Sunday, November 11, 2018, 05:30pm - 08:30pm

About The Event

Choral Evensong and Reception for Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday and Veterans Day Observed with Special Service at Saint Barnabas Church of Omaha

Saint Barnabas Catholic Church will commemorate Remembrance Sunday and the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice ending World War One with a special Choral Evensong service on Sunday, November 11, 2018, at 5:30 pm. This musical service, with prayers for the souls of those who died in the “Great War,” will include organ and choral works associated with the conflict. A reception will follow at the historic Offutt House immediately adjacent to the church, where there will be refreshments and readings from some of the many distinguished World War One poets and authors. All are invited to attend without cost, at 129 N. 40th St., Omaha, NE 68131 

Remembrance Sunday is the primary memorial day throughout the British Commonwealth for those who died in war, and is observed on the Sunday nearest “the eleventh day of the eleventh month”, the date of the 1918 Armistice and the date of America’s Veterans Day. Saint Barnabas Church, as part of the Roman Catholic Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter (for former Anglicans), is heir to the great patrimony of English music and ceremony. Thus, the parish will celebrate both this important historical anniversary and the ties that bind American and Britain in a service unique and beloved throughout the English-speaking world. 

Composers featured at Evensong include Ralph Vaughan Williams, who served 1915-1916 as a Royal Army Medical Corps bearer in the Salonika Campaign on the French Western Front and 1917-1918 as a Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery; and William Walton, who wrote the haunting 1916 work, “Drop, drop slow tears,” while still a Oxford choirboy in a world permanently marked by the death of a much of a generation. Organ works will include Walford Davies’ ‘Solemn Melody’ and Vaughan Williams’ ‘The White Rock’, two of the pieces played every year since 1930 at the primary Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London.

The reception following Evensong will include refreshments, readings, and a tour of the grand Offutt House. Built in 1894, it was the lifelong home of Lt. Jarvis Offutt, who served as a pilot in the pioneering Aviation Section of the US Army Signal Corps and was killed in the line of duty in August, 1918. Offutt Air Force Base is named for him.

Contact : DBPage@SaintBarnabas.net
Category: Commemoration & Memorial Events