I watched the Vespers on EWTN earlier today, but three hours later,there is still no report anywhere on the event. Meanwhile, I've put together some background material from earlier Vatican Radio reports and previous Forum material on St. Gregory the Great and St. Romuald.
FIRST VESPERS
OF THE THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
Eve of the death anniversary
of St. Gregory the Great
on the 100th anniversary
of the Camaldolesi Benedictines
Libretto cover: Illustration from the Lambeth Bible, 12th-century, Lmmbeth Palace Library. Top panel shows Abraham receiving the three 'guests, with his wife Sarah who would shortly conceive Isaac in her old age. Bottom panel: Main illustration is Jacob's ladder in Joseph's dream about his father, while one section shows the angel stopping Abraham when he was about to sacrifice Isaac.
Pope Benedict XVI presided at First Vespers today in the Church of San Gregorio Magno al Celio, with the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mons. Rowan Williams, who delivered a brief homily before the Holy Father's own homily.
This is the third time that an Anglican Primate has attended Vespers at San Gregorio with a Pope. John Paul II celebrated Vespers here in 1989 with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, and in 1996, with Rowan's predecessor, Mons. George Carey.
The occasion this year is the celebration by the Camaldolese monastery at San Gregorio in Celio of the 1000th anniversary of their founding by St. Romuald in 1012.
[Benedict XVI will mark the anniversary in May this year when he makes a pstoral visit to Arezzo, near where the original Camaldoli monastery is.]
The monastery located on the Caelian hill has had strong ties with Canterbury and the Anglican Communion since the Second Vatican Council decreed ecumenism as a pastoral mission of the Church.
It was from this church that Pope Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to evangelize England at the end of the sixth century.
The site also has another lesser known landmark: the tomb of Sir Edward Carne, who was sent to Rome twice between 1529 and 1533 by King Henry VIII in an effort to obtain papal approval for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Attached to the monastery and rising on top of an elegant flight of steps, there now stands the Roman Church of San Gregorio Magno, dedicated to Gregory the Great by a later Pope, Gregory II.
The entire complex grew out of chapels and oratories that Gregory, who was a Benedictine monk, build next to his residence on the Caelian hill before he became Pope. The present church is a baroque structure which houses a chapel in what was believed to have been the cell occupied by St. Gregory.
Today with the exception of the cosmatesque pavement and some ancient columns, the Church is an example of baroque splendour.
The Camaldoli monastic community, near the Tuscan hill town of Arezzo, is a place of outstanding natural beauty - Immersed in a lush forest around the foothills of the Apennines. Here, the 11th-century Benedictine monk St. Romuald of Ravenna founded the community, drawing deeply on the ancient monastic traditions of both East and West.
Uniting the solitary life of the hermit and the community dimension of a shared faith, the Camaldoli community has increasingly developed this vision into that of encounter between peoples of different faith traditions. Over recent decades this had led to its recognition as an important centre for ecumenical and interfaith dialogue.
Since the mid-16th century, the Camaldoli community has had an important presence in Rome in the monastery of St Gregory on the Caelian hill.
ST. POPE GREGORY THE GREAT (Italy, ca 540-624)
Civilian Prefect of Rome, Monk and Abbot, Papal Deacon and Envoy, Pope (590-604), Doctor of the Church
In 2008, Benedict XVI devoted two Wednesday catecheses to his great predecessor
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080528...
Gregory's parents Gordian and Sylvia, Roman patricians of the Anicia clan and devout Christians, are both venerated as saints. A great-great-grand-uncle was Pope Felix III (483-492) and one of his immediate predecessors Agapetus (535-536) was also from his clan.
Gregory is generally considered to have established the medieval Papacy and propagated medieval spirituality as embodied in St. Benedict. He is well-known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as Pope [and probably not matched by any other Pope until Benedict XVI] but his most important works were written as Pope.
In
The Rule for Pastors written at the start of his Pontificate, he described the ideal bishop as teacher and guide of his flock. In Book 2 of his
Dialogs, he wrote about the 'Life and Miracles of St. Benedict of Nursia' who had died when Gregory was a child; the work became the primary historical source for Benedict's biography.
