Today is the Optional Memorial of Saint Pius V, Pope (died 1572) and the Optional Memorial of Saint Marie of the Incarnation, Religious (died 1672). Today is the Anniversary of the Territory of Orleans becoming the State of Louisiana in 1812, and tonight is Walpurgisnacht (which has nothing to do with Pius V, or with Marie of the Incarnation, or with the State of Louisiana).
Saint Pius V, Pope (died 1572) was born to impoverished Italian nobility in 1504 at Bosco, Lombardy, Italy as Antonio Ghislieri, and received an excellent training in piety and holiness, including a scholastic education from a Dominican friar; he joined the Order himself in 1518, taking the name Michele. After studies in Bologna he was ordained in 1528 and became a professor of theology in Pavia for sixteen years. He served as master of novices and as prior of several Dominican houses, working for stricter adherence to the Order’s Rule. Appointed Inquisitor in Como, after several years of inquisitorial missions he was appointed commissary general of the Roman Inquisition in 1551. In 1556 he was consecrated Bishop of Nepi e Sutri against his will. Created cardinal in 1557, he became Grand Inquisitor in 1558, was part of the conclave that elected Pope Pius IV in 1559, and was himself elected Pope in 1566. He immediately faced the task of enacting the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563). New seminaries were opened, and a new breviary, new missal, and new catechism were published; foundations were established to spread the Faith and preserve the doctrine of the Church. Pius spent much time personally working with the needy. He built hospitals and used the papal treasury to care for the poor. He faced many difficulties in the public forum, both in the implementation of the Tridentine reforms and in interaction with other heads of state. At the time of his death he was working on a Christian European alliance to break the power of the Islamic states; he did live long enough to hear the news of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), and to institute the new feastday of Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the victory. Saint Marie of the Incarnation, Religious (died 1672) was born as Marie Guyart in 1599 in Tours, France, the daughter of a master baker. From childhood, Marie showed signs of an unusual spiritual life, marked by mystical visions of Jesus. She said that at age seven, she had received a spiritual calling to devote herself entirely to God. She therefore gradually stopped playing with children her own age and instead spent her time reading devotional books and meditating. In the family bakery, she learned the basics of managing a business. At age fourteen, Marie expressed her wish to enter the convent of the Benedictine Nuns. But her parents encouraged her to marry instead, and she was wed to Claude Martin, a master silk worker. The marriage was difficult: for one thing, Marie’s mother-in-law was jealous of her; for another, despite the devotion that Marie showed toward her husband, her spiritual commitment was her first concern. He died in 1619, after just two years of marriage, leaving her with a six-month-old son, Claude. Marie took care of liquidating the family business, which had gone bankrupt. After her husband died, Marie put her son in the care of a wet-nurse and went back to live in her parents’ home. She spent a year living on the top floor like a recluse and devoting much of her time to meditation and prayer while doing needlework to earn a living. Her family encouraged her to remarry, but instead she chose to take a vow of chastity. On March 24th, 1620, she had a mystical and emotional “conversion” experience. She decided to withdraw from the world, but her sister and her brother-in-law asked her to stay and help them rebuild their failing transportation business. She agreed, and took on many responsibilities, including administration, the handling of goods and the health of the company’s employees. The business prospered, but Marie continued to experience visions of spiritual marriage to God. She spent her free time in meditation, prayer and penitence. She also took her son back, but refrained from showing him too much affection, so as to prepare him for the separation that she knew would come when she entered religious orders. In 1631, despite the considerable pain that it caused her to leave her eleven-year-old son behind with her sister, Marie entered the cloister of the Ursulines in Tours and took the name of Marie of the Incarnation. Total separation from her family and the outside world was one of the conditions for entering the order; in other words, she had had to choose between God and her son. She took her vows in 1633 and taught Christian doctrine for the next six years. At about the age of thirty-five,, she had what she believed to be an out-of-body experience, in which she saw her spirit travelling to various countries where there were souls to convert, including Canada. Her visions, together with her reading of the Jesuit Relations, accounts