Out on a Limb

I have, generally, no use for papal prognostication.  Most prognosticators are engaging in wish-fulfillment anyway. Including me, of course.

But…here goes:

Deep breath….

Either Ouellet, Ranjith or Scola.

Name: Gregory or Leo, with more money on Leo.

Watched this tonight.  What a day that was.  Electric. Watching it made me sad (that he resigned) and grateful (for his work, witness and papacy).

Well…onward…Veni Creator Spiritus

Read Full Post »

Angelus

Here’s a bit of video from Sunday’s Angelus.  The first is part of the prayer, the second is the Holy Father’s English greeting, and the third is afterwards – one of the three groups from the NeoCatechumenal Way that were singing and dancing in the square afterwards.

The first photo is of the set up – don’t know what the scaffolding is for, but if you look to the left, you can see the big screen with the prayer prompts!

 

Here’s the text of the Holy Father’s remarks. 

Read Full Post »

Sunday at St. Peter’s

….guess I should have read the schedule more closely.

Since we’re a five minute walk away, and since it’s Sunday, we thought we’d go to Mass at St. Peter’s Sunday morning, and then stay for the Angelus.  The regular schedule indicates a 10:30 Mass.  So we got there about 10:15, in order to get through the security line, which was quite long….on the screens outside, the Pope was…talking…inside St. Peter’s.  I was thinking that perhaps it was a replay of yesterday’s Consistory, but then we hit the door, and the sounds inside matched the sounds outside (the Credo by that point)…so, um, there we were inside St. Peter’s, halfway through Mass being celebrated by the Pope.

There were no seats of course, so we tried to find various vantage points from which we could see something besides the ceiling – no such luck.  No one was moving from their hard-won SRO positions against the barriers, not even for angelic-looking children.  We wandered to the back, eventually, and stayed there since it occurred to me that from there, we could see the Holy Father as he processed out – well, we could, sort of, although he turned away to go through the curtains before he got to us – the boys saw his face, though.  Following are some photos – next post will be a couple of videos from the Angelus.

Waiting to get into the Basilica

Took this holding the camera over my head I never actually saw the altar with my own eyes.

Waiting at the end of Mass

And…there he goes.

Cardinal Rigali

Many men and women were wearing these, in honor of the new Cardinal from Nigeria

At the end of every church event, someone has to stack the chairs.

 

Texts:

Pope Benedict’s talk at the Consistory

His homily for Sunday’s Mass.

Read Full Post »

Peace and Good

Today, we took the bus down the hill from Assisi to S. Maria degli Angeli, the location of the Porziuncola of St. Francis.

Afterwards we were at McDonald’s – so sue me, it’s the first time in about 2 weeks and it’s right there by the train station/bus stop  - dining in the midst of a couple dozen Italian high school students and a few young families.

Time to evangelize!

This group of mostly sisters, with a few young laypeople, had been handing out flyers in front of the Basilica – I said “no Italiano,” as I do many times a day, but just my quick glance indicated that it was advertising for a youth/family event of some sort.

And what better place to spread the word than a McDonald’s full of young people at lunch?

They hit every table, spent time with those that responded, regrouped at the end, then walked off together back to the Basilica.

It was impressive.

Reaching out, inviting, dialoguing, going into the place where young people gather in person, not just virtually, not just waiting for them to come to you.

Read Full Post »

The Pursuit of Italy

It took me ages to read this book, mostly because it sent me off on so many tangents of research.  I realized that this is just one more of those positive/negative aspects of the Internet – it’s great that I can set my book down and immediately go do some extra reading on Pope Benedict XV and World War I, but, well, that’s a negative, too. Because I can set my book down and immediately go do some extra reading…

The Pursuit of Italy is a rather idiosyncratic book that’s aroused a bit of controversy.  Some say David Gilmour has really said nothing new here, others that he contorts evidence to support his case.  Others that the book is just overstuffed – and with this I can concur.  Overstuffed in some areas, rather sparse in others.  That said, Gilmour never does claim to be writing a comprehensive history of Italy and freely admits that his own interests play a role in shaping the material.  Of course they do.

That said, I found it fascinating.  The book is posing and seeking to answer the question, “Was Italy inevitable?”  Italy, of course, didn’t exist until the 19th century, and aside from his reassessment of risorgimento, what I was most interested in was his exploration of the centuries before unification, and of the question, “When people talked about ‘Italy,’ what did they mean? How did the envision it? What was the foundation of their conceptualization?”

