'Heart speaks to heart':
The UK prepares for the Pope
by Mons. Vincent Gerard Nichols
Archbishop of Westminster and
President, Bishops' Conference of England and Wales
Translated from the 8/20/10 issue of
Right: Feature on the Westminster Archdiocese site to which thousands of UK Catholics have contributed.
Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom is, without a doubt, a historic event. The invitation was extended to him by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. And it will be she herself who will officially welcome the Pope when he arrives on September 16 in Edinburgh.
This visit thus marks a new phase in the long and complex history of relations between the monarchs of this land and the papacy.
The Pope and the Queen share some profound concerns: for the wellbeing of the peoples of the world, for the role of Christian values and teaching, for the importance of having stable institutions to benefit society. I am sure that they will have much to reflect upon during the time they will spend together.
The first Mass that the Pope will celebrate on British soil will take place on the day of his arrival, in Glasgow.
The second day of his visit, in London, will be dedicated to meetings with various sectors of society. It will start with an event that celebrates Catholic education and the role that it plays in the educational system of this nation.
Benedict XVI will be addressing every school in the territory, thanks to an Internet link, and will invite all children, wherever they are, to follow the events of his visit and to support him with their prayers.
Saint Mary's University College in Twickenham, where this will take place, is also one of the training venues for the coming Olympic Games in London in 2012. This adds another dimension to the event because of the interest in sports that is common to most people.
Benedict XVI will then meet with various personages - men and women who head various sectors and enterprises and who belong to the various religious confessions in the land. He will speak to them of the importance of God as a formative and inspirational guide for service in the common good.
In the afternoon, the Pope will go to Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury (primate of the Church of England), and later to Westminster Hall, a historic edifice in the center of London, where he will address political, civic, diplomatic and business leaders of the United Kingdom.
Westminster Hall was the place where St. Thomas More was condemned to death in 1535 for adhering to the Catholic faith. The meeting here will have great resonance not only for its historical significance but for its relevance.
The second day of the visit will end in Westminster Abbey, with a celebration of Vespers along with the various Christian communities in the United Kingdom.
The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury will pray together at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor, King of England who died in 1066, and who had re-founded the historic abbey. He represents the profound Christian roots of this land shared in common by all its Christians.
The following day, Sept. 18, the Pope will celebrate Mass at the Cathedral of Westminster; he will visit a home for the aged and terminally ill; and he and will lead a prayer vigil in Hyde Park, a vast open space in the heart of London.
On Sunday, Sept. 19, Benedict XVI will leave London for Birmingham where he will preside at Mass and the beatification of Venerable John Henry Newman. This is a most significant point of the visit.
Cardinal Newman's beatification will highlight to the Church a scholar of great importance, a writer and poet of considerable merit, a parish priest who was profoundly loved by all those who met and knew him.
He was a man who understood how mind and heart should go hand in hand in the great undertakings of life, the greatest of which is the search for God and of our salvific relationship with him.
He expressed the emptiness of life without God in these words: "Should I look at a mirror and not see my face, I would feel the same sentiment that overwhelms me whenever I look at this frenetic world and fail to see the reflection of its Creator".
The general hope we have for this visit can be expressed very simply.
We hope that the illuminating presence and the words of Benedict XVI will help many in our land to understand that faith in God is not a problem to be resolved, but a gift to be rediscovered.
For many in our society, faith has become a problem - something to keep hidden or to be moved out of public life. But truth is something very different: faith in God brings great richness and joy to men. He is the freedom and the guidance that we seek, reason for inspiration and perseverance, source of forgiveness and compassion.
But an invitation to faith is profoundly personal. For this reason, the motto chosen for this visit is the same one that John Henry Newman chose for his cardinal's coat of arms: "Heart speaks to heart".
Damian Thompson has fired off another blistering broadside against the organizers of the papal visit from the Church side
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/the-pope/7956602/Comic-carry-on-of-the-papal-visit-is-no-j...
in which he claims they think they will only get 35,000 people to show up for the beatification Mass in Cofton Park - or half the field's capacity. (This, even as a report from Glasgow claims there are still 25,000 tickets available for the Mass in Bellahouston Park (out of a total 100,000).
