Featured Window

Our Lady of Grace, Dearborn Heights, Michigan

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MSGC : Collections : Window

Window

Building Name: St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church

Artist Name: Maria Orr

City: Kentwood

Window Shape: 2 (rectangle)

Subject/Title of Window: Venerable Matt Talbot

Brief Description of Subject: One of nine exits from the Shrine of the Penitent. Matt Talbot was born in 1856 to a poor family in Dublin, Ireland. Matt left school at age twelve to work for a wine merchant and in whiskey stores. Before lone he was an alcoholic. He once stole a fiddle from a street entertainer and sold it to buy drink. One evening, penniless, he waited outside a pub in the hope that somebody would invite him in for a drink. After several friends passed him by, he went home in disgust and announced to his mother that he was going to “take the pledge” (renounce drink). Talbot maintained sobriety for the following forty years of his life. He found strength in prayer, began to attend daily Mass, and read religious books and pamphlets. He repaid all his debts scrupulously. Having searched for the fiddler to repay him for the instrument he had stolen, and failing to find him, he gave the money to the church to offer Mass for him. Talbot was on his way to Mass in 1925 when he collapsed and died. Heavy penitential chains were found on his body wound around his waist, an arm, and a leg. These windows were designed and painted by Michigan artist and longtime church member Maria Orr and were fabricated at the Pristine Glass Company in Grand Rapids, where she was employed. Pristine Glass employees Elizabeth Kolenda and her staff were much involved in the fabrication process by creating and cutting all the digital layouts for the window designs.

Inscriptions: Venerable Matt Talbot

The MSGC is a constantly evolving database. Not all the data that has been collected by volunteers has been sorted and entered. Not every building has been completely documented.

All images in the Index are either born-digital photographs of windows or buildings or are scans of slides, prints, or other published sources. These images have been provided by volunteers and the quality of the material varies widely.

If you have any questions, additions or corrections, or think you can provide better images and are willing to share them, please contact donald20@msu.edu