Category: emoji

Ask your grandparents: many of them remember the light tap on the cheek the bishop gave each person being confirmed. The gesture vanished from the rite with the 1971 reform, replaced by a greeting of peace. The idea behind it survives: Confirmation is no mere formality, it sends someone out into the world. With no…

Right now, if you want to tell someone you are going to confession, the keyboard offers 🙊, 🫣 or 😬. Not wrong, exactly, but incomplete: there is no real confession emoji, and above all nothing for the best part, the moment you walk out feeling lighter. The sacrament of reconciliation has a bad reputation, often…

Evening in a Benedictine abbey. The monks sing Compline, and after that, as the Rule of Saint Benedict asks, nobody speaks until morning: this is the Great Silence. The name comes from the Latin completorium, the office that completes the day. A Compline emoji would be something like that: the prayer you say just before…

One Sunday in spring, a row of children waits in the front pew, the girls in white dresses and veils, the boys in suits that will be too small by Christmas. Some have their hands folded, others are checking that their new shoes still shine. Parents have their phones ready, and Grandma brought tissues. It’s…

February 2 is a busy day. In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a groundhog is consulted about the weather; in France, everyone flips crêpes. Both customs hang on an older feast: forty days after Christmas, the Church celebrates the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, and its English name, Candlemas, comes from the candles blessed at Mass…

On Maundy Thursday, at the end of the Gloria, the church bells fall silent. They will not ring again until the Easter Vigil; in France, children are told they have flown to Rome and will come back loaded with chocolate. It is a gentle way of saying that something serious is happening. A Holy Week…

At the preparation of the gifts, the priest pours wine into the chalice, then adds a single drop of water. He says a prayer the congregation almost never hears: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”…

Halloween is short for All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day, when the Church celebrates every holy man and woman at once, the famous and the forgotten. Most people remember the costumes far better than the feast. And when you want to wish someone a happy saint’s day, the only saints emoji on…

A wedding at Cana in Galilee. The party is in full swing when someone notices, before anyone else, that the wine jars are empty. It is Mary. She tells her son, “They have no wine,” then says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” The scene, told by Saint John, is a good starting…

“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” Jesus says it to his disciples after a day so busy they hadn’t had time to eat. Two thousand years later, the invitation still stands, and people still take it up: a weekend in an abbey, a week in a retreat house, sometimes…