Welcome, FIUV!

Hello to all readers of Gregorius Magnus magazine who have followed the link to the Mrs McLean Waltzing Party website! I hope to make the comments feature easier to access soon, but in the meantime I’ll be delighted to read your emails.

One of the reasons for publishing this blog is to encourage you to create social dancing opportunities within your own Catholic communities. My advice is to help keep local culture strong by encouraging youngsters, no matter whence they come, to learn your local dances as well as any international favourites that suit your group. In the Canadian or American Prairies, that could be square-dancing. In Breton, that’s probably the Gavotte.

MMWP is in Scotland, so we end most of our dances and parties with an energetic “Strip the Willow”—followed by the singing of the season’s Marian Anthem. Like the 14th century pilgrims celebrating journey’s end with Our Lady of Monserrat, we bookend our dances with prayer.

Scottish country dances (and their riotous younger siblings, ceilidh dances) originated in English court and country dances, so they belong in England, too! It’s always a delight to me to see photographs of ceilidh dancing at the SPUC Youth Conference, for example. Meanwhile, many a Newman Guide College in the USA offers its students social dancing, notably swing-dancing and even the waltz.

The waltz was born in Catholic Austria, of course, and it is still de rigeur in Vienna . Recently it featured at the ITI (International Theological Institute) Viennese Benefit Ball in Denver, Colorado.

MMWP was founded after the St. Boniface Institute’s Catholic Resistance Conference in Vienna in 2023, at which there was a ball dedicated to that most Viennese of dances, the waltz. We began our own first hesitant steps to 3/4 time, and then learned (or reviewed, for some of us are Polish) the Polonaise. After a few months, we decided to try out the Lindy Hop and then to go, as a group, to other organisations’ dance events.

These excursions have been joys but also challenges. They have shown us that there is a real need for a traditional, Catholic-friendly dance scene that recognises and honours the complementary of the sexes.

Please enjoy clicking around the site to read about our various adventures and themes of interest to Catholics who either enjoy social dancing or would like to learn!