Formal Vesture for Men and Women in a Parish Choir: A Solution

In honor of St. Cecilia

Guercino, St. Cecilia (looking somewhat as if she’s wearing an alb, cincture, and cope)

Those who have been involved in high-level parish music programs have often wondered how to solve a particular problem that arises when one tries to take seriously the truth that singers are making a formal, if not ministerial, contribution to the liturgy — in other words, that they occupy a special designated place in the unfolding of the action that deserves to be distinguished in a way that is not necessary or fitting for the laity in the pews. The problem is simply: How to clothe the musicians?

I see three main reasons for using a uniform choir garb:

(1) It recognizes, with appropriate symbolism, the choir’s liturgical role of furnishing sacred music and leading the congregation. This kind of symbolism is the reason we have all the vestments we have, such as the priest’s and the server’s. (In fact, there even exists a “Ritual for Choir Investiture” that could be utilized at the start of an academic year.) The Second Vatican Council seems to support this point when it says:

Servers, lectors commentators, and members of the choir also exercise a genuine liturgical function. They ought, therefore, to discharge their office with the sincere piety and decorum demanded by so exalted a ministry and rightly expected of them by God’s people. Consequently they must all be deeply imbued with the spirit of the liturgy, each in his own measure, and they must be trained to perform their functions in a correct and orderly manner.  (Sacrosanctum Concilium 29)

As one commentator notes:

The choir is a constituent member in the liturgical action, whether in stalls in a chancel, or a loft above the nave. Like the lay servers at the Altar, they are liturgical ministers, though not sacred ministers. Accordingly, they should be vested as lay liturgical servers.

(2) It gives the choir a greater external beauty of appearance, which is appropriate both for the choir’s procession at Communion time and for when the choir travels, if that is part of its program.

(3) It helps the choir members themselves be more focused and serious about their role in the liturgy, and thus gives them a more tangible sense of purpose and service. This is a widely known phenomenon that explains why choirs generally perform better when in uniform (something analogous can be seen in business, academic, and military settings as well).

Now, if one is talking about a men’s schola that can be situated in the choir area of the transept or near the sanctuary, the question is easy to answer: they should wear the classic cassock and surplice.

But if one is talking about a mixed choir of men and women (a practice I have defended elsewhere) located elsewhere in the church, usually in a choir loft, the solution is not so obvious. For if the men in the ensemble wear cassock and surplice, it looks odd for the women to wear diverse lay clothing; and if they all dress in black or some other agreed-upon color, there is still perhaps an aesthetic mismatch.

Various solutions have been proposed. One of them is to dress the entire ensemble in cassocks without surplices, usually red or blue:

 

Another and better solution, in my opinion, can be seen in the St. John the Baptist Schola Cantorum from Allentown, New Jersey, which I had the privilege of singing with last year. The photos have been shared with me by the estimable director Peter Carter. The current format is for boy and girl choristers to alternate every week in singing with the Schola Cantorum (mixed adult choir). Also, the women and girls’ vestments are still a work in progress, as there will be a matching veil for the women and girls. The robes for the men and women are technically cassocks, but Carter refers to them as “robes,” with the men wearing surplices and the women mantles. The “cassocks” are double-breasted and do not have the clerical collar which, with the color, differentiates them in style from the cassocks of the clergy and servers. 

First, the mixed ensemble:

The men and boys:

The women and girls:

 

The mantles were crafted by a seamstress at my parish from surplices and are modeled after the historic mantle of St. Clare of Assisi:

The cassocks and surplices were purchased at Watts and Co.

While Carter likes the solution he came up with (and I agree that it is elegant and suitable for the purpose, without violating any liturgical conventions), it’s not terribly easy to replicate at the moment, because the robes and surplices from Watts and Co. are expensive, their fulfillment of orders is slow, and the surplices have to be reworked into mantles by a seamstress at St. John’s. Perhaps this post will inspire an American vestment maker to make a similar solution more easily available! 

(Here's the photo of when I visited the Schola. What a great group to sing with!)

