“regularly” is a relative word.
Right?
Things that happen but once a year still happen regularly.
Anyway, if you haven’t already, catch up with every word the Holy Father said in the United Kingdom at the visit’s page at Vatican.va
Christopher Blosser has great summarizing links here.
Two of my favorite commentaries:
The most positive effect of the Pope’s visit, however, was one that even the BBC could not prevent — and that was the public display of Roman Catholic ritual at its most gorgeous and replete. For many television viewers the mass at Westminster Cathedral was their first experience of sacramental religion. The mystical identity between the ordinary worshipper and the crucified Christ is something that can be enacted, but never explained. It is enacted in the Mass, and as Cardinal Newman recognized, it is the felt reality of Christ’s presence that is the true gift of Christianity to its followers. For those who experience it the quibbles of the atheists and the protestors seem as trivial as BBC News. For many Englishmen, I suspect, the Pope’s Westminster mass was the first inkling of what Christianity really means.
Damian Thompson in words already widely quoted and rightly so:
Compare the protestors to the Catholics in Hyde Park: old Polish ladies, tweedy gents from the shires, African hospital cleaners, self-consciously cool teenagers, Filipino checkout assistants and, as one of my friends put it, “some rather tarty-looking traveller women who’d obviously had a glass or two”. They don’t call it the Catholic Church for nothing: if not a universal cross-section of humanity, it was a damn sight closer to it than the humanist smugfest.
And there you have it. One Body – a Body in all of its resonance, a Body with many parts, a Body which is the Word Incarnate, a Body Crucified and Risen redeeming our beings, bodies and soul, a Body consumed, a Body in Communion.
I have been reading A Dangerous Liason - a joint biography of Sartre and de Beauvoir and the contrast could not be more stark between the cramped, self-serving, circular, reactive, insular lives of those two – all in the name of “freedom,” – and real freedom which is ours, as the Holy Father tirelessly points out, is ours as those who belong to Christ:
To belong to him, to be called by him, is to be rooted in life indestructible.
I salute your ability to read about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. My physical reaction to their writing resembles gasping for lack of oxygen — I can’t keep reading for the claustrophobia. Sartre’s “No Exit” reminds us that the gates of Hell are barred from the inside. Existential dread is self-imposed.
In contrast, reading Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI feels like beneficial stretching, resistance exercises like weight-lifting. I feel challenged and energized, the world seems expansive and sparkling.
I don’t read much Sartre anymore.
Exactly – great way to contrast.
I had goose bumps throughout the the entire Mass at Westminster Cathedral.
The image that reading Ratzinger/Benedict brings to my mind is that of drinking pure, clear water, in contrast to the all the polluted things I read elsewhere.