His homilies continue to be quoted today and some 860 of letters he wrote as Pope were conserved. Gregory started life in the footsteps of his father as a Roman administrator, becoming Prefect of Rome when he was 32.
After a few years, he left civilian life to become a monk, converting the family home into a monastery. After he was ordained, he was named one of the Pope's seven deacons for Rome, but in 679, Pelagius II named him his ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople, which by then was the capital of the Roman Empire.
He served there for six years, then chose to return to his monastery where he became abbot. But in 590, he was elected Pope by acclamation to succeed Pelagius. At the time, the papacy had little influence outside Italy.
Gregory sought from the start to reaffirm the primacy of Rome as his predecessor Leo the Great had done. He considered evangelization of Europe's pagan lands a priority, and in this context, he sent a mission to England led by the future St. Augustine of Canterbury.
Gregory also required all his bishops to engage in systematic assistance to the poor, an activity which was responsible for reestablishing the prestige and influence of the papacy in Italy against the distant imperial rule in Constantinople.
His papacy was also characterized by his tireless efforts at peacemaking with pagan monarchs. He revitalized the liturgy, introducing the use of prayers in the Canon of the Mass that vary according to the liturgical season.
The so-called Tridentine Mass of 1570, adopted after the Council of Trent, in effect, simply formalized the rubrics of the Mass as it had been celebrated since the time of Pope Gregory, and 'Gregorian rite' is still interchangeably used as a term for the Tridentine Mass.
Around 800, when a system of notation was devised for the plainsong used in liturgy, it came to be called Gregorian chant although he had died two centuries earlier.
As Benedict XVI has pointed out, "Gregory remained a simple monk at heart.. and wanted to be simply
servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God". He coined the phrase, which has become one of the 'titles' for the Supreme Pontiff. It manifested "his way of living and acting, convinced that a bishop should, above all, imitate the humility of God and follow Christ in this way".
NB: The Feast of St. Gregory is observed on September 3, anniversary of his episcopal ordination. Before Vatican II, it was celebrated on March 11, anniversary of his death, a date which always falls in Lent. But since no Memorials may now be observed during Lent, the feast was moved to Sept. 3.
Second and third from right: St. Romualdo's Vision, by Guercino, 1641; and Guido Reni's Coronation of Mary, 1595, with St. Romualdo (extreme right) and St. Catherine of Alexandria flanking Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist; and second from right, St. Romuald by Fra Angelico, in a 1441 fresco in the Convent of St. Mark, Florence.
ST. ROMUALDO (Italy, ca 950-1027), Benedictine monk, Hermit, Abbot, Founder of the Camaldolesi Benedictines
St. Piero Damiani would write the biography of this saint a mere 15 years after his death. One of the many saints who spent their early privileged life of wealth in profligacy, Romualdo had a change of heart at age 20 when he saw his father kill someone in a duel.
He fled to a Benedictine monastery near Ravenna where he decided to become a monk. He left the abbey after three years because he did not think it was strict enough and became a hermit on an island.
He gained a reputation for holiness that persuaded the Duke of Venice to leave office and join Romuald in a hermitage near the Benedictine abbey of San Miguel de Cuxa in Catalonia (Spain). Romuald returned to Italy after seven years when he learned that his father had become a monk but was tormented with doubts, which his son managed to resolve.
Romuald also gained the frieddship of Emperor Otto III who asked him to revive an old monastery as abbot. However, Romuald's reforms were resisted and he went back to being a hermit. For the rest of his life, however, he travelled all over France and Italy, establishing about a hundred monasteries and hermitages to propagate his mission to restore the Benedictine order to the primitive Rule of St. Benedict.
In 1012, he founded the Congregation of Monk Hermits of Camaldoli, after he was given a property in Tuscany on which he could built an abbey. The Camaldolese have given the Church two popes (Pius VII and Gregory XVI), many saints and blesseds. St. Romuald's body was found to be incorrupt at the time he was canonized in 1582, more than five centuries after his death.