The Participation of Women in the Priestly Work of Liturgy

It seems almost impossible these days to read anything coming from the Vatican without reading about desires to “increase women’s roles and responsibilities” in the Church. Yet somehow suppressed is the truth that there cannot possibly be, in any possible or actual universe, a higher role or responsibility for women than (1) to be mothers and (2) to pray, in some combination of the two, ranging from a wife and the mother of a family to a consecrated virgin and spiritual mother. I am all the more confident in saying this, in spite of not being a woman, because all of the best, holiest, wisest, and happiest women I have ever known agree with this view; in fact, they are the ones who taught it to me, much as Diotima taught Socrates.

As Bishop Athanasius Schneider says:

[The faithful Catholic women during Soviet times] would never have dared to touch the holy hosts with their fingers. They would refuse to even read a reading during Mass. My mother, for example…when she first went to the West, she was shocked, scandalised, to see women in the sanctuary during Holy Mass. The true power of the Christian and Catholic woman is the power to be the heart of the family, the domestic church, to have the privilege to be the first who gives nourishment to the body of the child and also to be the first who gives nourishment to the souls of the child, teaching it the first prayer and the first truths of the Catholic faith. The most prestigious and beautiful profession of a woman is to be mother, and especially to be a Catholic mother. (source)

No doubt Bishop Schneider would say, in accord with the traditional teaching of the Church, that the religious profession of a consecrated virgin exceeds even this most beautiful natural calling, for it is an especially lofty and pure reflection of the nature of the Church as Christ’s Immaculate Bride, and the fullest outpouring of faith and love for the heavenly Bridegroom. All this could be said to be John Paul II’s perspective as well, but of course he has been thrown under the bus by the feminists and their allies who now occupy the positions of authority.

My own views on the irreducibly distinct and complementary roles of men and women in the Church may be found in my book Ministers of Christ: Recovering the Roles of Clergy and Laity in an Age of Confusion, which is intended to be nothing other than a presentation and defense, in modern language, of traditional teaching and practice.
 

But it seems to me valuable to share a passage from the famous Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, who paints an attractive picture of the necessary and valuable involvement of women in making and repairing items for the liturgy. The following is taken from The Spiritual Diary (pp. 132–33), an entry written on March 20, 1925.

How lovely are Your tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord [Ps. 84:2–3 Douay-Rheims]. The lot of the priest—how joyful, how elect, for the sparrow has found herself a nest [Ps. 84:4].
          Though not all are priests, still the Lord allows those who are not to reach out and to touch the sanctuary and to rejoice in it. I behold women, old and young, making clerical vestments and veils for the holy mysteries of Christ, and my heart expands as I rejoice in their love, in the miracle of God’s mercy. Unceasingly created and continually traversed is the grace-bestowing ladder between earth and heaven [John 1:51]. This ladder is brought into being even now by timid and obedient fingers. For whatever is intended for the sanctuary is already holy by virtue of its purpose, it is holy in its consecration, and, after entering through the curtain of fire, is taken out of human hands to remain in consecrated hands alone, for in truth consecrated hands are no longer human (no matter how sinful or wretched my right hand may be, O Lord). And that which is sewn and woven in our daily, mundane life is already regenerated and sanctified in [priestly] hands and becomes a thing of another world, of the new heaven and new earth.
          The Lord has elected the most skilled and endowed them with the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the completion of their work for the tabernacle [cf. Ex. 31:1–6]. But this gift, having once come down for the elect, remains and is passed down even now in the Church. It rests even now on those who worthily and prayerfully complete this work.…
          Through them, a bridge is created between the sanctuary and the outer courts, a link by which angels ascend and descend from heaven to earth and back. And the woman who offers the Lord her love and her work is like the woman who bought the alabaster jar of expensive oil and poured it on the feet of the Savior and filled that home with fragrance; and the Lord said of this blessed woman that she hath wrought a good work.… Yes, may there also be a blessing for those women who do a good work today by offering a vial of the precious oil of love from their hearts [cf. Matt. 26:6–10].

These words bring to mind the many women over the years whom I have worked with or have heard of, who are sewing and repairing vestments, altar cloths, altar frontals, who are rinsing, washing, mending, doing all sorts of behind-the-scenes work without which the liturgy would not be fittingly offered. The Lord knows of their service and He will reward it.

