in omnem terram exit sonus eorum

Their sound went into all the earth: and their speech continually unto the ends of the world. Ps. 18:5

There’s a little bit of a mystery as to which text exactly this is a quotation from–it doesn’t correspond to the Nova Vulgata, and I am rummaging around on the Internet to see which earlier Psalter it’s from–but in any case, at the time I didn’t know about this oddity, but just found it a striking piece of mosaic art. (And Latin!) It is from the entrance to the Madonna Della Strada Chapel on the Lakeview campus of Loyola University, where I visited this past Monday.

Directly opposite this, flanking the other side of the doorway, is a corresponding piece with a quotation from a place both surprising and not –

It asks, ‘What region in the earth is this, not full of our pains?’ It is 1.460 of the Aeneid. Aeneas himself speaks this, when they stumble upon Tyre and find it, unexpectedly, a wealthy, regal land. Of course, Christians for millennia have found Vergil the most Christian of pre-Christian writers, and this is not a surprising pairing. It is quite beautiful, though.