NOTEBOOK
Not wanted TIME WAS when a Belgian football club would have been happy to accept sponsorship from a Catholic weekly. Not today. Even though the first division club Cercle
Brugge was founded by the Jesuits more than 100 years ago, it has turned down an offer from the Catholic weekly, Kerk & Leven (“Church and Life”), to advertise on its players’ shirts. Like everyone else in Bruges, the club was stunned earlier this year when the city’s bishop, Roger Vangheluwe, quit and went into hiding after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew for years.
“With all the scandals in the Catholic
Church, especially with Bishop Vangheluwe in Bruges, we thought this was too sensitive,” said the club’s commercial director, Marc Tanghe. “We were afraid of becoming a target.” The club was also concerned that the advertising might violate the neutrality rules of Belgium’s football association.
Me and my shadows ALONG WITH the cheering crowds and the papal flags there is, it seems, another constant on the Pope’s travels. The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, related this week how he joined Benedict XVI in the Mercedes-made Popemobile for the journey from Lambeth Palace to Westminster. At the launch on Tuesday of an official DVD of the visit, Archbishop Nichols recalled: “We got out and there were certainly plenty of people – including, over on the right- hand side, one of the first signs of protest about the papal visit. And there was one banner in German held up, which I was told was about the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. I said: ‘Oh, there’s that ... ’, and the Holy Father said: ‘Oh yes, that follows me everywhere.’”
Holy markets SHOPPERS BROWSING at Christmas market stalls may be surprised to hear that some of the items on sale originate from an Orthodox convent in Eastern Europe. Products made by the sisters of St Elisabeth’s
convent in Minsk, Belarus, are on sale at the Cologne Christmas Market at London’s Southbank Centre and also at markets in Canterbury, Winchester and Cirencester. The nuns make everything from Nativity cribs, candleholders and mugs to CDs, icons and book covers. The convent was founded in 1999 following the creation of the sisterhood three years earlier, and the sale of the goods helps the nuns with their main apostolate of caring for the mentally ill – the sisters work in the National Psychiatric Hospital. In addition to that, they run a centre, 19
16 | THE TABLET | 11 December 2010
miles from Minsk, helping drug addicts and alcoholics as well as providing shelter for the homeless. The Southbank market runs until 23 December.
Larger than life PEOPLE LEAVING the funeral of the Dean of Southwark, Colin Slee, last Saturday were given a biscuit in the shape of Father Christmas. His great friend Dr Jeffrey John explained it was because St Nicholas was the dean’s patron saint, the name “Colin” being a diminu- tive of Nicholas in Scots Gaelic. Dr John – Dean of St Albans and a former Southwark canon – said that St Nicholas was a remarkably good fit for Slee and not just in terms of physical stature and generosity. “It was also Nicholas – let us remember – who at the Council of Nicaea is said to have punched Arius the heretic on the nose because he was misrepresenting Jesus and failing to show the full extent of God’s love in the Incarnation,” he said. He recalled how his former boss sometimes would terrify his canons by firing off “dozens of wildly improbable ideas, while we squeaked our reservations and tried to rein him in. When Colin had his heart operation last year, the consultant told him that for years he had only been functioning at 30 per cent power. I think it was Bishop Tom [Butler] who said, ‘Thank God we never knew you when you were 100 per cent’.”
Slee’s son Ben paid tribute to his father
and invited the congregation to stand and offer three cheers and applause making the loudest noise possible. The dean was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October and died on 25 November, aged 65.
Founding father BRITAIN’S BIBLICAL scholars gathered in Cambridge on Tuesday to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain, an event marked by a lecture on the association’s history by Dom Henry Wansbrough, the Ampleforth monk and biblical scholar (see page 6). Although he was unable to join them for the anniversary, thoughts turned to Fr Reginald Fuller, one of the association’s founders at the Easter meeting in 1940 of the Catholic Conference of Higher Studies, who is now 102. In 1966, Fr Fuller was co- editor of the first Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible. He now lives in a retirement home, Nazareth House, in East Finchley, north London. Organised by the Von Hügel Institute on behalf of St Edmund’s College, the event is intended to relaunch the Lattey Lecture, due to take place annually or biannually, in honour of the principal founder of the asso- ciation, Fr Cuthbert Lattey SJ.
Mexican devotion AFTER THE Virgin Mary appeared on the cloak of a simple peasant, Juan Diego, in 1531, nine million Aztecs in Mexico converted to Christianity and gave up the practice of human sacrifice. Now, an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is concluding an historic nine- month novena tour of dioceses in England and Wales and will be displayed in Westminster Cathedral over the weekend. According to the Archdiocese of
Westminster, the purpose of the novena is “for the cause of the Gospel of Life, the pro- tection of the unborn, the sanctity of families and the peace of the nation”. The man behind the novena is Edmund Adamus, Westminster Diocese’s director of pastoral affairs who before the papal visit described Britain as “the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death”.
Adamus obtained permission from the Archbishop of Westminster to ask every bishop in England and Wales if they would display in their diocese the image of the icon. It is an authorised relic and one of only 220 in the world which was consecrated next to the cloak of St Juan. At noon on Saturday, Archbishop Vincent Nichols will lead devotions before the image in the cathedral.
Here’s to Pugh CONGRATULATIONS TO our cartoonist Jonathan Pugh, who was voted Pocket Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoon Art Trust at its annual awards last week. The Tablet provided Pugh with his first weekly cartoon slot just over 20 years ago.
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