I think about this YouTube channel, humbly entitled “Vestment Lady” (nowhere will you find out her name—she would not even use her name in our email correspondence): 

 

Or the many makers of fine vestments you can find with a minimum of searching, like Altarworthy or Traditional Vestments. And who can forget the charming pair of ladies featured in Mass of the Ages who continued to sew and repair traditional vestments all through the dark days of the 1970s when such vestments were being thrown away, and who were blessed by God with the sight of a burgeoning new demand for the same?

Indeed, even “those who are not priests” still “reach out and touch the sanctuary and rejoice in it” by the labors of their hands and by the love in their hearts. What is needed today is not a feminist advancement of laywomen into higher and higher bureaucratic posts or more and more semi-clerical occupations—the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of laymen—but a revolution of mentality, a metanoia, a putting on the mind of Christ, Who came not to be served but to serve, and Who gave Himself as a ransom for the many. This is the true model of the priesthood, both ordained and baptismal. It is a model that has become well-nigh indecipherable in the postconciliar period’s smoke and mirrors, culminating in the booby hatch of the Synod on Synodality. May we find our way once again to the humility of tradition by a future servus servorum Dei who does not subscribe to the utilitarian horizontalism and depersonalizing functionalism of the modern West.

Photos of the Guild of St Clare by Joseph Shaw.

New Book Defends All-Male Liturgical Ministry, Subdiaconate/Minor Orders, and Proper Roles of Clergy and Laity

I am pleased to announce the release of my latest book, Ministers of Christ: Recovering the Roles of Clergy and Laity in an Age of Confusion (Crisis Publications).

When this project was first conceived over a year ago, my initial idea was to write a critique of Paul VI’s attempted suppression of the subdiaconate and minor orders, of John Paul II’s permission of altar girls, and of Francis’s innovation of female “acolytes” and “lectors.” During its writing, however, the scope of the book considerably broadened to include a full-scale presentation and defense of the traditional sevenfold manifestation of Orders — priest, deacon, subdeacon, lector, acolyte, exorcist, and porter — together with an explanation of the distinct but mutually supporting roles of clergy and laity. In order to accomplish this, I stepped back further to look at the distinction and complementarity of the sexes in the order of creation and the order of redemption, a perspective that provides the ultimate foundation for the Church’s entire teaching on states of life, roles, and ministries. In this way the book serves as a response to the “gender madness” that afflicts the world and increasingly infects the Church.

The summer’s anti-TLM motu proprio Traditionis Custodes and the mounting threats against the former Ecclesia Dei institutes that avail themselves of the traditional rites of ordination conspire to make the book’s overall argument more urgent still. (Fortunately, subsequent to July 16 I was given the opportunity to do some last-minute revisions to the text in order to take this new scenario into account. Nothing of substance had to be changed in the overall argument.)

Ministers of Christ analyzes the problems with recent popes’ successive innovations in the area of ministry, showing how they have created a theologically and liturgically incoherent situation—a categorical rupture from a tradition firmly rooted in the most profound anthropological, Christological, and ecclesiological principles. In this regard the Church stands in desperate need of the correct (and corrective) witness of the usus antiquior. This will remain true even if a tyrannical attempt is made to prohibit the ancient rites of ordination, an act that would have no more legal validity than Traditionis Custodes itself.

Part I, “Foundations,” looks at the most fundamental questions: how sexuality and the body have personal significance and therefore moral, theological, and liturgical significance as well; the connection between the Incarnation of Our Lord and the male priesthood and male sanctuary service; the blessing on womanhood conferred in and through Our Lady, the Virgin Mother of God; the Old Testament background and New Testament roots of the diaconate, subdiaconate, and minor orders, seen as radiating outward from the priesthood of Jesus Christ, and the solemn tradition behind this ecclesiastical hierarchy; and the proper role of the laity in the great world outside the churches, where they exercise their primary responsibilities.

Part II, “Deviations,” takes a critical look at practices that entered the Church after the Second Vatican Council—above all, the attempt to sideline the subdiaconate and minor orders and the habitual use of female lectors and altar servers, whether filling in as “substitutes” or, as Pope Francis would have it, installed as ministers. It explains how these distortions and novelties misconstrue and muddle the callings of laity and clergy as well as their diverse but complementary modes of participation in the liturgy. In the course of the chapters, the notion of “active participation” is freed from its harsh captivity as a slogan trafficked by modern liturgists.

