Easter in the romantic village of Menotomy

NPR had a piece on Friday afternoon about the last of the lady's milliners.
Y'know hat-makers....milliners still abound in Washington DC thanks to the black church the tradition of dressing up like "God's People" on Sunday.
So you can just imagine the pressure is really on the perfect hat to top off an Easter in D.C.
The woman they interviewed was wildly enthusiastic about her work and drew elegant parallels between an ornate hat and the bliss of the kingdom to come.
Fair enough, at least the work isn't be outsourced to slave labor camps in Thailand.
Of course in my parish, God's People pretty much come to the Lord's House dressed to pull up weeds in the front yard.
Even the altar boys wear bulky sneakers neath' their linen robes.
I didn't see too many Easter bonnets in the pews...and the few that I saw were firmly planted on the heads of girls under the age of five.
Which is still an age that can't put up much of fight about holiday millinery.
Meanwhile Momma is still dressed in flats-n-slacks all set off with the intriguing look of a royal blue sweatshirt...she looks like she'll be taking the dog for a walk after mass or something.
Well what of it?
The R.C.C. is a mass religious phenomenon, it works on volume-volume-volume, there has never been a big dress up tradition therein.
Still, I felt a little foolish in my suit coat and tie...but then I'm a traditionalist living up to a nonexistent tradition.
Otherwise the homily was appropriately platitudinous and no one got hurt.
***
Meanwhile the Boston Globe breathlessly reported this morning the presidential candidate John Kerry received the Eucharist at his favored' church yesterday.
As it turns out, O'Malley can rail against pro-choice Catholics and insist they much skip communion til they are in line with church doctrine....but at the same time the dioceses makes it a policy not to refuse communion to individuals.
So we are back to passive aggression in the pulpit I guess.
I still think O'Malley is sucking up to the R.N.C. on some level.
Last summer he singled out pro-choice Catholics as being outside church teachings and therefore must forego the Eucharist.
The archbishop had nothing to say though in regards to the equally numerous pro death penalty R.C.'s out there...

Just another glorious day in the Bay State my friends...