“Celebrate the Mother of God in Eastertide”
The Society of Mary’s May Festival celebrating the Mother of God will take place again this year. On three Saturdays in May Mass will be celebrated at a three downtown Toronto parishes.
The full 2026 schedule is below:
Saturday, 2 May, 2026 at 10:00 a.m.
S. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church, Regent Park
(509 Dundas Street East)
Saturday, 9 May, 2026 at 10:00 a.m.
S. Thomas’s Anglican Church, Huron Street
(383 Huron Street)
There will be no special Mass on either the 16th or the 23rd of May.
Saturday, 30 May, 2026 at 10:00 a.m.
The 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 2, 2026 at 10:00 a.m.
Celebrant: The Rev’d Dr Walter Hannam
Sung by: The Chantresses of S. Bartholomew
Choir Director & Cantor: Katherine Hill
Parish Organist: Fr David Smith
Music:
Mass: Missa in A – Josef Rheinberger (1883)
Motets: Maria, mater gratie – Gabriel Fauré (1887);
Sancta Maria, succurre miseris – Claudio Monteverdi (1627);
Regina Caeli – Gregor Aichinger (1603)
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.