Part III, “Restoration,” charts a path out of this mess into a healthier church life, making the case for several related proposals:

– the universal reestablishment of the subdiaconate and minor orders, which have never been and cannot be abrogated and which remain in use to this day;

– a return to the traditional lex orandi of the classical Roman rite, which embodies true doctrine about states of life, ministries, and sexes;

– the wearing of veils by women in church as a sign of their dignity and role within the Mystical Body;

– the full acceptance of the supernatural and sacrificial vision of priesthood and consecrated life that attracts vocations today as it always did in the past, together with a firm repudiation of the “heresy of activism” that extinguishes the primacy of prayer and the ultimacy of contemplation;

– a reversal of the mad race of aggiornamento, to be replaced by the serene embrace of the essential changelessness of the Christian religion, which worships the immutable God in His eternal truth, reflected in traditional liturgical rites.

This book also includes the definitive versions of two essays by Bishop Athanasius Schneider: “The Significance of Minor Ministries in the Sacred Liturgy” and “Healing the Rupture: A Call for the Restoration of Minor Orders.”

Ministers of Christ concludes with three litanies for private devotional use. The first is for the clergy in general. The second and third, based on the Roman Martyrology, remind us that the Church’s history provides many examples of saintly subdeacons, lectors, acolytes, and exorcists whom we ought to invoke. Lastly, there is a select bibliography divided into topics.

Ministers of Christ: Recovering the Roles of Clergy and Laity in an Age of Confusion.
   By Peter Kwasniewski, with two chapters by Bishop Athanasius Schneider.
   Foreword by Leila Marie Lawler.
   Manchester, NH: Crisis Publications, 2021.
   xliii + 285 pp.
   Paperback $19.95.

Available directly from the publisher or from Amazon.com.

Here is a short video (by no means professional...) that has more or less the same content as the post above, for those who prefer the video format.

Are Women Permitted to Sing the Propers of the Mass?

In the wider Catholic world, the question posed in the title is not even on the radar screen. If you can have altar girls and female lectors — indeed, apparently, acolytesses and lectresses, in a veritable salmagundi of sanctuary servants — then why not women singing music for the Mass? (Never mind the fact that the concept of “propers” has more or less disappeared outside the world of the usus antiquior.) However, traditionalists, myself included, reject both altar girls and female lectors, arguing that it is only appropriate for males to fill these roles, and, in general, that the patronizing and vocationally deviant clericalization of the laity should be avoided. It might therefore be thought that, as a matter of logical consistency, we ought to maintain that women should not form a chant schola to execute the propers of the Mass. Yet this conclusion does not follow.

While I am an adamant opponent of feminism, I am no less staunch an opponent of chauvinism wherever I see it — and I do see it reappearing in the traditional movement, along with other -isms (e.g., antisemitism, libertarianism, sedevacantism) that are incompatible with Catholic tradition. The revival of traditional liturgical practice has permitted the reappearance of some extreme points of view that deserve refutation. For example, not only have I heard traditionalists argue against women singing the propers; I’ve heard them argue that none of the laity whatsoever should sing any of the Mass Ordinary or responses. (On that last point, see here, here, and here.)

The point of departure for the question on women chanters is the rather blunt statement of Pope St. Pius X in his famous 1903 motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini:

With the exception of the melodies proper to the celebrant at the altar and to the ministers, which must be always sung in Gregorian chant, and without accompaniment of the organ, all the rest of the liturgical chant belongs to the choir of levites, and, therefore, singers in the church, even when they are laymen, are really taking the place of the ecclesiastical choir…. On the same principle it follows that singers in church have a real liturgical office, and that therefore women, being incapable of exercising such office, cannot be admitted to form part of the choir. Whenever, then, it is desired to employ the acute voices of sopranos and contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the Church.

Stated thus, it sounds cut and dried. But is it self-evident that “all the rest of the liturgical chant” (would this include the Ordinary?) “belongs to the choir of levites” (whatever that means exactly)? It seems that Pius X has in view singers in the sanctuary or the “choir” area of a transept of a monastic-style church, where their placement and vesture suggest that they are performing a ministerial function. The operative conception here, it seems to me, is that of a cathedral, seminary, or boys’ school.

