Not the least of the writing tasks for the Holy Father during his current vacation are the drafts for the papal texts to be delivered when he visits the Czech Republic in September. By the same token, the Church in that country is deep in preparations for the Sept. 26-28 visit. The English service of Czech Radio has a situationer:
Preparations underway
for Pope's autumn visit
By Christian Falvey
July 15, 2009
2009 is a year of big visits for the Czech Republic. After receiving the new American president Barack Obama in April, the country is now preparing for another extremely important visitor: His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who will be making several stops in the country over three days in September.
The papal visit from September 26 to 28 will be the first for the new pope, and preparations are already in full swing. Much of the program has been especially planned according to the Pontiff's wishes, during which he will visit the country’s main pilgrimage sites and other sites of particular interest to him.
Karel Štícha, from the office coordinating Pope Benedict’s visit, said: “The Pope will visit two important cities in the CR, first he will celebrate Holy Mass in Brno, which is the capital of Moravia, and then he will visit Stará Boleslav, a well-known city in Central Bohemia, and in this city, on the day of St. Wenceslas, he will celebrate Mass for the people from the region.”
Stará Boleslav is of huge significance to Czech Catholics as it marks the site where the patron St. Václav, a.k.a. Good King Wenceslas, was murdered by his younger brother, thus dying a martyr.
This stop on Pope Benedict’s tour of the country will be a major event, with 30,000 people tentatively expected, and thus a lot of the planning is focused on international transit to and from Stará Boleslav, as well as on many other areas.
“We are in the process of negotiation with the companies that are able to construct the structures necessary to prepare for Holy mass and we are also in the process of negotiating with the state authorities about cooperation on infrastructure and the logistical preparations and so on.”
Prague, of course, will not be off the Holy Father’s list of things to see. Here, he requested a special stop at the Church of Our Lady Victorious which houses the Infant of Prague, a statue of the infant Christ that is revered around the world. Father Petr Šleich heads the Carmelite Priory of the Infant Jesus of Prague*.
[The visit to the image is the Pope;s first event in Prague after the airport arrival ceremony.]
“It’s not an honour for the Infant Jesus of Prague to be visited by the Holy Father, but in this special case it’s an honour for the Holy Father to visit the little Jesus in this place which is so widely known and beloved by so many faithful on every continent today, and for centuries already.
"I think it is a great encouragement for all those Christian people in many countries who love this image of the little Jesus, they can see that the Church really appreciates their devotion, their trust in the little Jesus, and that they are not alone in this, that even the Pope himself shares their attitude.”
The Czech Republic is a famously non-religious country, with 59% of the population agnostic, atheist or non-denominational.
Nonetheless, the roughly 2.5 million Catholics in the country will doubtless be joined this autumn by their brethren from the neighbouring Catholic bastions of Slovakia and Poland and the Pope’s homeland of Germany.
The papal visit to the Czech Republic is sure to be a big one. John Paul II visited the Czech Republic three times.
[He must have felt such concern for what had become of the once very Catholic Czechs after four decades of life under Communism.]
*
I have had occasion to note a couple of times in the past how widespread is the devotion to the Infant Jesus in my country, the Philippines, where he is known as the 'Santo Nino', the Spanish words for Holy Child.
And therefore, for most Filipino Catholics who can afford to travel, Prague would rank among their first three pilgrimage choices after Rome and Lourdes, precisely for the Infant Jesus of Prague.
What I did not realize till now is that the original Santo Nino venerated by Filipinos is more than a century older than the image found in Prague, though both of them were made by Spanish artisans.
Indeed, our Santo Nino - a carved wooden statue barely 12 inches high - was a gift given by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 to the chieftain of the local tribe on Cebu, the Philippine island where he first went ashore.
The missionaraies with him managed to baptize this chieftain, his wife, and followers. The image was a gift to mark that baptism. However Magellan was eventually speared to death in an encounter with another tribe under a chieftain named Lapu-Lapu who resisted the foreigners.
The Spaniards did not return to the Philippines until 1565, and miraculously, they found the statue in a hut that had been burned during the fighting that preceded this actual colonization of the island. A church was built on the site where the statue was found, and the church has become the Minor Basilica of the Santo Nino de Cebu.
The Infant Jesus of Prague, on the other hand, was a gift to a Bohemian noblewoman from her Spanish mother. In 1648, the 19-inch-tall image was turned over to the Carmelites of the Church of Our Lady of Mary Victorious in Prague. However, it is thought that the statue may have been made as early as 1340.
In fact, the oldest continuing Santo Nino devotion is Spain's Santo Nino de Atocha (Madrid) commemorating miracles in the 13th century attributed to a little boy dressed as a pilgrim turning up to help Christians persecuted by Muslims.
The Santo Nino devotion has taken hold particularly in Latin America, and if the Philippines had not had its own older Santo Nino tradition, it would certainly have received it eventually during the three centuries of Spanish rule, when the cultural osmosis was mostly from Latin Amnerica (particularly Mexico) to the Philippines, rather than directly from Spain.
I have Googled the query but there does not seem to be any comparable Infant Jesus devotion in Germany, not even in Bavaria. The references mention St. Therese of the Child Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony of Padua, and St. Teresa of Avila as devotees of the Infant Jesus.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/07/2009 05:08]