Fun Fact I learned at Facebook today …
Sources:
http://www.catholicvote.org/what-is-the-oldest-catholic-church-in-the-united-states/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_churches_in_the_United_States
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That’s very cool. I’m fond of another church a few thousand miles south of Santa Fe, also called San Miguel, that dates from the mid-1550s. But it was burned down and desecrated and rebuilt a few times since then, so yours is a little more stable, even if it’s just slightly younger. 😉
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The article at Wikipedia listed the criteria used for determining oldest this and that. It’s an interesting list. Check it out.
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Absolutely. Thanks for the article! I wasn’t questioning the status of San Miguel in Santa Fe. It IS the oldest in the U.S. I was just bragging that I’d been to mass a few times at one that was even older. But it’s in an entirely different country, of course, so it doesn’t count. Pathetic brag, anyway, since I’ve never been to Europe where the churches are many hundreds of years older still.
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Dearest did the same thing. He’s SURE the church he went to south of Tucson is ALMOST AS OLD, like within a year or two! LOL Of course, he can’t remember the name of it. ::coughcough::
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Ages ago, in the mid-1970s, Milady and I had the mixed fortune of living in Santa Fe for a couple of years. There were several restaurants right around the Mission that we used to go to, and per Google Maps some still seem to be there.
Do you know about Santa Fe’s Loretto Chapel? Short walk from the Mission. When folks left the East and headed down the long, long road which was the Santa Fe Trail, when you finally got to Santa Fe, there was “the Church at the End of the Trail.” (And you’d get right down on your knees in gratitude for having survived the journey, I’m sure!) Nice little place. Lovely spiral “miracle” staircase built by a Mysterious Itinerant Carpenter. I’ve done some woodwork, and I am in awe of this staircase.
One of the coolest things, the very keystone over the front door has some Hebrew marking…I just asked Milady if that was right, and she said she didn’t recall anything about that. Which is funny, because she’s the one with the steel trap memory and I’m the one who can’t recall what I had for dinner last night. [Some ixquick searching later] Okay, I had my churches confused. (It’s only been, what, thirty-eight years since we lived there? Old neurons are stirred by Google street-cam images, though. “It all starts to come back to me.”)Just a little further up the road, again, is The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (per NMCatholic blog article) has a “keystone brick arch… above the main entrance… [with] a carved triangle with the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew,” reportedly in Bishop Lamy’s appreciation for the contribution of a wealthy Jew for the completion of the church. Here’s someone’s photo of the keystone.
Uh-oh. Will this post with three links? (Pushing the envelope, I yam.)
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Cool stuff, Mindful! I’d love to see the Loretto chapel, and I’m jealous of you! Being a part-time carpenter myself, like you, I’ve always wanted to see it, but never made it.
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I have heard of Loretto; a friend from our parish visited there. But I’d never heard of the Basilica of St. Francis or that Tetragrammaton carving. Wow … the altarpiece at the basilica is GORGEOUS!!! Links worked fine for me. :O)
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Okay, that was a bit of a Santa Fe ramble, eh? Such stories I’ve got from those days, don’t get me started! Lovely place filled with good people and lots of loons. (We were among the latter, I’m afraid, but we had much help from the former.)
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I would like to hear some of your Santa Fe stories. Where are you nowadays? Still in OK?
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Grunt: “Still in OK?”
In Oklahoma for the duration, Lord willing. As for Santa Fe stories… if I can remember anything that’s not too paintful, maybe, sometime.
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I look forward to it. I don’t have any good Santa Fe stories, myself. Most of my NM stories are from other places, like Taos or ABQ or Shiprock. I did know a crazy blonde saxophone player once who used to perform in Santa Fe on weekends. She had a little drinking problem, and one morning after a show, woke up in somebody’s hammock on a front porch way out in the country. Nobody was home, and she didn’t know how she got there, so she hitch hiked back into town. Pretty sure she still has the drinking problem.
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