If singers are, in contrast, somewhere in the nave, whether on the floor or up in a loft, it is more difficult to see that they constitute a “choir of levites” with a “real liturgical office.” Just as laywomen were not forbidden to sing the Ordinary of the Mass (indeed Pius X and his successors encouraged this) even though the Ordinary is manifestly a liturgical text also said by ordained ministers, by the same logic women would be competent to sing the propers.

To make the situation clearer, Pius XII in his encyclical Musicae Sacrae of 1955 lifted the ban for lay women as long as they were not in the sanctuary (the internal quotations are from three earlier decisions of the Sacred Congregation of Rites):

Where it is impossible to have schools of singers [scholae cantorum] or where there are not enough choir boys, it is allowed that “a group of men and women or girls, located in a place outside the sanctuary set apart for the exclusive use of this group, can sing the liturgical texts at Solemn Mass, as long as the men are completely separated from the women and girls and everything unbecoming is avoided. The Ordinary is bound in conscience in this matter.”

Granted, Pacelli’s words are not exactly a resounding encouragement to have women, but it shows that there is no ban on women singing, as long as they are outside the sanctuary.

Let’s think this through, with attention to the symbolism of church architecture. The development of choir lofts, which can certainly be said to be the norm in most churches built in the century prior to Vatican II, perfectly accords with the role of the choir as a body that provides chant and polyphony for the liturgy, with mixed voices as needed or desired, and in a way that does not involve the singers in the ceremonies taking place below. This preserves the anonymity of the choir and bypasses the danger of distraction for the congregation, since the musicians do not so easily risk “putting on a show.” If the propers can be sung polyphonically with men and women, does that not establish that women may sing the propers by themselves?

Admittedly there is a longstanding tradition of having only men singing, inasmuch as the choir was seen as fulfilling a properly liturgical role. Yet just as it is possible for altar boys to substitute for acolytes, and even for any laity (such as girls in a girls’ school) to make the responses at Mass provided they are in the pews and not in the sanctuary, so too it is possible for non-vested laity to substitute for a properly liturgical choir. Put differently, lay people from outside the choir area can fulfill a liturgical function, but not in a properly liturgical manner, which would involve their being vested and being more closely associated with the ritual action in or near the sanctuary, as we see in solemn Vespers when the singers in cassock and surplice process into the sanctuary, genuflect, bow to each other, and split off to their seats on the sides for the chanting of the psalmody. (It also seems clear enough that whenever there is a schola of clergy or male religious singing the propers, as Pius X envisioned, women should not join them.)

We should also take into account the not inconsiderable witness of centuries of women religious singing the sacred liturgy, and doing so not because there are no men around to do it (although that will usually be true), but because it is proper to themselves: it is a requirement of their consecrated life, expected and indeed demanded of them by the Church. They do not “substitute” for anyone else but do it by a right proper to and inherent in them. Moreover, depending on the order or congregation, the nuns might perform this opus Dei in the choir area of a monastery church (still with a symbolic separation from the sanctuary), chanting all the parts of the Mass except those of the major ministers. It is true that this fact in and of itself does not establish an analogous right for unconsecrated lay women to do the same, but it does establish, once and for all, that women as such are not disqualified from singing the chants of the liturgy, provided that good order is maintained.

Once again we can see what a fine and helpful development the choir loft was, and why it should be present in every Catholic church. How many blessed hours of my life have been spent in choir lofts, leading or singing with scholas and choirs of men and women, in Santa Paula, California; in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland; in Gaming and Vienna, Austria; in Lander, Wyoming and in Lincoln, Nebraska!

We cannot leave history and prudence behind. There has been an evolution in the attitudes toward women in the Church, even while we still hold fast to the ancient truth, now contradicted by Pope Francis, that women should not be vested and serving in ministerial roles (cf. 1 Cor 14:34). One need look no further than the redoubtable Justine Ward to see that women were heavily involved in the resurgence of Gregorian chant in the twentieth century and taught people how to sing it, which means that they were in the lay schola.

It’s not clear to me what we could possibly gain by trying to prevent women from singing the propers, provided the singers are musically qualified (and the same holds, obviously, for men — no one’s sex makes him or her more adept for the art of singing). Unlike the minor orders of acolyte and lector, there has never been a minor order of cantor/singer. It is therefore impossible to classify women singers along with altar girls/acolytesses and female readers/lectresses as part of the same progressive “slippery slope” for the ordination of women as deacons or priests. Musicologists and musicians are free to argue about whether a higher-pitched or lower-pitched rendering of chant works better from the point of view of liturgical aesthetics, and sociologists or anthropologists of religion could argue about cultural expectations and associations, etc., but none of this pertains to the question at hand.

