NOTEBOOK


Celebrity dean ALL EYES in the United States were on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the past few days as they visited California, where crowds were keen to catch sight of them following their wedding in Westminster Abbey in April. But they weren’t the first to benefit from royal wedding fever across the Atlantic; in June, the dean of Westminster was feted by the celebrity TV show Access Hollywood Live during his visit to America. The dean, Dr John Hall, visited New York to give out prizes and deliver the address at the annual prize-giving ceremony of the St Thomas Church Choir School and also preach at the Eucharist on the Feast of Pentecost at St Thomas’ Church on Fifth Avenue. Dr Hall told the excited Access Hollywood


Live presenters, who interviewed him about the wedding service and his role in it, that he had been uplifted by the wedding and had tried to block out from his mind the idea of two billion people watching. He also revealed that he urged Catherine Middleton to relax and enjoy the wedding when she arrived with her father for the marriage service. And with the presenters telling the millions in their TV audience that Westminster Abbey is a must-see for any trip to London, the interview seems to have contributed to a wedding bounce. The numbers of people attending weekday evensong have doubled since the royal occasion to 800 congregants.


Anglican gifts SPEAKING OF Westminster Abbey, when Pope Benedict XVI visited Britain, he was so taken with the choir there that Dr Hall sent him five of its CDs. Now we hear that the Pope has developed another distinctively Anglican interest: evensong. Mgr Keith Newton, the leader of the


Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, said that during a private audi- ence with the Pope earlier this year, the topic occupied a substantial part of their meeting. “We had a conversation about Evensong,


which I thought was quite bizarre,” he told this year’s Anglican Use Conference at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Arlington, Texas. “I’m sitting in this beautiful room and talking about Anglican evensong.” He explained that Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who was also present at the audience, believes that evensong is an import - ant part of the ordinariate’s “Anglican patrimony” and can help re-establish the regular practice of evening prayer that has been lost since the Second Vatican Council. For his audience, Mgr Newton wore the purple-trimmed cassock of a monsignor, but instead of buying a new one, he wore the one he used as a Church of England bishop.


18 | THE TABLET | 16 July 2011


Silver service THERE WAS a touch of class to the meals served to Sydney’s homeless by the St Vincent de Paul Society’s nightly mobile service. Vinnies Night Patrol, as it is affectionately known, had one of the top chefs from Sydney's Hilton Hotel prepare meals for the city’s homeless people on 30 June to mark the launch of a new partnership between the charity and the hotel chain. Under the three- year agreement, Hilton will supply freshly prepared food worth £67,000 to the night patrol and to the Matthew Talbot Hostel in inner-city Woolloomooloo. It will also provide chefs at the hostel with work experience in the Hilton’s kitchens. Last year, Vinnies’ two-night patrol vans


served 44,000 meals to people living rough in Australia’s most populous city. The deal was struck after Hilton’s vice president of operations for Australasia, Ashley Spencer, spent a night under stars as part of last year’s Vinnies’ “CEO Sleepout” when more than 1,000 business and political leaders, armed with sleeping bags and cardboard, spent a winter’s night in the open.


The art of simplicity AMONG THE famous paintings of great saints in Sr Wendy Beckett’s new book, there is a photograph of St Thérèse of Lisieux taken when she was eight. It shows a little girl “dressed to the nines,


ruffled and flounced, her hair an elaborate arrangement of ringlets”. According to the author, the saint turned the disadvantages of her early life – “her privileged upbringing, her special status as community darling – into positive assets”. At last Tuesday’s launch of her two latest


books, The Art of Saints (Redemptorist Publications) and The Iconic Jesus (St Pauls), in London, Sr Wendy declared St Thérèse her favourite saint.


“I admire her great sense of her need to be


unimportant and her understanding that doing small things is the way to God, not big things,” she told us.


Such a simple message is characteristic of


Sr Wendy, who has presented television and radio programmes about art and who lives in a caravan in the grounds of the Carmelite Monastery at Quidenham, Norfolk. The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, praised the “consummate skill” with which she introduced people to God without appearing to do so.


Clear vision HOW CHRISTIAN is Christian Aid? There are those who have been asking this question ever since a redesign of the charity’s logo in 2006 that shrank the word “Christian” and enlarged the word “Aid”. But the director of the charity, Loretta Minghella, who was brought up a Catholic, told us that over the last 18 months, when she has been in charge, “we’ve become clearer on that”. She explained: “We talk of a confident


Christianity, a confident humility and an inclusivity that reflects the inherent dignity of every human being.” Ms Minghella, 49, whose late brother Anthony was the Oscar-winning film director famous for The English Patient, has been on her own journey of faith. She recently had to take her daughter to her local Anglican church in south London for a service and hasn’t stopped going since. In an interview with the BBC, she said that she has childhood memories of singing “the Latin Mass” in a choir while growing up in the Isle of Wight, where her family still has an ice-cream business.


Next stop: Wembley INSPIRED BY that moment when, in the middle of Hyde Park, thousands of young people knelt in silent prayer with Pope Benedict XVI before the Blessed Sacrament, Catholic youth leaders are planning an event of similar magnitude. The Catholic Youth Ministry Federation


(CYMFed) has hired the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena to host its first National Youth Congress in the run-up to the Olympic Games. More than 2,000 tickets have already been sold for the Flame Congress 2012 – to be held on 24 March next year – at which the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, Barry and Margaret Mizen and a number of Olympians are due to speak about leadership, faith, justice and hope. John Biggins, CYMFed’s strategic co - ordinator, said he expects up to 10,000 young people. “Look at how many came to Hyde Park during the Pope’s visit,” he said. “We want to take that enthusiasm and build upon it.”


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