Memorial of Saint Bernard - Tintamarre on Ottawa's Streets

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard, the second founder of the Cistercians, the Mellifluous Doctor, the apostle of the Crusades, the miracle-worker, the reconciler of kings, the leader of peoples, the counselor of popes!

His sermons, from which there are many excerpts in the Breviary, are conspicuous for genuine emotion and spiritual unction. The celebrated Memorare is ascribed to him.

Bernard was born in 1090, the third son of an illustrious Burgundian family. At the age of twenty-two he entered the monastery of Citeaux (where the Cistercian Order had its beginning) and persuaded thirty other youths of noble rank to follow his example.

Made abbot of Clairvaux (1115), he erected numerous abbeys where his spirit flourished.

To his disciple, Bernard of Pisa, who later became Pope Eugene III, he dedicated his work De Consideratione. Bernard's influence upon the princes, the clergy, and the people of his age was most remarkable.

By penitential practices he so exhausted his body that it could hardly sustain his soul, ever eager to praise and honor God. [Excerpted from Pius Parsch, The Church's Year of Grace]

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O God, who made the Abbot Saint Bernard a man consumed with zeal for your house and a light shining and burning in your Church, grant, through his intercession, that we may be on fire with the same spirit and walk always as children of light. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

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On the Feast of the Assumption, the national feast of the Acadians, I heard and watched on St. Patrick Street the Ottawa expression of the Tintamarre, a new Acadian celebration of their identity.  Here are several photos:

Tintamarre, une nouvelle « tradition » en Acadie

par Ronald Labelle

Chez les Acadiens des Provinces maritimes, le 15 août est marqué chaque année par le Tintamarre, une grande fête où les gens se rassemblent pour traverser leur communauté en produisant un grand bruit collectif avec des instruments improvisés, exprimant ainsi leur fierté acadienne.

Cette pratique est devenue un symbole identitaire, au même titre que le drapeau tricolore et l’hymne Ave Maris Stella, et constitue un élément important de l'image de l'Acadie présentée à l'extérieur des Maritimes.

Alors que les autres symboles de l’Acadie doivent leur origine à une prise de conscience qui eut lieu pendant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, le Tintamarre a la particularité d’être un phénomène relativement nouveau, remontant au tournant des années 1970-1980.

Every year on August 15th, on the occasion of the Acadian national holiday, Acadians from the Maritime provinces hold a Tintamarre, a grand celebration in which people get together and march through their communities making an enormous racket with improvised instruments, in order to express their pride in their Acadian heritage.

This practice has become symbolic of their identity, along with the three-coloured flag and the hymn Ave Maris Stella. It is an important component of the image promoted of Acadia outside the Maritimes.

While the other symbols of Acadia originated as a part of the growing self-awareness that emerged during the second half of the 19th century, Tintamarre is different in that it is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back only to the end of the 1970s [source:  Encyclopedia of French Cultural Heritage in North America].