Thursday, September 12, 2013
Real Heraldry in Fort Wayne
Lest you think that the only "heraldry" that I found in our trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana was not really heraldry at all, just across the street and around the corner from the Embassy Hotel with the heraldry-like decorative elements was the following, on the Chancery Office attached to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a part now of the Diocese of Fort Wayne - South Bend.
What a great, clean coat of arms! Simple, easily identifiable, everything that you could want in heraldry. Of course, it got more complex when the diocese was combined with that of South Bend.
It is an unusual form of marshaling two coats of arms onto a single shield, basically Per fess in chief Fort Wayne and in base South Bend. Still, I'm not sure how else they could have done it (short of just taking some elements from each coat and combining them into a single coat of arms) given the Church's practice of using the arms of a diocese marshaled with the personal arms of the bishop as arms of office.
Still, I prefer the simpler coat of the Diocese of Fort Wayne over the marshaled coat of the Diocese of Fort Wayne - South Bend.
Uh, no. There never was a Diocese of South Bend. The original Diocese was Fort Wayne, and the name was changed (and a co-Cathedral designated) when the South Bend area got big enough that they decided to prepare for an eventual separation. The arms were modified at the same time to reflect the change, but they aren't marshaled.
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