AP had a perfunctory account of the Vespers service, focusing on Anglicanorum coetibus and the MSM version that the Pope's openigng to disaffectded Anglicans wishing to return to Catholicism was an opportunistic act. MSM has generally ignored the fact that various groups of traditional Anglicans had begun requesting the CDF for a 'mechanism' that would facilitate conversion en masse when Cardinal Ratzinger was still head of the CDF.
Pope prays with Anglican
primate for Christian unity
ROME, March 10 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI has presided over a ceremony in a Rome church with the Archbishop of Canterbury, saying he hopes their presence together will spur both Catholics and Anglicans to pray and work for unity.
Benedict led a vespers service Saturday evening at which both he and Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of the world's Anglican Communion, gave homilies. The two held private talks at the Vatican earlier Saturday, but no details were released.
While the Pope has made Christian unity a theme of his papacy, he has also created tensions with Williams. In 2009, Benedict issued an unprecedented invitation to Anglicans to become Catholics in groups or as parishes, just as many traditional Anglicans were upset by their church's ordination of women and gay bishops.
[But no mention of Abp. Williams's well-publicized indecision and failure to take an unequivocal stand about the problem of women and gay bishops that has occasioned many Anglicans turning away form the Church of England.]
Here is Vatican Radio's delayed report on the event. Outside of Christmas Eve Mass the Easter Vigil, Vatican Radio never reports promptly on evening events with the Pope, Choosing to wait until the next day to do so, or even later if the next day happens to be Sunday. [Since RV has a 365/24/7 operation, it's hard to believe it does not have at least one staff writer on duty after 5 pm for late events. One of my first jobs was to write newscasts and fresh reports if necessary on the graveyard shift - 12 midnight to 8 a.m - of a newsradio station in Manila.].
The plus side for this RV report is that they include both the text of Abp. Williams's homily and an English translation of the Pope's homily which was delivered in Italian.
Pope Benedict and Anglican primate
celebrate Vespers to mark 1000 years
of the Camaldoli monastic community
March 11, 2012
Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams celebrated Vespers in the church of St Gregory on the Caelian hill on Saturday afternoon, as they gave thanks together the 1000th anniversary of the Camaldoli monastic community which is based there. Philippa Hitchen was at the celebration and tells us more about this ecumenical encounter.
“It is good to touch the soil on which you are nurtured”. Those words from Dr Rowan Williams explain why three successive archbishops of Canterbury have come to the Rome church of San Gregorio al Celio – to the very place from where Pope Gregory the Great sent out the future St. Augustine of Canterbuury and 40 of his monks to take the Christian gospel to Anglo-Saxon England at the end of the 6th century.
"
Today, for the third time", Pope Benedict said in his homily, "the Bishop of Rome is meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury in the home of St Gregory the Great. Today’s celebration is therefore marked by a profoundly ecumenical character, which as we know is part and parcel of the spirit of the Camaldoli community that has lived and worshipped in the church on the Caelian hill since the mid 16th century".
Noting the hospitality and openness of this community which has made it a place for fruitful dialogue throughout the centuries and now in different parts of the world, the Pope said "we hope that today’s celebration will act as a stimulus for all the faithful – Catholic and Anglican – encouraging them to renew their commitment and prayer for the unity that Jesus himself asked of His Father"
In his homily, Archbishop Williams spoke of the monastic vision of Gregory the Great, grounded in humility, which helped him see clearly the needs of the people of England and respond by sending St Augustine on his prophetic mission. The church today, he said, is called upon to show that same prophetic spirit, to see where true need is and to answer God’s call…
Speaking of the need for silence and patient discernment to combat a feverish advertising culture and an economic system centered on selfishness and greed, the Archbishop said we must learn to set aside our busy and self-serving agendas and allow the self-giving Christ to live in us, to open our eyes and to empower us for service.
Before leaving the church, the two leaders each lit a candle in the small chapel thought to have been Pope Gregory’s simple monastic cell – a tangible reminder of the need to continue bringing the light of the Gospel to today’s world, just as St Gregory sent Augustine to bring the Cross of Christ to Britain over 14 centuries ago.
