A church in Cologne has walls made of human bones In the Golden Chamber of Saint Ursula's Basilica, thousands of bones are laid out in swirls, zigzags and Latin words The legend says they belong to Ursula and 11,000 virgins martyred by the Huns One theory: the old text said 11 virgin martyrs, 'XI M V', and a scribe read the M as a thousand Her feast is today

In 1908 G.K. Chesterton explained why the ordinary man stays sane and the clever man goes mad ‘He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them’ So the ordinary man believed in fate, and in free will also ‘Mysticism keeps men sane’

Stop giving your kids modern names! In 1975 the top name for a Dutch baby boy was Johannes In 2025 it is was Noah Nothing wrong you'd think At least it's not 'Muhammed' But Johannes was a grandfather’s name Noah the sound a sub-group of parents liked Personal preference over lineage And I see trad Catholics do the same: They call their son 'Benedict Joseph Augustine' While the father is named Kevin And the grandfather is John 1/2

Cloistered nuns in Pennsylvania are hand-building a monastery meant to last 1,000 years, using hand-forged nails, fieldstone, and lime mortar, with no electricity Their contractor said that if he could find more crews willing to work under a vow of obedience, the job would be easy In the Netherlands, roughly 1,000 of the 1,204 still-functioning Catholic churches have already planned their closure

Good King Wenceslas is a Christmas song The man in it was not walking through snow with a page He was a duke on his way to Mass His brother waited at the church door and killed him there This was on the September 28 in 935 The Czechs still keep the date as a national holiday The English-speaking world kept the tune and lost the murder

For centuries altar candles had to be made of beeswax, and the reason is stranger than tradition Medieval Christians believed bees reproduced without mating So their wax stood for the pure flesh of Christ, born of a virgin, and it was the only fit light for the altar This is why most historical bee experts monasteries kept bees

Dutch farmhouses had a room nobody lived in The 'pronkkamer' held the best furniture and the best china, and it was often too cold to sit in. The family lived in the kitchen It opened for the priest, the doctor and the notary, for coffee after Sunday Mass, and for the dead before the funeral We call it wasted space. Farmers knew some moments deserve a room of their own

The worst floods in Dutch history are named after saints The All Saints' Flood struck on 1 November 1570 The St Elizabeth's Flood of 1421 drowned the Grote Waard and left behind the Biesbosch, with villages that never came back People dated their disasters by the feast they fell on, because the Church calendar was the calendar

The most ornate vestment in a church began as a raincoat The cope was the cappa pluvialis, a hooded cloak monks wore outdoors in processions Over the centuries the useful hood shrank into the embroidered shield on the back, which covers nothing Italians still call it the piviale: the rain cloak

There is a house in the Dutch forest built in the shape of a miracle Helene Kröller-Müller asked Berlage to turn the legend of St. Hubert into architecture: St. Hubert was nobleman who lived for the hunt, until he aimed at a stag and saw a glowing crucifix between its antlers Its two long wings and its tower are said to trace the stag's antlers and the cross between them You have seen that stag before, on every bottle of Jägermeister

This monstrance was made in 1934 for the consecration of a convent chapel in Roosendaal Water streams across its foot, a rose branch climbs the stem, and an ivory Virgin stands beneath the Host During the war a priest staying at that convent hid Dutchmen and Allied servicemen from the Germans He was arrested there, and shot at Vught on 11 August 1944 Today this monstrance stands in a museum case

In 1942 the Germans began taking the church bells of the Netherlands About 6,700 were pulled from their towers and shipped to Hamburg to be melted into weapons The Dutch had graded their bells by value before the war, and the oldest were marked M to be spared More than 200 of those survived only because the ship carrying them sank near Urk

Everyone on Twitter says ‘Christ is King’ But almost nobody means what Pope Pius XI meant by it In 1925 he put the feast on the last Sunday of October, right before All Saints and All Souls Meaning: Christ reigns now, over laws and nations, over the living and the dead In 1969 Paul VI moved it to the end of the year and renamed ‘King of the Universe’ The claim became: ‘someday’ Christ is King If you're Catholic: Have a blessed Solemnity of Christ the King 👑✝️

Today I am going on retreat to a chapel in Belgium that a priest built after being excommunicated In 1988 Fr. Paul Schoonbroodt was removed from his parish in Steffeshausen after refusing to give up the Latin Mass He had bought a guesthouse in 1980 to lodge the visitors who came to him In 1991 the church he built onto it was consecrated, and the Latin Mass is still said there today... Nowadays served by the Society of Saint Pius