A day in the life in Mobile, AL

Fr. Bartus has given us the a look into his Sunday morning, so I thought I would do the same.  Saturday nights and Sunday morning I say mass at the parish where I am the parochial vicar.  We have a beautiful church built in the Spanish Colonial style with some French elements inside.  Our church still has plenty of marble statues in it and the old high altar survives as a gigantic marble shrine for the tabernacle complete with statuary and images of the Holy Family carved into the marble, all under a great mosaic of the Annunciation on the apse. 

After the morning masses I switch gears into Ordinariate worship.  Our worship setting is a restored side chapel.  The church we worship in had 4 side altars and they survived as shrines with the marble reredos, statues and altar rails with iron gates remaining.  We have built a temporary wooden altar that matches the footprint of the old marble altar so that when covered with a three sided Laudian frontal you can barely tell that it was ever missing.

We start setting up around 3 for the afternoon, as one dedicated lay leader and myself serve as the altar guild, sexton and sacristan.  At 3:45 we have confessions at 4:15 we have (semi) sung Evening Prayer.  Evening Prayer is Rite I from the BDW with the preces, suffrages and collects chanted.

At 4:30 we begin mass.  We are blessed to have a good Episcopal organist who leads us in hymns from the 1940 Hymnal.  We have also taken to chanting the minor propers during the mass.   Our worship is somewhere between Prayer Book Catholic and the old Anglican Missal.  We use 5 piece Roman vestments with biretta and incense, but our liturgics are simple.  The Liturgy of the Word is sung from the priedieu, the peace in the middle and the rest ad orientem at the altar.  We follow the BDW using the optional 9 fold Kyrie, Prayers of the People Form III and the Comfortable Words.  Following the lead of our principal church Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston we conclude with the Last Gospel after the dismissal with he text taken from the RSV-CE 1^st Edition.  We average about 12 people on Sundays now at about 8 masses into this grand adventure.

We have lots of visitors and we are prayerfully hopeful that we will continue to grow.