St. Patrick's at St. Patrick's

What do you do with an archbishop, a retired cardinal, four concelebrating bishops, and three dozen assisting priests? Why, you have a big Mass at St. Patrick's Church for St. Patrick's Day!

Yesterday was the official patronal festival service for St. Patrick's Church in downtown Washington. This was my first time in the church, and it was absolutely beautiful! St. Patrick's was the first Catholic church in the District, started around 1792, and the current building was completed in 1884. It's done in the Victorian English Gothic Revival style with lovely architectural details on the exterior and stunningly beautiful Bavarian stained glass windows on the interior. What's more, when they did their post-Vatican II remodeling—the kind that damaged and ruined the architectural integrity of so many churches Catholic and Episcopal—the designers did an unusually fine job of preserving both the beauty and the holiness of the space.

They've also added a lot of nice marble statuary around the side aisles of the church, some of which is quite good. One of the most striking bits of sculpture is the crucifix behind the high altar. Now, most Catholic churches have a big crucifix with Jesus in agony, sometimes quite graphically, hanging on the cross, but here, they've done a negative relief of that crucified Jesus in a Celtic cross, but coming from that Celtic cross is a high relief figure of a risen Christ reaching out for His people—an unusual thing for a Catholic church.

In the choir loft in the back of the nave they have a large display of organ pipes beneath the rose window. They have a 44-rank Lively-Fulcher organ and about a dozen volunteer adult choristers to assist with the music. For this special service, they also had two trumpeters in the loft, a Celtic harpist (who was quite good) in the front of the nave, a bagpiper in the narthex, and a bagpiper outside on the steps in the rain.

The hymns were old Irish classics: St. Columba for the processional, Slane at the offertory, and St. Patrick's Breastplate for the recessional. I would have changed that order around a bit. They needed more music at the begining to get all those clergy in and then incense the altar, so the organist had to improvise for a while. At the end of the service, they had everybody out with the three verses of the first section of Breastplate, then they had the choir sing the two verses in the middle section a capella before going back to the original tune for the final verse with the congregation and organ. This resulted in the congregation emptying out of their pews during the middle section and virtually no one (save me, of course) sang the final verse. Otherwise, though, this congregation is a group of hearty singers.

His Excellency the archbishop gave them special dispensation to waive the Friday Lenten fast and abstinence requirements and also permitted them to sing the Gloria during Lent for this service. They did a responsorial Gloria by Calvert Sheck (1940-2005) that had very modern choral verses that were a little too ambitious. The rest of the Mass setting was the standard Proulx A Community Mass. During the responsorial psalm, Psalm 23, of course, the organ accompanied the antiphon and the Celtic harp accompanied the cantoress for the verses.

For the offertory anthem, the choir sang "How Amiable Are Thy Dwellings" by Colin Mawby (b. 1930), another modern music work. At communion, after a short responsorial marching hymn (not many parishioners sing it here, either), the choir sang an arrangement of the hymn Christus redemptor gentium (Christ is the world's redeemer).

The archbishop's homily gave tribute to St. Patrick and the Irish in America. I'm starting to get the impression after seeing the archbishop a few times that he's really quite the schmoozer with the wealthy and important congregants, as not only did he do his usual handshaking with certain people as he came down the aisle (holding up the procession), but he walked over to personally administer communion to some special guests from Ireland and the Irish Embassy. I'm sure the archdiocese will be having a big capital campaign sometime soon,and I'm sure he'll be quite successful.

The rain all day required a few logistical changes. They were going to have Irish dancing outside, but they ended up moving them from before Mass to after Mass, and put the girls in the narthex with a piper's accompaniment. Everyone enjoyed watching them as they shook hands with the clergy on their way out.