Gregory XIII's tomb in the Vatican

What a Long Strange Year It's Been

Anniversaries are strange animals, and have a curious way of mutating in date and form as they are passed down through the centuries. Some historians claim, in opposition to the received opinion about the scary old Dark Ages, that the apocalyptic year 1000 was no big hairy deal to the early mediaevals, whose calendars were so imprecise that in great stretches of the northern forests nobody was sure what year it was at all. It's a charming and perhaps preposterous idea, but it does shed some light on the relative mutability of the measurement (and to some degree, conquest) of time up until the present day. The last five hundred years since the reform of the Julian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII, in order to bring earth time back to celestial realities, have seen such bizarre anomalies as years in which some parts of the world had no October 4-14, and other places which gained them: Sweden holds the record for weirdest date ever in that regard, February 30, 1729. In our own era, we've had confusions about the Year 2000 bug, celebrated the millenium a year early, and, for that matter, we're still not entirely sure if Christ was born in A.D. 1. Time, like life, can be a messy thing.

The reason, though, for this long rambling Steven Hawking-esque monologue is to excuse the fact that I forgot about a week ago, on July 17, that the Shrine turned exactly one year old. Given the current peregrinations of the ecclesial calendar ("Ascension Sunday," need I say more?), I offer the excuse that our birthday was moved by order of the episcopal conference. It's been a long, strange and enlightening year here at the Shrine. We've brought the world the long-lost legend of St. Flutius and the Holy Whapping, dazzled the blog community (well, maybe) with songs like Secret Archives Man and The Sacristan, revived the Ember days and become, unwittingly, the clearing-house for information on the Venetian Gesuats (not the Jesuits), as well as describing my own adventures rambling through the sunny streets and dusty side-chapels of Italy in search of the holy, the bizarre, and sometimes a little of both, meeting cardinals and clerks, professors and peasants along the way. I even may get a book out of the experience yet, if my readers will be patient.

The Shrine itself has been the genesis of several far-flung friendships that I believe will endure long after this little corner of the Internet has been reduced to pixilated dust. There'll be more speechifying and celebratory remarks--heck, let's just declare an octave and party all week long. But, for now, I'd like to pull an Academy Award weepy speech (and I'll keep it short). I'd like to thank all those folks out there who got the Shrine up and running and whose continued readership keeps this weird little experiment in theology going.

You guys (and girls) the reason we write: your erudite comments are the fuel that keeps our imagination going. I've never had a more well-read or esoterically intelligent audience. In particular, I'd like to thank Mark Shea and co. at HMS Blog for trusting us enough to post a link to a website that only then had a few sparse booger jokes and an appreciation of Juliana of Norwich. (Let me remind you, Mark, that I'm the Holy Roman Emperor around here, descended from Charlemagne, and not you. Plus, you owe me Emily Stimpson's hand in marriage as the prize from that essay contest.) Also, I owe a great debt of thanks to my faithful readers, including Don Jim, one of the coolest priests I've never met; Jane and Lizzy, who inspired us to start writing; Fr. Bryce, who thinks we're brilliant; the Irish Elk; Taylor Marshall the P.O.D. Anglican; Zadok; comments-box denizen Philemon (wherever he is now); the erudite Sandra Miesel, relic expert extraordinaire; monarchist Theodore Harvey; Erik Keilholtz, who miraculously still takes me seriously as an architect; our first groupie Meredith the kissable Catholic; and our friend in tweed Andrew Cusack, who has much cooler Catholic Nerd toys than we do at the Dome.