On a practical level, unless there is some extenuating circumstance like a CMAA Sacred Music Colloquium with its pedagogical aims, it would be strange to have a men’s schola and a women’s schola dividing up tasks at the same liturgy; this is best avoided. When only men or only women are singing the propers, the worshiper can more easily forget about it and pay attention to the chants, the texts, and the ceremonies. When the two scholas go back and forth, it draws attention to the octave difference between men and women — that is, it draws attention to the performers, which is not ideal. Similarly, chant sung by men and women simultaneously is sometimes an unavoidable necessity, but chant tends to sound best in a true unison, not in organum of parallel octaves. If a chapel or parish has two scholas, a men’s and a women’s, it would be better to have one or the other sing all the propers at Mass. This is what I did at Wyoming Catholic College. The men’s schola sang multiple times a week; at a certain point, a women’s schola was created to give the women a chance to immerse themselves more fully in the chant and to give the men a much-needed rest. Here, too, a certain complementarity developed that was beneficial for all.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

Prominent Catholic Women Announce the Launching of HelenaDaily.com

A Site that Collects the Best Content Available to Fortify the Dignity of Women In Harmony with the Common Good (and So It’s Good for Men Too!)

Launched just this week, Helena Daily is the new gathering space for all Catholic women, a site that collects the best content available to help all women rediscover, highlight, and emphasize the best of who they are, helping them to become the women that God created them to be.

Carrie Gress, author of the bestselling book The Marian Option, and one of the founders of the project, alerted me to this recently, and I am very happy to pass on the information. She told that Helena Daily, “is rooted in the 2,000-year-old Catholic tradition that fortifies the dignity of women, and is a place where the content is rich and beautiful, drawing on the Church’s teaching as a guiding compass.

“From the checkout stand to social media, women are barraged with a very narrow and generally unhealthy model of what it means to be a woman. We want to both challenge this narrow vision and show why the Catholic Church has so much to offer women,” she said.

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Guido Reni

There are three women behind the new site:

Becky Carter, co-host of Thriving in the Trenches podcast, is a mother to five strong-willed children. She and her family returned to the Catholic Church after leaving it for 17 years. The years of searching for the truth have led her to be a fierce defender of the Faith.

Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. She is a regular blogger at The National Catholic Register and at My Favorite Catholic Things. She has authored several books, including a best-seller, The Marian Option (TAN 2017), and most recently, Marian Consecration for Children (TAN 2018).

Megan Schrieber, co-host of Thriving in the Trenches podcast, is a Catholic mother of six, an athlete, interior designer, and speaker who is eager to address and defend the Catholic Church’s empowering vision of womanhood and religious freedom.

The content for Helena Daily will focus exclusively on issues and topics for women, and will collect fresh pieces ranging from well-known writers to obscure bloggers. The three founders felt that although there are several great Catholic aggregate sites, none focus solely on issues and topics for women.

I have started to follow Carrie Gress recently through her articles on NCR and her blog. What has struck me is how by a simple, clear and unapologetic articulation of all that is so positive about the Church’s understanding of women, she gets noticed. The response is not all positive. If you thought that liturgy sites had the potential for generating bitter commentary from readers, you should try looking at the response that women’s issues get. I don’t think I have seen such vitriol in writing as I have from people who push back on women’s issues.

I am grateful to her and her colleagues Becky and Megan for having the courage to start such a project.

The Helena Daily site is live, and already offering fresh, meaningful content for all Catholic women.

Content suggestions can be sent to helena@helenadaily.com or through the URL of the site itself: www.helenadaily.com

“Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, friends - these are the basic relationships that make up our lives. And these are the places in the past where women flourished, learned from each other, supported each other, and grew into the women that God called them to be. Through births, deaths, high days and holy days, dark days and mundane days, tears and laughter, women have been there for each other. For millennia, this was simply the fabric of everyday life.”

From About Helena Daily, HelenaDaily.com

All images are Virgin and Child with St Anne, mother of Our Lady and the Nativity of the Mother of God.