I’m going through the reasonably comprehensive online archives of the Nashville Tennessean and the Nashville American (owned by and then merged back into the paper), the predecessor of the modern Tennessean newspaper. The coverage is especially interesting. Catholicism was treated respectfully even though it was hardly a major presence on the ground and would number only in the tens of thousands by the death of Bishop Thomas Sebastian Byrne about fifteen years later.

The times…I don’t know what’s going on. I’ll get that out of the way.

The organist of the cathedral is probably a relative of John Floersh, baptized and raised at my parish, the Church of the Assumption, just a few years behind Cardinal Stritch, archbishop of Chicago and the first prefect to head a congregation dicastery of the Roman Curia, a fact surely not lost on the new Roman pontiff. Maybe I’ll invite him here. (My pastor would ask me to strike that out; I’m serious, as I think that the pope should visit a growing city in the Southern U.S., because “growth”, “South”, “wealth”, and “Catholic” are now all in one sentence, but not even politicians living in the U.S. permanently understand this.)

It says “new cathedral”; the cathedral of the Incarnation was dedicated in 1914, but Saint Mary’s had been the cathedral since 1847.

Finally, the men’s choir sang plain chant. Do they mean from the Vatican edition?!