Anticipating the Pope's Christmas, 2009
ROME, Dec. 18 (Translated from Apcom) - Christmas with his household staff (two secretaries and four housekeepers) for Pope Benedict XVI, a simple celebration as usual. Gifts to and from his staff, and a traditional German Christmas lunch coming straight from Germany, on his fifth Christmas as Pope.
His Christmas card this year carries a Latin inscription that says "The light shines on us today because the Savior is born".
[I have searched online, and there is no image so far of the card. We never saw the one for 2008 either. The Vatican press Office should have a definite policy about this. In the first three years, it made available images of both the Christmas and Easter cards sent by the Pope. Why have they stopped doing so?]
The German Christmas lunch will reportedly include canederli (dumplings with bacon), white sausages, sweet mustard and lebkuchen (Bavarian cookies).
A novelty this year is the possibility to send Christmas greetings to the Pope through Facebook. The Pontifical Council for Social Communications has opened a channel in Pope2You to facilitate such greetings, to which photos may be attached. Once posted, the Vatican IT system will print them out to be delivered as cards to the Pope himself.
The most beautiful greetings will be displayed on the various Vatican social-networking pages.
As previously announced, the Christmas Eve Mass celebrated by the Pope in St. Peter's Basilica will start at 10 p.m. this year instead of midnight.
The following day, Christmas Day, he will deliver his Christmas message Urbi et Orbi at noon from the central loggia of the Basilica.
On December 26, he will lead the noon Angelus
[I don't know why - it's Saturday and not a religious holiday], and on Sunday, Dec. 27, he will have lunch with the indigent at the Sant'Egidio soup kitchen in Trastevere.
[I think he will lead the Sunday Angelus before going to the soup kitchen where he is not expected until 1 p.m.]
This afternoon, the Christmas tree on St. Peter's Square will be lit. It is a 90-year-old 90-foot tree from the Belgian resort town of Spa in the Ardennes.
The Nurseries Union of the Ardennes also donated forty smaller trees for the papal apartment, the Sala Clementina and various offices in the Vatican.
Tickets for the Christmas Eve Mass have long been 'sold out'. The Pontifical Household distributed 10,000. Similarly gobbled up were the tickets for the Vespers and Te Deum on December 31 and for the New Year's Day Mass the next day.
[The Apcom report does not say anything about it but for the past four years, the Pope's brother, Mons. Georg Ratzinger, has come to the Vatican around December 28 from his home in Regensburg to spend the New Year and his birthday on January 15 with his brother.]
P.S. I have found the Pope's 2009 Christmas card in BILD, the German tabloid. I rotated and cropped the right photo to try and get the message side clearly, but the picture does not resolve well when enlarged.
The legend at the bottom of the card says the illustration is from a stained-glass panel in the Pope's private chapel at the Apostolic palace, executed in 1964 by Italian artist Silvio Consadori (1909–1994). The Latin inscription „Lux fulgebit hodie super nos; quia natus est nobis Dominus“ is from the Roman Missal.
The following is an item I would normally post in BENADDICTIONS, but I am adding it here for thematic continuity.
The Pope's Christmas courier
from Bavaria began work before Advent
by Barbara Just
MUNICH, Nov. 27 (Translated from KNA) - On a warm spring-like November afternoon in a nursery in West Munich, bank director Thaddaeus Kuehnel drives up with his Mercedes and backs carefully towards the open gate of the greenhouse.
The 62-year-old man is evidently nervous. Although no one could possibly think of Christmas in this warmth, he is - he must load more than 40 festively decorated Advent wreaths into the car. The destination for the precious cargo? The Vatican.
"How will all this fit?" he worries. But his good friend Robert Zwirner calms him down. Every year, he packs in wreath after wreath along with several boxes of pre-wired replacement candles into the trunk of the car and on the back seat.
"We'll manage it this time, as well", Zwirner is certain and unconcerned.
The problem came earlier. The ex-gardener of St. Boniface Abbey, Brother Ansgar Moessmer, 90, had intended to make all the wreaths himself as in previous years. But the Benedictine monk had broken his hip in a fall and was hospitalized.
