The Church celebrates only three birthdays: those of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist. The Birthday of our Lady, which we celebrate today, is a lovely feast, full of light and joy. In the East, it is one of the twelve so-called Great Liturgies. The earliest sermon for the feast is by St Andrew of Crete (though my favourite is by St Bernard) and the day was once marked by a special procession or litania from the Forum in Rome to Sta Maria Maggiore. In England look out for the autumn crocus, the popular name for which, "Naked Lady", is a reference to Mary.

Digitalnun apologizes for her hasty condemnation of JS-Kit's commenting apparatus. A little research last night indicated that the main reason the blog page is not appearing correctly on all screens is because the dreaded Windows Internet Explorer is causing some of the code to scramble (sigh). The page actually appears better in some earlier versions of IE than the current one, so this is another problem that will have to be worked on. In the meantime, we recommend the use of Firefox which is a very fast, stable, cross-platform browser. By way of compensation, we are reintroducing the commenting option, but you'll have to scroll down the page to do so. The good news is that in October the site is to have a makeover, with some new content to look forward to and possibly a whole new look . . .