Here is RV's English translation of the Pope's homily:
Your Grace,
Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,
Dear Monks and Nuns of Camaldoli,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
It gives me great joy to be here today in this Basilica of San Gregorio al Celio for Solemn Vespers on the liturgical commemoration of the death of Saint Gregory the Great.
With you, dear Brothers and Sisters of the Camaldolese family, I thank God for the thousand years that have passed since the foundation of the Sacred Hermitage of Camaldoli by Saint Romuald.
I am delighted to be joined on this occasion by His Grace Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. To you, my dear Brother in Christ, and to each one of you, dear monks and nuns, and to everyone present, I extend cordial greetings.
We have listened to two passages from Saint Paul. The first, taken from the Second Letter to the Corinthians, is particularly appropriate for the current liturgical season of Lent. It contains the Apostle’s exhortation to seize the favourable moment for receiving God’s grace.
The favourable moment is naturally when Jesus Christ came to reveal and to bestow upon us the love that God has for us, through his incarnation, passion, death and resurrection.
The “day of salvation” is the same reality that Saint Paul in another place describes as the “fullness of time”, the moment when God took flesh and entered time in a completely unique way, filling it with his grace. It is for us, then, to accept this gift, which is Jesus himself: his person, his word, his Holy Spirit.
Moreover, in the first reading, Saint Paul tells us about himself and his apostolate – how he strives to remain faithful to God in his ministry, so that it may be truly efficacious and may not prove instead a barrier to faith.
These words make us think of Saint Gregory the Great, of the radiant witness that he offered the people of Rome and the whole Church by a blameless ministry full of zeal for the Gospel. Truly, what Saint Paul wrote of himself applies equally to Gregory: the grace of God in him has not been fruitless (cf. 1 Cor 15:10).
This, indeed, is the secret for the lives of every one of us: to welcome God’s grace and to consent with all our heart and all our strength to its action. This is also the secret of true joy and profound peace.
The second reading was taken from the Letter to the Colossians. We heard those words – always so moving for their spiritual and pastoral inspiration – that the Apostle addressed to the members of that community in order to form them according to the Gospel, saying to them: “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Col 3:17).
“Be perfect”, the Master said to his disciples; and now the Apostle exhorts his listeners to live according to the high measure of Christian life that is holiness. He can do this because the brothers he is addressing are “chosen by God, holy and beloved”.
Here too, at the root of everything, is the grace of God, the gift of the call, the mystery of the encounter with the living Jesus. But this grace demands a response from those who have been baptized: it requires the commitment to be reclothed in Christ’s sentiments: tenderness, goodness, humility, meekness, magnanimity, mutual forgiveness, and above all, as a synthesis and a crown, agape, the love that God has given us through Jesus, the love that the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts.
And if we are to be reclothed in Christ, his word must dwell among us and in us, with all its richness and in abundance. In an atmosphere of constant thanksgiving, the Christian community feeds on the word and causes to rise towards God, as a song of praise, the word that he himself has given us.
And every action, every gesture, every service, is accomplished within this profound relationship with God, in the interior movement of Trinitarian love that descends towards us and rises back towards God, a movement that finds its highest expression in the eucharistic sacrifice.
This word also sheds light upon the happy circumstances that bring us together today, in the name of Saint Gregory the Great. Through the faithfulness and benevolence of the Lord, the Congregation of Camaldolese monks of the Order of Saint Benedict has completed a thousand years of history, feeding daily on the word of God and the Eucharist, as their founder Saint Romuald taught them, according to the triplex bonum of solitude, community life and evangelization.
Exemplary men and women of God, such as Saint Peter Damian, Gratian – author of the Decretum – Saint Bruno of Querfurt, and the five brother martyrs, Rudolph I and II, Blessed Gherardesca, Blessed Giovanna da Bagno and Blessed Paolo Giustiniani; men of art and science like Brother Maurus the Cosmographer, Lorenzo Monaco, Ambrogio Traversari, Pietro Delfino and Guido Grandi; illustrious historians like the Camaldolese Annalists Giovanni Benedetto Mittarelli and Anselmo Costadoni; zealous pastors of the Church, among whom Pope Gregory XVI stands out, have revealed the horizons and the great fruitfulness of the Camaldolese tradition.