Aain, I must ask, is it really possible that there are not 220,000 British Catholics who are willing to contribute 5 to 25 pounds to attend the big papal events and help the Church defray its expenses for the trip? If you think of 25 pounds as allocating roughly 2 pounds a month for one year for this purpose, it's not unreasonable at all, especially if it also covers the cost of transportation to and from the site.
I do not recall reading such dire outlooks for any trip of Benedict XVI before this (outside of Turkey, in which however, attendance was never an issue since there are so few Catholics there). Thompson himself has been consistently down and dismal about the preparations, and he justifies it by saying that embarrassing the organizers in public is the only way to get them to do something positive for a change. I don't know, but I find the 'us against them' divide counter-productive at this point. With less than a month to go to the event, surely even Thompson should manage to be charitable and positive.
He does acknowledge that Mons. Guido Marini put his foot down on what kind of music was to be used at the Pope's liturgies, so Thompson's earlier worries about the 'poor Pope' having to listen to bad Christian pop would seem to have been over the top.
The following story appears to confirm that the Pope will not have to endure out-of-place Christian pop at the UK Masses:
Choirs prepare for papal Masses
By Mark Greaves
Friday, 20 August 2010
Choirs across England, Wales and Scotland are rehearsing the new setting of the Mass composed for the papal visit by James MacMillan.
[MacMillan, born in 1959, is an internationally acclaimed Scottish classical composer and conductor, who was commissioned to write A Mass to be performed during the Pope's visit. He and his wife are lay Dominicans. He has written many outstanding works of sacred music, including a very well-reviewed Mass for Westminster Cathedral in 2000 and the St. John Passion oratorio in 2008. His music is said to be distinguished by the use in overt and subliminal ways of familiar themes, especially Socttish traditional music, to make it more accessible.]
MacMillan's new Mass setting will be performed at the two big papal events at Cofton Park, Birmingham, and Bellahouston Park in Glasgow and will follow the new English translation of the Mass.
Sections of the setting are already available online so that papal pilgrims can practise singing it in the run-up to the Pope’s visit.
Crowds will be aided by a choir of 2,000 at Cofton Park and 800 at Bellahouston and there will be “detailed and focused” rehearsal before the Masses start.
The choirs will be accompanied by brass and timpani on the day but, according to Mr MacMillan, any parish can perform the setting as long as it has an organ.
Mr MacMillan said he tried to make the basic melody simple so that congregations would pick it up easily. “It’s not a lot of time to bed the music down in dioceses and parishes,” he said.
He also said he hoped it would be “appropriate to the text and the way the drama of the Mass unfolds”.
Mr MacMillan said: “There has to be a sense of awe at the words of ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’, just before the consecration. And the
Gloria is a huge raising of hearts to heaven, a great joyous outburst from the very early days of the Church, that again has to have a very different flavour.”
Mr MacMillan admitted he was apprehensive about the setting being sung “in the middle of a field”.
“Singing out of a field is tricky – it’s just a very strange experience standing in the middle of the field and being expected to sing. And Catholics are reluctant singers at the best of times.
“I just hope that people rise to the challenge. At first encounter it might feel strange, but if they have the text and music with them I hope they will really join in on the day,” Mr MacMillan said.
Sample reviews of MacMillan's Westminster Mass:
It is hard to think of any recent music that conveys religious ecstasy as intensely as James MacMillan’s Mass... Closer in style to Britten than to Tavener, MacMillan is distinctive in his brilliant use of choral effects, with surging crescendos to stir the blood: it is music of high voltage from first to last. Equally the shorter choral works on the disc, all written in the 1990s, have a rare concentration, often involving powerful slabs of sound. The singing of the Westminster Cathedral Choir is electrifying.
- The Guardian
A strongly sung reminder of MacMillan’s far-reaching abilities as a vocal composer... The Gloria of the Mass contains some particularly effective and memorable music, not least some marvellously atmospheric and haunting organ writing, and the crepuscular Agnus Dei lingers in the mind long after the final notes die away.
- Gramophone
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/08/2010 22:28]