His answer to that first, basic question is that Italy was not at all inevitable and it is no more difficult to  envision a still-separate Republic of Venice (for example) than it is to envision the Netherlands.  Further, he makes the case that the peninsula was at its most prosperous as a whole when it was most “divided” – the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Finally, he explains risorgimento, not as an organic cry for freedom and Independence (from what?) but essentially as a Piedmontese power-grab, aided by hopeful, yet confused and opportunistic republicans.  The “united” country was further harmed in subsequent decades by short-sighted, bellicose leadership continually aching for a fight to prove its manhood and claim some grand place on the world stage.  He concludes:

“It was the peninsula’s misfortune that in the nineteenth century a victorious national movement tried to make its inhabitants less Italian and more like other peoples, to turn them into conquerors and colonialists, men to be feared and respected by their adversaries. For eight decades, Italy’s leaders followed the same policy, leading their new and fragile nation on a mistaken journey to poverty, colonial disaster, the fascist experiment and the humiliation of the Second World War…. Some countries, like France or Britain, became more important than the sum of their parts. In Italy the opposite is true. The parts are so stupendous that a single region—either Tuscany or the Veneto—would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilisation of its past. But the parts have not added up to a coherent or identifiable whole. United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for because its making had been flawed both in conception and in execution, because it had been truly what Fortunato(the Italian Politician Giustino Fortunato) was told by his father , “a sin against history and geography”… The peoples of Italy “have created much of the world’s greatest art, architecture and music, and have produced one of its finest cuisines, some of its most beautiful landscapes and many of its most stylish manufactures. Yet the millennia of their past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation state”.

I wish that Gilmour had given more serious attention to the Church, though.  He’s not a huge fan, but he’s not reflexively, rabidly negative, either.  A closer look at, for example, the Papal States, might have been helpful in drawing this bigger picture.

All in all, a suggestive and interesting book, and useful in moving beyond  the myth-making, narratives of inevitability and deterministic equations that pass for history for most of us.

Read Full Post »

Caponata

I hesitate to post this photo because, honestly…it’s not appetizing.  And I couldn’t get the colors right. Because I still can’t do indoor photography with indoor lighting…inside. It’s beyond me.  And Picnik is disappearing into the Google Borg, and then what shall I do?

So. As we all know, the Food Network has devolved into an insane cycle of cupcake competitions, men driving around the country eating food, and men driving around the country fixing restaurants.  The only shows left worth watching are Chopped, Iron Chef when a Birmingham chef kicks Flay Tail, and yes, I watched and enjoyed The Next Iron Chef.  

If you want actual cooking shows, you’ve got to be fortunate to have the Cooking Channel, which is where reruns of Good Eats were sent and where I followed up on Michael Chiarello after the last season of Next Iron Chef.  He was pretty much hated all over the Interwebs, but I liked him, and wondered what his show was like.

I like it: Easy Entertaining.  His mannerisms in the show’s open do get on my nerves – he holds a plate of food in his left hand and flaps his right around while being forced to read lame lines about how his pals are all coming over for a Old West themed  polenta party on the beach during a lunar eclipse  in honor of Valentine’s Day or something.

But once we make it through that and he starts cooking, I’m there.  The food he crafts appeals to my tastes and always seems so doable. Which they should, of course, considering the title of the program.

Which is why I made his Northern Italian Caponata tonight. 

I know. It looks like hash.  But it’s delicious.  I will be eating on this for the next couple of days – that and another batch of my roasted tomatoes that I cooked for almost four hours this time and are like rich little oily, crusty gems.

Caponata, not surprisingly, has ..varieties.   Eggplant is the point, and it’s got a southern Italian/Sicilian provenance.   Chiarello calls this recipe “Northern Italian” and is probably considered a heretic because he throws in potatoes and there’s no tomato. Plus, the dressing is an agrodolce – a sweet and sour concoction (like a French gastrique) that has vinegar as a base, cooked down with a bit of sugar and some golden raisins.  Orange zest and red pepper flakes add to the contrasting flavors.

Please don’t think anyone else in this house is going to eat this.  That’s fine. I didn’t make it for them.

Now back to tonight’s other recipe, which they will eat  - birthday cake – a chocolate pound cake, requested by someone who will be eleven years old tomorrow.  That should be a prettier picture.  But weird Mom?  Prefers the caponata.

Read Full Post »

Crostata

Discovered this a couple of weeks ago. A very common, standard Italian dish. Made it on Saturday.

Will be making it again.  You should try it.

It plays a tart or pie-like function but it’s made with a shortbreadish-type of dough.  Very easy and wonderful.  The filling for this one was some blueberry filling I’d made and frozen earlier in the summer.  You can use any kind of jam.

 

The pan is my Official Crostata Pan –  an Italian brand scored for 2.99 at Ross a few weeks back. They had a bunch of different pans from this company  - Guardini –  interesting shapes and nice colors, all for under 3.50.  Somebody’s import scheme didn’t go so well!

 

 

Read Full Post »

Saw St. Ambrose Today

I didn’t take his photo though. I probably could have – a little girl stuck her camera right through the grate and got a shot of the vested skeleton and no one stopped her. But it just didn’t feel right to me. Maybe because the boys were with me and I didn’t want to model “getting a good shot” as even Step Two (after “pray”) in “What To do in the Presence of Important Saints’ Relics.”

 

Sant’ Ambrogio Basilica

 

Can you see the weasel or ferret or whatever to the right? We were just standing there not looking at it, when a man strode up, tapped Michael on the top of the head, made faux surprised noises, said something in Italian, pointed at the creature and strode on.

Read Full Post »