Every phase of the long history of the Camaldolese has produced faithful witnesses of the Gospel, not only in the hidden life of silence and solitude and in the common life shared with the brethren, but also in humble and generous service towards others.
Particularly fruitful was the hospitality offered by Camaldolese guest-houses. In the days of Florentine humanism, the walls of Camaldoli witnessed the famous disputationes, in which great humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino took part.
In the turbulent years of the Second World War, those same cloisters were the setting for the birth of the famous Codex of Camaldoli, one of the most significant sources of the Constitution of the Italian Republic.
Nor were the years of the Second Vatican Council any less productive, for at that time individuals of high calibre emerged among the Camaldolese, enriching the Congregation and the Church and promoting new initiatives and new houses in the United States of America, Tanzania, India and Brazil.
In all this activity, a guarantee of fruitfulness was the support of monks and nuns praying constantly for the new foundations from the depths of their “withdrawal from the world”, lived at times to a heroic degree.
On 17 September 1993, during his meeting with the monks of the Sacred Hermitage of Camaldoli, Blessed John Paul II commented on the theme of their imminent General Chapter, “Choosing hope, choosing the future”, with these words: “Choosing hope and the future in the last analysis implies choosing God ... It means choosing Christ, the hope of every human being.”
And he continued, “This particularly occurs in that form of life which God himself brought about in the Church, inspiring Saint Romuald to found the Benedictine family of Camaldoli, with its characteristic complementarity of hermitage and monastery, solitary life and cenobitic life in harmony with each other.”
Moreover, my blessed Predecessor emphasized that “choosing God also means humbly and patiently cultivating, according to God’s design, ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue”, always on the basis of fidelity to the original charism received from Saint Romuald and transmitted through a thousand years of varied tradition.
Encouraged by the visit from the Successor of Peter, and by his words, all of you Camaldolese monks and nuns have pursued your path, constantly seeking the right balance between the eremitical and the cenobitic spirit, between the need to dedicate yourselves totally to God in solitude, the need to support one another in communal prayer, and the need to welcome others so that they can draw upon the wellsprings of spiritual life and evaluate the events of the world with a truly Gospel-formed conscience.
In this way you seek to attain that perfecta caritas that Saint Gregory the Great considered the point of arrival of every manifestation of faith, a commitment that finds confirmation in the motto of your coat of arms: “Ego Vobis, vos mihi”, a synthesis of the covenant formula between God and his people, and a source of the perennial vitality of your charism.
The Monastery of San Gregorio al Celio is the Roman setting for our celebration of the millennium of Camaldoli in company with His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury who, together with us, recognizes this Monastery as the birthplace of the link between Christianity in Britain and the Church of Rome.
Today’s celebration is therefore marked by a profoundly ecumenical character which, as we know, is part and parcel of the modern Camaldolese spirit. This Roman Camaldolese Monastery has developed with Canterbury and the Anglican Communion, especially since the Second Vatican Council, links that now qualify as traditional.
Today, for the third time, the Bishop of Rome is meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury in the home of Saint Gregory the Great. And it is right that it should be so, because it was from this Monastery that Pope Gregory chose Augustine and his forty monks and sent them to bring the Gospel to the Angles, a little over 1,400 years ago.
The constant presence of monks in this place, over such a long period, is already in itself a testimony of God’s faithfulness to his Church, which we are happy to be able to proclaim to the whole world.
We hope that the sign of our presence here together in front of the holy altar, where Gregory himself celebrated the eucharistic sacrifice, will remain not only as a reminder of our fraternal encounter, but also as a stimulus for all the faithful – both Catholic and Anglican – encouraging them, as they visit the glorious tombs of the holy Apostles and Martyrs in Rome, to renew their commitment to pray constantly and to work for unity, and to live fully in accordance with the “ut unum sint” that Jesus addressed to the Father.
This profound desire, that we have the joy of sharing, we entrust to the heavenly intercession of Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Romuald.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/03/2012 13:21]