ecclesiastical

Rising above the western skyline before freeways had cut their paths, spires and towers signaled many of the ecclesiastical palaces — St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Joseph’s, First Methodist — calling the faithful from Queen Anne neighborhoods that along with their original churches have long since disappeared.

Only ecclesiastical authorities sanction marriage, and do so with additional patriarchal commitments.

The observatory’s mission statement says experts will analyze and interpret apparitions, lacrimations, or weeping statues, stigmata “and other mystical phenomena that are in progress or have already occurred, but are still awaiting a pronouncement of the ecclesiastical authority on their authenticity.”

Within a few decades, new endpapers were added, and around 1847, the ecclesiastical historian and collector William Maskell signed the book and began adding his own notes.

Across the decades, there were many cases of ecclesiastical civil disobedience — clergy doing ordinations and marriages that defied church bans, some of whom were tried for heresy or other infractions.