Catholic

With the tying of a purple ribbon on the front door, St. Mary's Immaculate Conception Church, known as the oldest Catholic church in the Wyoming Valley, closed on Sunday after a final celebration of Mass.

Today is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The virgin Mother is said to have appeared to St. Juan Diego in Mexico in the 1500s. The manifestation helped to convert many native people of Mexico to Catholicism. In Wilkes-Barre, the faithful sang, danced and prayed ahead of a large procession through the streets today.

As a teenager at the turn of the 20th century, Casimira Kaupas was smuggled out of Lithuania under a tarp and potatoes to Northeast Pennsylvania. She spent four years in Scranton, which led her on a path to a religious life. Kaupas became Mother Maria and now, 84 years after her death in Chicago, the once curious Lithuanian teen is on her way to Catholic sainthood.