of life in Canada by missionaries from the Society of Jesus, convinced her that God was calling her to Canada. Along with two other Ursuline nuns and Mme de la Peltrie, the patron of the Ursuline order in New France, Marie landed in Québec City on August 1st, 1639. There she founded a convent and the first school for girls, in the Lower Town. In 1642 the Ursulines moved into a new stone monastery in the Upper Town. There Marie zealously dedicated herself to educating French and Indigenous girls. From her earliest years in Canada, she worked doggedly to convert Indigenous people to the Catholic religion and French culture. The education that the Ursulines provided was designed to make Indigenous girls give up their nomadic lifestyle, adopt the Catholic faith, and start wearing French-style clothing. The purpose of this education was to get the girls to abandon their original culture and become perfect prospective brides for French men. To facilitate this assimilation, the Ursulines did show some flexibility with regard to the girls’ language and diet. In 1646, together with the Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant, Marie wrote a constitution to guide the spiritual lives of the Ursulines in New France. This constitution adapted the rules of the Ursulines in France to the realities of their lives and mission in North America. In 1650 a fire destroyed the Ursuline monastery when one of the sisters forgot burning coals under a dough trough. No lives were lost, but the destruction was total. Only the barns remained intact. The sisters took advantage of the reconstruction to expand the monastery. In 1654 Marie wrote an autobiography, Relation de 1654; it was not a chronology of her life, but rather a sort of apology to explain to her son (who had become a Benedictine monk) the reasons why she abandoned him. By 1668, Marie acknowledged that her efforts with Indigenous girls had failed. From then on, the Ursulines concentrated on educating the daughters of the French colonists instead. In addition to numerous theological and spiritual treatises, Marie wrote a catechism in Iroquois, as well as Algonquin and Iroquois dictionaries. She also kept abreast of public affairs. Though cloistered, she received many illustrious visitors, including the first bishop of Québec City, François de Laval. Her written works constitute one of the largest collections of personal documents from the early years of French colonization. Over two hundred and seventy-seven of her handwritten letters have been preserved to the present day, including thirty years of correspondence with her son. The main subject of these writings is spirituality, but they also contain numerous observations on the growth of New France. Her son published her Relation de 1654, adding to it some excerpts from an earlier autobiography that his mother had written in 1633. He subsequently published two hundred and twenty-one letters of her correspondence in an anthology entitled Écrits spirituels et historiques. After her death in 1672 the Ursulines went on with her work in Trois-Rivières, where they founded a monastery in 1697. They even ventured as far as French Louisiana, where they founded a school for girls in New Orleans in 1727. Their convent, rebuilt in 1752, is one of the rare buildings of the French Regime to have survived in Louisiana. Marie was declared venerable in 1874. In 1980 Marie, François de Laval (the first Bishop of Québec) and José de Anchieta (also known as the Apostle of Brazil) were officially beatified by Pope John Paul II. On April 3rd, 2014, Pope Francis proclaimed all three of them saints by an exceptional procedure known as equipollent or equivalent canonization, in which someone is canonized without having performed a miracle. Their canonization was celebrated at the Thanksgiving Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome on October 12th, 2014. Cardinal Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, Archbishop of Québec, headed the Québec delegation that came to attend the ceremony. Turning to secular matters, on this date in 1812 Louisiana became the Eighteenth State of the United States. La Louisiane (named for Louis XIV of France) became a colony of the Kingdom of France in 1682 and passed to Spain in 1763. Local colonial government was based upon parishes, the local ecclesiastical divisions (French: paroisse; Spanish: parroquia). The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (on April 30th of that year) had brought into the United States some 828,000 square miles of territory, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico from the west bank of the Mississippi River to what is now Minnesota, and stretching east to what is now Montana and into what is now Canada. In 1804 the Territory of Orleans became that part of the Purchase south of the 33rd Parallel (basically, the current Arkansas-Louisiana border), and again not including the land east of the Mississippi River, which was part of the Spanish territory of West Florida, with William C. C. Claiborne