My mom is catholic-- and she travels with me for Christmas... So that means we seek out cool places for her to go to mass where ever we are when Sunday comes.

Seems like I have a thing for St. Stephen...On Christmas eve we went to midnight mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, and Today (Sunday 28th) we went to St. Stephen's Basilica in Budapest.

What a stunning building. And it is kind of cool listening to mass in a language I cannot understand AT ALL... pretty funny actually.

But it was lovely, and the basilica is gorgeous.

In case you wondered, as I did, What makes a church a basilica?

The Latin word basilica (derived from Greek, Basiliké Stoà, Royal Stoa), was originally used to describe a Roman public building (as in Greece, mainly a tribunal), usually located in the forum of a Roman town. In Hellenistic cities, public basilicas appeared in the 2nd century BC.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the term came by extension to refer to a large and important church that has been given special ceremonial rites by the Pope. Thus the word retains two senses today, one architectural and the other ecclesiastical. from Wikipedia