Thank God, another gardener, Marille Schuster, volunteered to make the wreaths. The largest wreath is at least a meter in diameter. Like all the rest, it is decorated with gold-edged red ribbons, golden floweers and golden bulbs. During Advent, they are to adorn every room in the Apostolic Palace where the Pope's guests are received, as well as the Pope's apartment and private chapel.
The wreaths come with red candles which were chosen because, says Kuehnel, "That is how the Pope remembers them and treasures them from his childhood".
Since 1982 when Joseph Ratzinger moved to Rome to become Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Kuehnel has regularly brought him delicacies and traditional decorations from his Bavarian homeland.
Advent wreaths are not a common tradition in Italy. "South of Trentino, they don't recognize what they are", Kuehnel notes.
Once he packed a couple of wreaths in his suitcase to bring to Rome. A Customs agent had him open his bags in Rome and when he saw the wreaths, he assumed they were for a funeral. "He apologized and expressed his condolences," Kuehnell recalls, amused.
But to bring just a suitcase of goodies on his holiday runs has long become inadequate. Since Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope in 2005, the demand in Rome for Advent decorations and Christmas goodies has soared - more and more, Germans who work and live in the Vatican also want them. Among his earliest 'new' customers were a former Nuncio to Germany and Cardinal Lajolo, governor of Vatican city state [though he is not German).
Obviously, Kuehnel must also think of papal scretary Mons. Georg Gaenswein, the Pope's four housekeepers (all Italian), Cardinal Augustin Mayer and Bendictine primate, Abbot Notker Wolf.
Kuehnel's Mercedes is almost like a long-distance "Bavarian care package' delivery van. He uses even the storage space under the trunk floor for chocolate Santas, cans of white sausage, sweet mustard, horseradish and coffee from a famous Munich coffee roaster.
Six homemade candles of beeswax from the enterpreneur-artist Claus Hipp (who tends beehives in his spare time) are not going on this trip.
Kuehnel says he will take them to Rome on his trip just before Christmas when he undertakes the 11-hour car trip once more to deliver three five-meter Christmas trees from Bavaria to the Pope.
And as always, he expects the ride will end with an invitation to lunch with the Pope.
Top left photo, one of Kuehnel's wreaths provides a suitable foreground for the Pope's group picture with the bishops of Belarus; right and bottom left, Kuehnel with a new wreath, and with Christmas trees to bring to Rome.
I am adding some material from a Guardian article on Kuehnel last Christmas:
When Joseph Ratzinger left Bavaria to become cardinal of the Roman Curia, Thaddaeus Kühnel promised to be his driver during home visits in the German south. Since then, the banker drives to Rome at least three times a year to bring the Pope gifts from the state.
He has already spent some 250,000 kilometres behind the steering wheel of his official car – the equivalent of driving around the world six times for the his holiness.
When the Cardinal became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, Kühnel, 62, offered to be at his beck and call whenever he wished to stock up on German delicacies that are hard to come by in Rome, including sausages, strudel and dumpling mix.
Lebkuchen (honey and spice biscuits), stollen (German Christmas cake), and chocolate were among the treats, Kühnel told German media. Of the trees, which came from the Pope's home town, Marktl am Inn, Kühnel said: "One is for the Pope's living room, and two are for private chapels."
Butchers in Marktl am Inn began selling Ratzinger sausages in his honour when he became Pope in 2005.
Kühnel said he had already clocked up around 250,000km (150,000 miles) in his car, delivering goods to the pope that he had personally requested, along with presents from his old friends, staff and distant relatives.
"I deliver all the things he misses about Bavaria, including fruit nectar, Bavarian sausages from his favourite restaurant, advent wreaths and German sweets. He has a very sweet tooth," Kühnel said.
"The first thing I brought to Rome, in my car, was a paschal candle, as well as some fruit from Adelholzen and mineral water. He likes the Christmas cookies that women from Bavarian parishes bake at home as well as those made at certain monasteries. He also likes the chocolates made in Aachen."
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/12/2009 00:33]