appointed as the Territorial Governor. The Organic Act of 1804, passed on March 26th for October 1st implementation, also created the United States District Court for the District of Orleans, the only time Congress has ever provided a territory with a United States district court equal in its authority and jurisdiction to those of the states. On April 10th, 1805, the territorial legislative council divided the Territory of Orleans into twelve counties. The borders of these counties were poorly defined, but they roughly coincided with the French and Spanish colonial parishes, and hence used the same names. On March 31st, 1807, the territorial legislature created nineteen civil parishes without abolishing the old counties (which term continued to exist until 1845). In 1811 a constitutional convention was held to prepare for Louisiana’s admission into the Union. This organized the state into seven judicial districts, each consisting of groups of parishes. The Florida Parishes east of the Mississippi River were annexed into the Territory of Orleans on April 14th, 1812, and soon afterwards the Territory of Orleans became the State of Louisiana on April 30th, 1812, with William C. C. Claiborne as the first Governor. In 1816 the first official map of the state used the term “parish” instead of “county”; since then the official term for Louisiana’s primary civil divisions has been parishes. Final adjustments to the borders of the State were not completed until about 1819, when the western boundary with Spanish Texas was fully defined with the Adams–Onís Treaty; the treaty also incorporated the former Republic of West Florida (the land east of the Mississippi River and above Lake Pontchartrain into Louisiana. (I live in the Parish of St. Landry; created in 1805, it was named for the St. Landry Catholic Church in Opelousas, which in turn was named for the Bishop of Paris, who died in 650. The parish at one time was the largest one in Louisiana, but over time six other parishes were carved out of the parish.) Today is also Walpurgisnacht, when in German lore the witches meet on the Broken, the highest of the Harz Mountains of north central Germany, to hold their revels. The current festival is, in most countries that celebrate it, named after the English missionary Saint Walpurga (ca. 710–778). Pope Adrian II named February 25th (the anniversary of her Dies natalis, or her entry into eternal life) as her feast day, but he did the act of canonization on the first of May in about 870, and the saint became associated with May Day, especially in the Finnish and Swedish calendars, and the eve of May Day, traditionally celebrated with dancing, came to be known as Walpurgisnacht (Walpurga’s night). A scene in Goethe’s Faust Part One is called “Walpurgisnacht”, and a scene in Faust Part Two is called “Classical Walpurgisnacht”. The last chapter of book five in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is also called “Walpurgisnacht”. In some parts of northern coastal regions of Germany the custom of lighting huge fires is still kept alive to celebrate the coming of May. (The same kind of festival was held in the British Isles and called Beltane, but the only ones who celebrate Beltane now are neo-pagans.)
Last night I continued reading The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook). At the NBA Playoffs – First Round, our New Orleans Pelicans lost their Home NBA game with the Oklahoma City Thunder by the score of 89 to 97, which ends the 2023-2024 Season for the Pelicans. Better luck next year, guys!
I woke up at 8:00 am, fed the cats, and did my Book Devotional Reading. I then ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch, and did my Internet Devotional Reading. With all the rain we had yesterday morning, I opted not to do anything with the porch or plants. I left the house at 11:00 am, and drove to the Lafayette Public Library – Southside Branch, where I took out The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I then went to Lowes and got a couple of pots and a plant. I arrived back home at 2:15 pm, and continued reading A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy by Richard L. Hasen (Ebook). We watched Jeopardy and News, and watched Murdoch Mysteries 1711 “A Heavy Event” (2024). We then ate the last of the rolled chicken breasts, mashed potatoes, and baked beans, and watched Rebecca (1940), which won the Oscars for Best Picture, and Best Cinematography, and is the only film since 1936 (when awards for actors in supporting roles were first introduced) that, despite winning Best Picture, received no Academy Award for acting, directing or writing. Our LSU Tigers won their a Home College Baseball game with the Grambling State University Tigers by the score of 26 to 2 in seven innings; our LSU Tigers (29-17, 7-14) will be playing the first game of a three-game, three-day Home SEC College Baseball Series with the #1 Texas A&M Aggies (38-6, 15-6) on Friday, May 3rd. And I will now finish this Daily Update, clean my jewelry, do some reading, and go to bed.
