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SAINT COLUMBA’S RETREAT HOUSE, WOKING UPCOMING EVENTS
January 2011 Monday 24 - 10-4 A Celtic Day led by the pastoral team. £25. Own lunch, refreshments supplied.
February 2011 Monday 7 - 10-4 Columba’s Quiet Day – Columban Prayer – How did St Columba pray? Including Celtic Daily Prayer & Celtic Mass. Led by Fr Owen Murphy Own lunch, donations welcome.
Friday 18-Sunday 20 Ignatian Retreat led by Linda Scrivener and Pam Thorogood, both experienced in Ignatian spiritual traditions and direction. Individually guided residential retreat. £160 FB. Numbers limited book early.
Monday 28 - 10-12.30 Poetry and Parables for changing hearts 1 led by Viv Stacey. A cycle of 4 morning workshops exploring the wisdom poetry of the parables with the inner ear of the heart. £10. Own lunch and stay longer.
Contact: E:
retreats@stcolumbashouse.org.uk T: 01483 766498
W:
www.stcolumbashouse.org.uk Saint Columba’s House, Maybury Hill, Woking, Surrey GU22 8AB
Letter from Rome A
nticipation of Christmas intensified this week in Rome as Pope Benedict XVI went to Piazza di Spagna and laid a wreath at the towering statue of Our Lady for Wednesday’s Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Earlier this week at the Vatican, workmen began stringing some 3,000 silver and gold ornaments and 1,500 white and yellow light bulbs on the massive spruce that was recently erected in the middle of St Peter’s Square. The 94-year-old tree, which is more than 110 feet tall, arrived in the early morning of 3 December from northern Italy. Pope John Paul II began the custom of
2011 Diary
In association with The Tablet this smart, navy blue and recyclable pocket diary
incorporates the Liturgical Calendar for 2011.
It also contains useful information on travel, maps, holiday dates and conversion tables, printed in a week-to-view format with a ribbon marker. Only £3.00 each inc. VAT (plus 60p postage & packing)
Please send your order, enclosing payment of £3.60 per copy, to: CAFOD Resources, Romero House 55 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7JB
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in association with
displaying a Christmas tree in the square in 1982, and since then different towns throughout Europe have taken turns in providing the giant spruce. This year’s Tannenbaum comes from the hamlet of Lüsen (Luson in Italian) in the German- speaking part of Italy. The town is adjacent to Brixen/ Bressanone, the place where Pope Benedict spent his 2008 summer holiday and where he and his siblings often holidayed before his election to the papacy. But the lights on the tree in St Peter’s Square won’t be switched on until 17 December and the adjacent, larger-than-life Nativity Scene will not be unveiled until Christmas Eve. That’s because the Pope is intent on keeping the focus on Advent in a spirit of hopeful waiting. He’ll probably touch on that theme next Thursday when he celebrates Vespers in St Peter’s Basilica with students enrolled at the various state-run and private universities in the Eternal City.
major Vatican office. Numerous members and friends of the order hold middle and lower management positions in the Curia, including the assistant editorship at L’Osservatore Romano. Many people believe the Salesians’ fortunes have improved at the Vatican because of the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. He, of course, is also a Salesian and the man who has the most influence on Pope Benedict concerning personnel changes. You’re probably saying, “Good grief, another Salesian!” But hold your hats and mantillas until you hear who it is. According to the usually well-informed Andrea Tornielli, Vatican writer for the conservative Il Giornale, next in line to become the prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life is Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga. And some surely believe that such a move would put him in line to become the next Pope. He will be 68 in a couple of weeks and next month will
T 32 | THE TABLET | 11 December 2010
he latest rumours inside the Roman Curia is that Pope Benedict is about appoint yet another Salesian to run a
complete his eighteenth year as Archbishop of Tegucigalpa. The multilingual Salesian has long been touted as a possible candidate for the papacy, but he was considered still too young at the last conclave. Since then, however, even those who first began to imagine him as a sort of Latin American John Paul II have begun having second thoughts. First of all, he has made eyebrow-raising remarks on the clergy sex-abuse crisis, even blaming the Jewish- dominated media. And then he appeared to back the coup d’état in Honduras last year. Tornielli wrote that the Vatican is eager to get him out of the country as he has received death threats because of that less than prudent action. (See Church in the World, page 29.)
D
iplomats at the US Embassy to the Holy See have been bracing themselves for the day when
WikiLeaks splashes their confidential reports on the Vatican all over the internet. So far, nothing of great substance on
US-Holy See relations has emerged from the torrent of documents that have been made public by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the new English translation of the Roman Missal has! The Tablet this week discovered it on a site called WikiSpooks. “The purpose of WikiSpooks is to build a repository of documents about deep political structures and events, together with development of the information they contain through user contributed articles, additions, edits and discussion,” the site says. There are some two dozen files (
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/ Template:RCMissal) that appear to be a photocopy of the same Vatican-approved Missal in English that was presented to Pope Benedict and members of the Vox Clara Committee last spring. Up to now, only certain parts of that text
have been leaked through other sources. Even the partial revelations have angered church officials who have worked in secrecy to keep the Missal from becoming public. They will probably blow their mitred tops when they find the whole thing online! WikiSpooks has done more than make the Missal available. It has also posted the scathing document that was sent to bishops’ conferences over the confusion and difficulties that were created by last-minute changes to the Missal (
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:Areas_of _Difficulty.pdf), which The Tablet reported on 13 November. WikiSpooks says the 25 files were anonymously uploaded to its site. So if any of you priests out there who are eager to start practising the tongue twisters of elevated liturgical language, you now know where to go.
Robert Mickens
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