I just finished importing all the photos from today's Priesthood Ordination Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis; it was a beautiful Mass (as is usual), and, as we still don't have an official Archbishop, the Archdiocesan Administrator, Bishop Robert Hermann, celebrated the Mass and ordained the four men as holy priests.
Pictures will be coming... for now, you'll have to be content staring at the picture below, taken with a—gasp!—Canon SLR. That's right; I pulled a list-minute audible and was able to borrow the a brand new Canon 5D Mark II from a friend, complete with a nice 24-105mm f/4 IS lens:
More pictures to come, sooner of later. Probably later at this point, as I have a little resting up to do. I just moved into a condo, and most muscles in my body are aching right now due to moving and assembling all things furniture!
Pictures were taken with the aforementioned 5D mark II, plus my trusty Nikon D90 with an 80-200mm f/2.8 and a 50mm f/1.4 (NICE lens ;-). View them all in my Flickr photostream.
From a marriage at which I was the photographer late last month:
It was a Wedding Mass done in the Extraordinary Form, and the whole ceremony was very solemn. Definitely not the kind of Mass that giddy multi-thousand-dollar-spending brides would love, but the kind of wedding someone who has a strong Eucharistic devotion would like!*
Instead of focusing on the marriage ceremony throughout the Mass, and having a lot of touchy-feely moments like a community candle (whatever you call it), the Mass starts with the marriage rite, then the bride and groom are led to the altar to kneel before the Lord during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The whole congregation is focused on the liturgy—the love feast of Heaven on Earth—and the focus is on the Eucharist.
One fact that I'm not sure most people know is that the bride and groom are themselves the ministers of the Sacrament of Marriage. The priest/deacon/whomever is simply a witness to this holy union.
(*Note: Don't take this post to mean that I'm some kind of anti-English-wedding-Mass nut. I'm just expounding the virtues of the extraordinary form rite of Marriage. I think that there are some excellent ideas in both forms... but all to often the focus of the Wedding Mass itself is completely lost on those for whom it should matter most: the groom and bride!).
What a beautiful Cathedral! I could take a thousand pictures and not capture even a small part of the glory and majesty of this wonderful building.
I was running around the Cathedral trying to grab some frames to be used in the Archbishop-elect Carlson's Installation Mass literature, and I think this is my favorite frame. I set the camera on my tripod and used the IR remote to get a steady shot (I love watching people run around the place with their little cell phone cameras and small digicams (with flash turned on, of course) trying to get a picture when half the lights are out!).
Just an update... the Catholic Canonball Awards' voting begins tomorrow (Sunday, the 3rd), while nominations began earlier today for the Catholic New Media Awards (formerly known as the "Catholic Blog Awards").
