What is Catholic life like in Louisiana?

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More Louisiana in this classic. Levon was never better. Except maybe in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” from the same concert (The Last Waltz). Produced by Martin Scorcese.
 
This seems like an excellent article. I will have to read it in more depth later (just skimmed it).

I am going to have to come down and visit sooner rather than later.
 
Yes! From their magnum opus album Rock of Ages. Also contains "Unfaithful Servant.* And Garth Hudson getting very church-organy in his solo, “The Genetic Method.” Here live, starting about 3:20.


Four Canadians and one Southern boy.
 
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Thanks for this. I’m already a Prime member, gonna watch it tonight!
 
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I was so squeamish at first…but they really are delicious. Just don’t think about what you’re eating. I’ve only had the beef but they also serve buffalo and lamb oysters! I’m trying those next. It’s about 20 miles up the road from my house!
 
Pattylt said:
I was so squeamish at first…but they really are delicious. Just don’t think about what you’re eating. I’ve only had the beef but they also serve buffalo and lamb oysters! I’m trying those next. It’s about 20 miles up the road from my house!
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I’ve heard Tom turkey oysters are the thing.
I think I’ll pass.
But crawfish, that is different: suck the heads, pinch the tails
 
I lived there when I was little; I wanted to go back and visit it, but then Katrina happened. Eventually, I had kids, and I wanted to show them the places I liked when I was their age, before they got too old to enjoy the stuff I wanted to show them. It was a great success. We went the week after Mardi Gras had ended, so they hadn’t entirely finished cleaning up the throws… my kids were such magpies!

I wanted a hotel that was on the trolley line, and came with free parking. I ended up choosing the Prytania Park Hotel, in the Garden District. It’s a stop or two away from Lee Square. It was in the $100-$120/night range, which is awesome for something with such a great location, and far away enough from the party districts that you’re not kept up at night with revelers. It was a great base of operations, and I was even brave enough to move my car on the occasions I wanted to go further afield, like to City Park.

As far as the Catholic bits go, it was really cool to be surrounded by so many great and beautiful churches. There’s the famous St. Louis Cathedral over by Jackson Square, of course. We ended up doing Latin Mass over at St. Patrick’s, just because I don’t get Latin Mass where I live anymore. But there are other architecturally/historically significant Catholic churches as well— Immaculate Conception on Baronne St (Jesuits); St. Augustine (oldest African-American church in New Orleans); St. Joseph’s; Holy Name; Shrine of St. Jude; etc.

I don’t remember a lot of Catholic things permeating Louisiana life when I was little— unless you’re ignoring Mardi Gras, which, like Christmas, is pretty secularized. You’ve got your feasting without your fasting! 😛 But I also remember some elements I haven’t run into elsewhere, like very elaborate St. Joseph’s Day altars—


—which, to me, are more of an Italian thing than a French thing. But basically, people thank St. Joseph for his bounty, and ask for his help in providing during times of need, and remember how he helped save people from famine with an unexpected bounty of fava beans. People bring home dried fava beans-- some people put them in their wallet so they “don’t run out of money”; others put them in their kitchen so, even if they’re not dining on steak, the cupboards are never totally bare.
 
As someone who lives in a swamp in Alabama, I feel you in this and the mosquitoes.
 
Where else would my cold drink be, lol?

The older I get, the more I think you have to be willing to miss something somewhere else to really get what counts in the place where you are. If you have people who count with you and you count with them, that’s what matters.
(I guess I mean you can’t appreciate a place or really be with someone if part of your heart is distracted with wishing it were somewhere else.)
 
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We had the good fortune to happen to go to Mass in British Columbia on a Sunday when Bishop Gary Gordon was there for confirmations. He told the confirmandi (and the rest of us) this: God only speaks one language: the language of the heart, the language that speaks directly, heart to heart. He went on to say God only ever says one thing: I love you.

Adding that with your observation reminds me again of a bit of the Screwtape Letters, and consoles me with the thought that all the communication in Heaven will be all Joy, heart to heart, where nothing is ever lost in translation:

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
(continued…)
 
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The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humour, which, though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is often disappointing in its results. The truth is that humans are pretty clearly divided on this matter into two classes. There are some to whom “no passion is as serious as lust” and for whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex. If your man is of the first type, bawdy humour will not help you—I shall never forget the hours which I wasted (hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one of my early patients in bars and smoking-rooms before I learned this rule. Find out which group the patient belongs to—and see that he does not find out.

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English who take their “sense of humour” so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is “mean”; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer “mean” but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as “Puritanical” or as betraying a “lack of humour”.

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
 
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I have a friend who grew up in France; I’d love to have her listen to some Lost Bayou Ramblers and see if she could understand a word of it. Even if she couldn’t, I think she’d love the music.
 
midori said:
I don’t remember a lot of Catholic things permeating Louisiana life when I was little— unless you’re ignoring Mardi Gras, which, like Christmas, is pretty secularized. You’ve got your feasting without your fasting! 😛 But I also remember some elements I haven’t run into elsewhere, like very elaborate St. Joseph’s Day altars—


—which, to me, are more of an Italian thing than a French thing. But basically, people thank St. Joseph for his bounty, and ask for his help in providing during times of need, and remember how he helped save people from famine with an unexpected bounty of fava beans. People bring home dried fava beans-- some people put them in their wallet so they “don’t run out of money”; others put them in their kitchen so, even if they’re not dining on steak, the cupboards are never totally bare.
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Louisiana isn’t rich as Wall Street accounts wealth, but in people it is one of the richest places on earth. Not just the Cajuns but the Isleños and various tribes and the list goes on and on. People there treasure their pasts, their identies. Still, even there the older ones haven’t always been able to find younger ones to pass the languages on to.
 
Louisiana is a unique state, alongside Alaska and my home state of Hawaii.

I once had someone tell me that Louisiana was not a “real” Southern state because of the large presence of Catholics in that state.
 
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