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To the south of the pier and adjacent to cruciform Field Museum is Soldiers' Field Stadium, capable of holding nearly 200,000 spectators on terraced seats and in oval field. In the field, church carpenters are constructing a sanctuary 224 feet long and 214 feet wide. This will have priedieus, or kneeling benches, for the more than 500 archbishops and bishops, who will attend in copes and mitres and bearing croziers. Fifteen cardinals robed in ecclesiastical red and attended by papal knights and lay dignitaries, whose clothes will be of festive cloth of gold proper for such an occasion, will assist at the Masses in Soldiers' Field. The cardinals will have their red-canopied thrones flanking a huge altar.
This altar will be of stucco on a platform 30 feet above the ground. At its pinnacle, above its gilded canopy, will tower the cross, 125 feet from earth. The cardinals with their gleaming attendants will mount to this altar by 24 broad steps leading up from three sides. Flowers for the altar will come from the home and school gardens of Chicago's Catholic children. Loud speakers will carry the words of the Mass to the multitudes.
Still another framework mounts magnificently for Cardinal Mundelein's spiritual bouquet to the Holy Father. This is at Mundelein, Ill.*** Hundreds of men have been working here all winter landscaping the grounds of the Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake. They have constructed in a little valley a grotto in replica of the one at Lourdes in southwest France. They have installed the Twelve Stations of the Cross. They have built miles of roads, five bridges over the indented shoreline of the lake. They have wreathed the seminary, the dormitories, the little chapel, in trees and shrubberies and lawns. They have mounted on a pedestal 20 feet square a marble shaft 62 feet high. Surmounting the pillar is a 12-foot bronze statue of the Virgin Mary standing on a globe to symbolize her supposed exalted position over the world. Bronze images of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John support the globe.
At the entrance to the seminary grounds will be an altar with thrones and sanctuary similar to the one at Soldiers' Field in Chicago.
"Little Flower of Jesus." The relics of St. Therese, the "Little Flower of Jesus," have just been brought to Chicago from Liseux, France, where she lived.**** The relics include a crucifix made from the rosebush from which, during her convent life, she daily plucked roses to place before the statue of the Infant Jesus. Other relics are several locks of her hair, her dust, a piece of the habit in which she died, a piece of another habit in which she was buried, a piece of the coffin in which she was interred before her exhumation in 910 and a large piece of her arm bone.
The Full Bouquet. The full savor of the million flowers of faith that Cardinal Mundelein is offering to his Supreme Pontiff will rise the last day of the Congress, Thursday June 24. The million pilgrims of all degrees will move themselves to the town of Mundelein to garland that jewel of Catholicism with their final public demonstration.† The million will proceed in processional through the miles of the seminary walks, past the Stations of the Cross. There never before was pomp like this in the U. S.