Sorry for the Delay

It has been a while since I have posted anything and I apologize for that. It has been a crazy couple of weeks (Art Week which meant nine hour class days, a trip to the town of Orvietto, first week of regular class, a Papal Audience, a weekend trip to Ravenna, and many things going on back home), so the blog has been on the back burner. I meant to begin catching up today, but a very interesting morning made that impossible.

My friend Ethan loves the Ukrainian Rite of the Catholic Church (in short, the Ukrainian Rite is made up of people from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church--a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church--who left the Orthodox Church and realigned themselves with the Pope while keeping their liturgy and most of their traditions). Ethan had gone to a Ukrainian Rite church last weekend and invited me and our friend Maggie (who was raised in the Ruthenian Rite--similar to the Ukrainian Rite) to go with him this weekend. The Divine Liturgy (what they call the Mass) was celebrated at 10am, so we were on the road at 7:45 to make sure we arrived on time. As we approached the church, we saw a lot of police officers our front. Upon asking what was going on, we were told that the Pope was visiting the church at 4pm. We had to go through security as a result, but we made it in just fine. However, the Liturgy had been moved to 11am, so we had a two hour wait. The wait was not silent however; psalms and prayers were chanted starting at 9:30 and took up most of the time until 11. The psalms were in Ukrainian, so we could not participate, but the woman chanting had a wonderful voice. During all this, the church was filling rapidly. The place was packed and there were many people with Ukrainian flags and cameras. When the Liturgy began, we learned what all the people were so excited for; the Major Archbishop of Kiev (the man in charge of the entirety of the Ukrainian Rite--under the Pope of course) was celebrating the Liturgy in preparation to meet with the Pope at the church in the afternoon. I could not see much of what happened during the Liturgy, but I could hear it and smell it which was beautiful. It went until a little after 1pm (and there are no chairs or pews, so we stood from about 7:45 when we left until close to 2 when we got on the bus to campus) and it was very good. All that being said, I had planned on being back earlier and getting homework and blogging done. Instead I had to focus on homework and skip the blog. However, I suppose that delaying the stuff I wanted to blog about for the opportunity to be an American Latin Rite Catholic celebrating the Divine Liturgy with the head of the Ukrainian Rite Church from Kiev is acceptable. 

Hopefully I will give more of an update on things tomorrow.

God Bless.