By Michael Breckenridge
The Northwest Renaissance Festival in Nine Mile Falls, Wash., celebrating its 16th annual this year, seems like a strange place to find a cemetery, yet that is exactly what awaits visitors, nestled right next to an actual working Catholic church that, while beautiful inside in its medieval simplicity, looks more like a tent revival gone permanent from the outside.
The church is run by Fr. Patrick McReynolds, a Catholic priest from Spokane who built the rustic Middle Ages style one-room chapel himself. The friar has taught classes on the Roman Republic, philosophers, and the collapse of civilizations and also conducts services at the Renaissance Fantasy Faire in Gig Harbor, Wash., in the late summer. Traditional Mass and the Lord’s Supper are offered in Latin or English during the run of the Northwest Renaissance Festival Saturdays just after closing and by arrangement at other times. Fr. McReynolds participates in the festival pageant and can be seen on the grounds in plum and cream-colored priestly Renaissance garb.
The graves are fictitious, of course. No one is buried on the grounds of the ren fair – are they?
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