On 2 September Shimon Peres met with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo. The account comes from L’Osservatore Romano: “During the meeting the Israeli president offered a gift of a seven-branched candlestick to the Pontiff, on which he had got engraved a personal dedication: ‘To His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the Shepherd who seeks to lead us to the fields of blessings and the fields of peace. With great esteem’. The menorah was made of silver by an Israeli artist and is 30 centimeters high”.

On 19 September Avvenire published an article by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan, on the surprising link between Cardinal John Henry Newman (who was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his recent trip to Britain) and the Church of Milan. We quote long excerpts: “I would like to dwell on the relationship that Newman experienced with a specific local church, the Ambrosian one, not only for his scholarly reference to the ‘majestic Ambrose’ – as he calls him – but also because of his stay in Milan from 20 September to 23 October 1846, en route to Rome: a stay that left a unique resonance in Newman’s soul, as he himself writes in the eight letters sent from Milan to friends in England... It was in some way a ‘special’ Church that Newman encountered in the Cathedral and in other churches in Milan, which struck him strongly because of the number of communions. ‘I was indeed very impressed by the number of communions: they do not just happen every day, but the rail is crowded several times in the space of an hour... I don’t think I have seen a Mass without there being someone who took communion – apart from the communions outside of Mass’. Here ‘in the city of St Ambrose’, he notes, ‘one understands the Church of God more than in most other places and is led to think of all those who are its members. It is not to do with pure imagination... there are here about twenty churches open to those who pass in front of them, and in each of them their relics are to be found, and the Blessed Sacrament prepared for the worshipper, even before he enters. There is nothing that has shown me in so strong a fashion the unity of the Church as the Presence of her Divine Founder and of His Life everywhere I go’. The ‘impressions’ aroused in Newman by the churches of Milan, while they make us rediscover interesting things about their past, show us how ‘popular holiness’ – fruit of a faith lived in daily life by a whole community – had power to release in him a great missionary force, an invitation to allow himself to be questioned and to be won over... Newman writes: ‘This is the most wonderful place – which impresses me more than Rome. Certainly, I was still not a Catholic when I went there, but Milan presents more appeals, than Rome, to the history that is familiar to me. Here there were St Ambrose, St Augustine, St Monica, St Athanasius, etc. Up to Saint Leo, Rome rarely offers relevant motives of interest from the point of view of history – except, of course some great martyrdoms, like that of St Lawrence”. In a letter written to his sister, he confessed: ‘I’ve never been in a city that has so enchanted me: standing before the graves of great saints such as St Ambrose and St Charles – and to see the places where St Ambrose drove back the Arians, where St Monica stood guard for a night with the ‘pia plebs ‘, as St Augustine calls it, and where the same St Augustine was baptized. Our oldest churches in England are nothing in terms of antiquity compared to the ones here, and at that time the ashes of the saints were cast to the four winds. It is a wonderful thing to be where the primordia, the cradle, so to speak, of Christianity continue to be”... And he specifies: “St Charles seems still alive. You see memorials of him everyplace – the cross that put an end to the plague when he carried it through the streets – his miter, his ring – his letters. Above all his holy relics: Mass is celebrated daily at his tomb, and you can see this from above. O bone pastor in populo seems fixed in the mind by everything you see. And it’s as if there was a connection between him and us...’. That ‘us’ refers to the English, for whom Newman prayed to the saintly reformer in order to regain the true faith and Catholic life: ‘I cannot doubt that he will do something for us up there, where he is powerful, this although we are on one side of the Alps, and he belonged to the other’”.

Controversy has arisen about the project to build a mosque at the place where, before 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers stood. Here is a passage from an article by Gad Lerner published in la Repubblica of 17 August: “Judaism also is divided on the issue of the ‘mosque at Ground Zero’. On the one side those in favor, such as Mayor Bloomberg, who flank the arguments of a constitutional nature with reference to the fundamental principles of the Torah; on the other those opposed, led by the Anti-Defamation League, whose arguments are progressively less derived from the founding Law of Judaism, relying instead on a kind of new religion of the Shoah. Their argument is historico-emotive: would you authorize the construction of a German cultural center inside Auschwitz? (My personal answer: at two hundred meters distance, why not?). These exponents are moved by political objectives, that they would like however to make absolute through moral blackmail, by arbitrarily taking on the role of spokesman for the victims. In their vision Judaism, at the end of its fifth millennium, would seem to seek foundation less and less in biblical principles and ever more in an alleged representation of the exterminated”.

Church/1
Pius X: The Eucharist not a prize, but a medicine for human frailty

On 8 August the historian Gianpaolo Romanato wrote an article in L’Osservatore Romano about the documents of Pope Pius X on the Eucharistic Communion. We quote an excerpt: “It should be remembered that a firmly-rooted mentality of Jansenist origin had dissuaded Christians from frequent Eucharistic practice, almost as though it were the culmination of the journey toward Christian perfection rather than the way in which to attain it, ‘a prize and not a medicine for human frailty’, the Pope was to write. With the insight of that great pastor of souls which he was and continued to be during his Pontificate, Pius x cut short dithering, fears, and perplexity, still rather widespread among theologians, promoting and encouraging with his Decree Tridentina Synodus of 16 July 1905 the opposite practice instead: frequent, even daily communion. Five years later, with the Decree Quam Singulari – the centenary of whose publication we are celebrating today as mentioned above – he completed the overall project of the reform of the care of souls, prescribing that the age for the First Communion of children be lowered to about seven, that is, to use his own words, ‘when the child begins to reason’. With these two provisions an age-old rigorist culture was surmounted and set aside to return to a practice already in use in the early centuries of Christianity, later reaffirmed both by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and by the Decrees of the Council of Trent… Pietro Gasparri, who in those years was working, as the Pope had ordered, on the codification of canon law, placed the Decree among the ‘memorable’ documents of the Pontificate and added: ‘May God want it to be observed everywhere’”.


Church/2
Dickens and the unexpected homage to St Charles Borromeo

“All Christian homage to the saint who reposes therein”. Such was the exclamation of the celebrated English writer Charles Dickens when visiting the Cathedral of Milan. He continued: “There are many good and true saints in the calendar, but St Charles Borromeo has ‘all my affection’ [in Italian in Dickens]... As a charitable doctor to the sick, as a generous friend of the poor, and this not with a spirit of blind fanaticism, but as the ardent opponent of the enormous abuses of the (papist church), I shall honor his memory. And not least shall I honor it because he was nearly murdered by a priest instigated by other priests to assassinate him on the altar, in return for his efforts to reform a brotherhood of false and hypocritical monks. May God protect all of the imitators of St Charles Borromeo as He protected him! Even in our times a reforming Pope would be in need of a little protection”. This tribute of Dickens to the Archbishop of Milan, (contained in Impressions of Italy Carabba, Lanciano 2004), was quoted in L’Osservatore Romano on 12 August in an article entitled: The unpredictable Dickens fascinated by the Bishop of Milan.


Culture
The perversions of finance and human sacrifice

“The question remains, however, it is the true heart of the matter. So said the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in The New York Times on 21 August: ‘the policy elite – central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue – are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods’. Otherwise, the Nobel laureate for Economics in 2008 asks, ‘how do we explain that almost everything that these priests impose brings continuous budget cuts, growing unemployment, stock market falls, people stunned by new privations – loss of home, school, work – that do not bear fruit? That is why I ask: when will we finish making human sacrifices to the God of an elite group of presumed experts who are ruining the world and devote ourselves to healing the economy?’. I make the question mine”. So said Furio Colombo in il Fatto Quotidiano on 29 August 2010.