100 Churches in Paris and elsewhere

  Chiara Offreduccio di Favarone  was born in July of 1194 in Assisi in Italy, and so has had a long career as saint. She founded the religious order known as the Poor Clares. This was an order of women dedicated to poverty and prayer, an activity at the time very much male dominated. In particular after her death, the Poor Clares spread around Europe, opening monasteries here and there, reaching Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1286, and the United States in the late 1870s. This is a modern church from the late 1950s, just near the music museum. I visited it when my daughter was singing in a choral thingy there. Very cheerful Stations of the Cross with gold backgrounds. Also, at the end of the fourteen Stations of the Cross detailing moments from the last few, sad days of Jesus’s life, there is a fifteenth, showing Jesus rising from the dead. This cheering PS to your Stations of the Cross was authorized by the pope a few decades ago, in the year 2000, but is actually very rarely seen...

Here we are almost in the dead centre of France, in a town on the road to Santiago de Compostela, which recently is above all known as the place where ex-Prime Minister Beregovoy   killed himself, on the symbolic first of May. I visited it while looking up a friend who likes growing stuff in the countryside. It has some very original things to offer, but first of all let’s look at those saints. Saint Cyricus and his mother are part of that unlucky bunch who got put to death just before the Roman emperor decided Christianity was cool. Only eight years later they would have been getting special treatment and being invited to all the best dinner parties, after Constantine plumped for Christianity, in 312. But, sadly, it was not to be. They were killed in 304. Cyricus was particularly precocious, being martyred at the age of three, apparently for being Christian and scratching the governor’s face. I am not making this up, but most places that speak of it use a lot of " it is said th...