“Celebrate the Mother of God”
This year the Society of Mary is looking forward to continuing the May Festival celebrating the Mother of God. On four Saturdays in May, a Solemn Mass with procession is celebrated at a different parish, followed by a light lunch (suggested donation: $10).
The full 2025 schedule is below:
Saturday, 3 May, 2025 at 10:00 a.m.
St. Thomas’s Anglican Church
(383 Huron Street)
Saturday, 10 May, 2025 at 10:00 a.m.
St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church
(509 Dundas Street East)
Saturday, 24 May, 2025 at 10:00 a.m.
Church of St. Matthias & St. Anne’s Anglican Church
(45 Bellwoods Avenue)
Saturday, 31 May, 2025 at 10:00 a.m.
Church of St. Mary Magdalene
(477 Manning Avenue)
All services will be followed by a light lunch ($10 suggested donation).
The May Festival at S. Bart’s
Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 10:00 a.m.
Celebrant: The Rev’d Canon David Brinton OGS
Sung by: Rebecca Claborn, Clara Moniz, Clara Krausse,
Margaret Cormier, Bernadette Domingo, Sofia Moniz.
Cantor: Katherine Hill
Organist: Fr David Smith
Prelude: On the Antiphon ‘I am black but comely…’
– Marcel Dupré (1886-1971)
Mass: Missa Cum Jubilo – Codex Las Huelgas
Motets: tba;
tba
Postlude: Improvisation – Fr David Smith
Live-stream (coming soon) | Leaflet download (coming soon)
Celebrating Mary in May
May is the month of Our Lady! The Church’s devotions, both public and popular, have developed side by side over centuries. Very often popular devotions are an amplification of one aspect of the Church’s official liturgical life by and for the sake of those who find that this or that devotion helps them in their spiritual life overall. The tradition of dedicating the month of May to Mary is almost certainly the result of such popular devotional instinct. Most of May falls within Eastertide, the time of rebirth, both natural (springtime) and supernatural (Resurrection). Mary is the Mother of Jesus, but because of this is also the Mother of the Church, which is His Body (see John 19:26), and therefore of each one of us, who are members of His Body, and the “remnant of her seed” (Revelation 12:17).
On these four mornings in May we undertake our major public devotion to Our Lady as we celebrate the Toronto May Festival. There are also many ways we can celebrate her place in the history of our salvation in our own homes. One such is to create a ‘May Altar’ on a table or a mantelpiece, by surrounding an image of Mary with flowers, and lighting candles before it when we are near it, or when we say our prayers. Such a practice reminds us both that her courage and humility allowed God to become Man, and that, when we worship her Son, she worships Him with us and that we are helped by this truth.