For the sake of those who don’t go beyond the home page, I’m taking the liberty of reproducing a comment I received on the previous thread: an eyewitness account of the beatification of Cardinal Newman. My grateful thanks to Manus, whose story it is:
It was a marvellous celebration. We got up at 2am to get to the choir practice for 6.30ish. It was raining at first, and my tongue-in-cheek hope was for a very convenient appearance of a Fatima style dancing sun, so we could roll on into the full sainthood bit there and then and have done with it. Alas we made do with a rainbow and the appearance of an entirely sober (but no less welcome) sun just before the Holy Father arrived. We had no further rain. A very convenient coincidence, gratefully received.
What struck me about the service was its homeliness. It was still just Mass, albeit with tens of thousands (50,000 I heard) and the Pope and scores of bishops. Mass is Mass – I’ll never forget that now. The people who attended need to commit months in advance, and so tended to be devout and committed. The silences were comfortable and intimate.
This contrasts with the sheer exhilaration of Hyde Park last night – 200,000 attendees, including my teenage son. Fairly wild and a very positive experience for him, but there was still the astonishing silence around Benedition.
We are still pinching ourselves about how well the whole visit has gone. It has been heart speaking unto heart and the spontaneous enthusiasm for the Holy Father has shone through. It’s nice for even the hostile media to accept the Pope as an academic and an intellectual – no more than a statement of fact, of course – but they have had further to acknowledge the depth of affection the Pope inspires in so many people.
And so to bed …
Great post. Must have been a great experience.
I notice he finished with, “and so to bed….”
Isn’t that how Samuel Johnson used to finish his essays?
Maybe, I know Samuel Pepys oftem closed his diary entries that way
JP,
Thanks! The day was glorious. The family is enjoying the afterglow while facing up to another working week.
JJS, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations the phrase “and so to bed” apparently does come from Samuel Pepys. What a cultured chap you are! It just popped out of my barely functioning brain as an apt phrase. More to the point though, there happens to be a bed shop in Headington with that name, so I can’t claim it sprang from any abiding love of literature on my part! I’ve scarcely read any Pepys, I’m afraid, though I gather he’s entertaining enough.
A great name for a bed shop.