Tomorrow is the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. In the secular world tomorrow is May Day and International Workers Day. The Third Quarter Moon will arrive at 6:27 am. I will be working on my plants, doing my laundry, doing the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan, paying some bills, and getting my nails done.
As the fires of Walpurgisnacht flare into the night this Tuesday evening, our Parting Quote comes to us from Peter Mayhew, English actor (died 2019). Born in 1944 in Barnes, Surrey, his height (which topped out at seven feet, three inches) was due to Marfan syndrome. He was working as a hospital orderly at the King’s College Hospital in London in the radiology department when his photograph was in the paper with an article about men with large feet. Film producer Charles H. Schneer saw his photo, literally standing above the crowd around him, and cast him in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects film, as the Minotaur. He was still working at King’s College when he heard of a casting call for a new movie that needed tall actors. He went to Elstree Studios in Herfordshire, and when he stood up to greet the director, George Lucas, Lucas immediately chose him for the part of the 200-year-old Wookie, Chewbacca, in Star Wars (1977). Mayhew went to the London Zoo to study the bears and gorillas, and modeled his interpretation of the part accordingly. He continued working as a hospital orderly while filming his part. Lucas said Mayhew was “the closest any human being could be to a Wookiee: big heart, gentle nature and I learnt to always let him win” The character did not have any lines, the sounds he made being derived from sound recordings of animal noises. Star Wars (1977) began his Wookie career; he played Chewbacca in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). In the meantime he played the role in the 1978 television film Star Wars Holiday Special and in a 1980 appearance on The Muppet Show. Mayhew played the role in commercials and hospital appearances for sick children, and made numerous appearances as Chewbacca outside the Star Wars films. In 1997 the twentieth-anniversary celebrations of Star Wars were announced with the release of the “Special Edition”, and all the conventions went into overdrive. Mayhew was active on the Star Wars convention circuit where he signed autographs. Mayhew, appearing as Chewbacca, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Film Awards 1997. He married in 1999 and had three children. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 2005 at a ceremony in Arlington, Texas. In an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram he joked that he did not get a medal at this ceremony either, a reference to the closing scene in Star Wars (1977) during which Luke Skywalker and Han Solo get medals, but Chewbacca does not. Mayhew noted in an MTV interview that although Chewbacca does not get a medal in the film, he does have the last line of dialogue, when he roars. In 2010 he and his wife wrote Growing Up Giant, a graphic novel based on the true story of war and shortages faced by a young giant on his journey to find a place in the world. The next year the couple wrote My Favorite Giant, a whimsical adventure that highlights the differences in people as being a strength instead of a weakness. By the time Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) began filming, he was wheelchair-bound due to knee issues steaming from his height, and had double knee replacement surgery in 2013. Joonas Suotamo shared the portrayal of Chewbacca in the film. For Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) Mayhew did not play the role of Chewbacca, but was listed as “Chewbacca Consultant” to Suotamo in the credits. In July 2018 Mayhew announced via Twitter that he had successfully undergone unspecified spinal surgery to improve his mobility, and was recovering. After his death, his wife announced that she would head his namesake charity, the Peter Mayhew Foundation. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) was dedicated to his memory (died 2019): “I’ve always said, if I get tired of [playing Chewbacca], I won’t do it. And I still enjoy it, and what’s there to get tired of?”
From The Recamier 