Plowman-Kasper Wedding

PLOWMAN-KASPER WEDDING

The Wedding Cake with the Unity Candle ready for lighting.

Andrew Thomas Plowman and Jessica Helen Kasper

Great Uncle Frank with the bride

Some of my contribution to the wedding ceremony:   "....... while we in the congregation focus on this couple today, let’s not forget their parents: Kathleen and Keith and Tom and Ellen.   Without their steadfast love, without their commitment to their children, today never comes into being.   Yes, we celebrate today the blessings that these three couples are to one another and to us.    Be consoled because these marriages are God’s way that we, too, all of us witnesses get a share in their blessings both now and in the future.    Beyond these three couples representing two generations of family, we have present here grandparents.  And some of us knew great grandparents and great-great grandparents, all of these ancestors wonderful family members.   Jessica, I and some others here, when youngsters,  knew some of your great-great grandparents.   I have a photo of myself with your great-great grandmother, Elizabeth.   And photos, too, of myself with great grandparents, grandparents and parents.  You represent for me a fifth generation.     I just put on my personal bucket list a photo op with a member of the sixth generation.   But Andrew and Jessica, no pressure.   I’m feeling healthy.  But I am reluctant to count on the other fifth generation members in my family....."   


But here are some of the 5th gens with the bride; some of the family can certainly count on them but my time is relatively short!

    

Crypt Chapel at Wernersville

Crypt Chapel at Wernersville

Catholics very often honor  bishops and benefactors by burying them in chapels under the altars of much larger chapels.   The Main Chapel at Wernersville has just such a crypt chapel, a bit below grade level and windowless.   This is the site for the remains of Genevieve and Nicholas Brady. the generous benefactors of the building and grounds, built as a Novitiate and still used by the Jesuits for a residence.   But the large building now serves mainly as a retreat house.

This crypt chapel not many weeks ago was the site of a Mass celebrated for the Jesuits in the community by Father Robert McTeigue, S.J. with Father Ifkovits as his altar server.  

He celebrated Mass in the Extraordinary Form, the Latin Mass based on rituals approved and published after 1570 and commonly used until about 1962.   In certain circumstances in these days such a Mass is celebrated publicly.   Many Catholics find devotion in it.  Indeed it was the form of the Mass known to the Bradys.   For me it was a return to the experience of my childhood church in the nineteen forties and fifties.