"Just Around The Corner" by Ryan Judkins

(The following is the beginning exerpts from an article about The Jubilee Museum published in Nouvelles Nouvelles, the newsletter of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University. Click here to see the entire article in its original format.)

An unprepossessing brick building once known as Holy Family High School rests in quiet solemnity in Franklinton, just west of downtown Columbus. Wimpled nuns no longer glide through the halls or teach in the classrooms, but art and history at least are still studied there.

Dedicated to preserving Catholic art and devoted to the continuance of its religious traditions, the 11-year-old Jubilee Museum that now occupies most of the building has quickly become the largest collection of diversified Catholic artwork in the United States.

With holdings that stretch from pieces of pottery that were old and forgotten when Christ was born to vestments produced after the sweeping changes of the Second Vatican Council, the Jubilee Museum is a particularly apt place to reflect on the place of religion in medieval and Renaissance society and the changes that have or have not occurred into
the modern period. Its large book collection, for instance, which includes a 1582 fi rst edition of the Rhemes New Testament and missals from 1607 to 1962, is well suited to examining the rituals that infused life, that celebrated births, recognized marriages, mourned deaths, granted
forgiveness, consecrated churches, and more.

Father Kevin Lutz, the priest who oversees the museum, commented, “It’s a witness to stability. There’s not a single word changed in the oldest missal we have. Rituals have a very slow development process. Kneeling, bowing, customs like that evolved slowly and even additions had an organic quality. Even if you might look different at twenty or thirty than fifty, you’re still the same person.”