I purchased my usual coffee mug as well as a large map with an extensive description of the local churches and a DVD of a 2001 documentary about the Painted Churches. The Chamber made reservations for our lunch for 13:00 at Sirilo's Cafe (the other suggestion was the Oak Ridge Smokehouse which we'd had supper at last night), and we headed out pretty much dead on 10:00. We were three vehicles; Wanda rode with Anne and myself and one other of our number, Sydney; the nine others of our group distributed between two vehicles that followed us. We in the lead car therefore benefited from Wanda's running commentary on much else about Schulenburg besides the Painted Churches.

Monday 01 April -- 2019 Texas Painted Churches Day 1

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church,
Shiner

For my wife and myself, our pilgrimage actually began on Saturday 30 March, when we traveled to Houston and spent the day with our son, who has since graduating college last year lived and worked in downtown Houston. His apartment is too small to accommodate us as overnight guests, however, so we usually stay in western Houston with Anne's sister and her husband. On Sunday, our son joined us out there for the day, then went back to his place in the evening to prepare for work the next morning. We, of course, would begin our pilgrimage to the Painted Churches then, today, Monday 01 April.

After a leisurely morning with Anne's sister, we headed out of Houston for the short, hour-and-a-half drive to Schulenburg. We saw patches of bluebonnets -- the Texas State Flower -- interspersed with a coral-orangish-color flower in even greater abundance, all along the way. It was quite cool and cloudy through most of the day; we experienced light rain at a couple of points along our drives, but the sun came shortly before we checked in to our hotel late in the afternoon.

Texas 2019 - Searching for a Daily Mass in the Hill Country….

https://masstimes.org

About half of our group are daily Communicants at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Natchitoches. This tour of the Painted Churches is, for us, a pilgrimage – a religious devotion. We want to attend daily Mass while there in Schulenburg. Here, besides missing his company and insights, is where we will miss Fr. Louis while we’re there – the original intention had been for him to say a “private” Mass for us in one of the Painted Churches. Sadly, that isn’t working out. We will have to find a scheduled Mass … which is proving harder than expected.

We really are blessed here in Natchitoches to have two regular Masses each day of the week, Monday through Friday – 06:30 at the Basilica and 12:05 only a few blocks away at St. Anthony of Padua Church. There is, furthermore, Mass at 17:30 Tuesday-Thursday (as well as 08:00 Friday) at Holy Cross, the Campus Ministry Church at my University, only a few blocks from the Basilica in a different direction. (Natchitoches is small.)

Confining it to within 20 mi of Schulenburg, based on the website Masstimes.org using as my search argument “Schulenburg, Texas,” I found really only one convenient, at 06:30 Tuesday morning. Fortunately, that’s the time of our morning Mass at the Basilica, so it won’t be too much of a shock to our systems. Unfortunately, it’s not repeated on Wednesday morning. Extending the time to the Monday and Tuesday evenings garners a couple of other options as well. I include telephone information for all of these because using any such Internet index based on reported data that could change at any time always demands to be confirmed.

Mini-Pilgrimage: The Painted Churches of Texas

St. Mary's Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas

This has actually been in the making for a couple of years. In conversation with my good friends Sonny and Sue, and their son Fr. Louis, mention was made of the Painted Churches of Texas. I had never heard of them. Sonny is of Czech ancestry, born and raised in Sealy, Texas. They told me how across the Texas hill country there are a number of historic churches (citations vary from “twenty” to “a couple of dozen”), built largely by 19^th-c. Central European immigrants in the architectural and decorative style of their homelands, mainly Bohemia and Germany. To quote an article at the Texas Hill Country website:

The insides of these magnificent churches are layered with hours of painstaking labor by hand stenciling, infill, freehand, marbling, staining and graining. They are adorned with masterful paintings, shimmering stained glass, charming murals, and gold-encrusted altars. [LINK].

Painted Churches around Schulenburg, Texas

Fr. Louis suggested that we – himself, his parents, my wife and myself, and various other church friends – should make a pilgrimage.