BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Saturday, March 17, Third Week of Lent

ST. PATRICK (PADRAIGH) (b Britain 387?, d N. Ireland, 493), Bishop, Missionary, Apostle of Ireland
Few saints have as many legends about him as Patrick. But the only facts known about his life before he came to Ireland as bishop
and missionary derive from one of only two existing letters from him. He called himself a Roman and a Briton. At 16, he and several
others were captured by Irish raiders and sold as slaves in Ireland. He was put to work as a shepherd but escaped back to Britain
after six years. He may have studied in France, but the next known event is that he was consecrated bishop at age 43. A dream
about Irish children convinced him it was his mission to Christianize what was then pagan Ireland. Once sent there, he made friends
with local chieftains and began converting many Irish, to the point that soon he was creating dioceses, calling councils, founding
monasteries, constantly preaching 'greater holiness in Christ' - and eventually able to send Irish missionaries to help Christianize
Europe in a matter of decades. If the dates currently 'established' for his birth and death are approximately right - they have been
changing over the centuries - he would have been about 106 when he died, and would have spent at least 60 years Christianizing
Ireland. The Irish have celebrated him on the anniversary day of his death for over a thousand years, and he has become very
much part of Irish culture and tradition.
Readings for today's Mass:
usccb.org/bible/readings/031712.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops (weekly meeting)

- Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, Archbishop of Genoa and president of the Italian bishops' conference

In the afternoon, with

- Mons. Guy Marie Bagnard, Bishop of Belley-Ars (France).





- On March 14, the Vatican correspondent of Rome's Il Messaggero newspaper, Franca Giansoldati, published a rather frivolous article about an Italian perfume creator, Silvana Casoli, who was supposed to have created a cologne expressly for the Pope.('Silvana creates a perfume for the Pope: Essence of the woods and music'). I did not feel called upon to post anything about it because the details were too imprecise: namely, that on the basis of some colognes Casoli had created for 'the Shrine of Santiago de Compostela' of which the prelates there had apparently given the Pope samples ('Acqua di Fede' and 'Acqua di Speranza'), the perfume-maker reportedly received a request months later from 'the Vatican' to create a cologne for the Pope. As a former journalist, I mistrust generic sources like 'the Shrine of Santiago de Compostela' or 'the Vatican', on the ground that if the sources cited cannot be more specific, then the item's 'news value' is reduced to the level of idle hearsay....

But again, despite all my personal caveats about the ways of MSM, I ought to have known that - like the canard about Prada making the Pope's red shoes, or his wearing designer Serengeti sunglasses - it would be the kind of trivia picked up by the Anglophone press and blown up to yet another myth about the 'vanities' of this Pope.

The same day the story came out In Messaggero, there was a story in The Guardian entitled 'Pope commissions custom-blended eau de cologne', which has since been picked up by other Anglophone media outlets. It shamelessly picks up the details in the Messaggero story and then embellishes it with sentences directly attributing the ordering to the Pope himself, i.e.: "Alerted to Casoli's talents, Benedict put in a request for his own stock of scent" and "Casoli said she had 'a pact of secrecy' with her most illustrious client to date [Yeah, sure! Like, they had this telephone conversation, and the Pope said, 'Swear to me you will never tell anyone what you put into this, and that you will never give this scent to anyone else!"], and refused to release the full list of ingredients that had gone into his scent" (As though any parfumier would ever 'reveal' his/her formulas! The elements she did specify were lime, verbena and grass, as she wanted it to be 'light and clean'). There are quite a few more outrageous statements meant to insinuate an excess of worldly vanity in this Pope such as one might find in dandies or gays.

The article is as offensive an item of malicious myth-making by the media as the Peter Popham article back in 2005 that launched the Prada myth. I will post both the Messaggero and Guardian articles in the Waste thread just to keep a record of when, how and where this particular myth was born. I remember posting and fisking the Popham article for the RFC forum at the time.