Archdiocese of New Orleans

Archdiocesan Archives
Archbishop Antoine Blanc Memorial
1100 Chartres St.
New Orleans, LA 70116-2596

Mardi Gras officially ends at 12:00 p.m. on the night of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras Day. Lent begins and all celebrations must officially cease. Ash Wednesday begins a forty-day period of fasting, self-discipline, and good works. Appropriately our Mardi Gras Guide concludes with the Lenten records of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans.

The New Orleans Roman Catholic Archdiocesan Archives is in the historic Old Ursuline Convent in the Vieux Carre. Completed in the early 1750s, the convent is the area's oldest structure. The Ursuline nuns donated the building to the bishop of New Orleans in 1824, and it has been owned and occupied by the diocese ever since. The Archdiocesan Archives functions as records manager for the Archdiocese and also collects, preserves, and makes available records of the eight civil parishes of Louisiana included in the New Orleans Archdiocese. Sacramental records date from 1718 to the present. The Archives also holds one of the South's most extensive collections of antebellum religious correspondence, and has an active publication program.

Two Mardi-Gras-Lenten collections are of particular interest:

-- the bishops' nineteenth century pastoral letters outlining Lenten obligations and practices; and

-- church historian Roger Baudier's weekly newspaper columns (1932-1960), picturing Creole New Orleans' late nineteenth-century Mardi Gras and Lenten customs.