(Photo by Joe)
This is how the Mass at Bellahouston looked for the faithful. But how did it look for the Pope?
At his General Audience yesterday, Pope Benedict described Glasgow as a ‘city embellished by beautiful parks’. In his words to the English-speaking pilgrims, he recalled how he ‘celebrated Mass in Glasgow in the presence of many bishops, priests, religious and a great concourse of the faithful against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset at Bellahouston Park, within sight of the place where my beloved predecessor celebrated Mass with the Scots twenty-eight years ago.’
When speaking in Italian at the same audience, he gave a longer description of his meeting with the beloved church in that dear green place:
It was an occasion of intense spirituality and of great importance for the Catholics of the country, considering also the fact that on that day occurred the liturgical feast of Saint Ninian, the first evangelizer of Scotland. During that liturgical assembly, gathered together in attentive and participative prayer, made yet more solemn by traditional melodies and inviting chants, I recalled the importance of the evangelisation of culture, especially in our age in which a pervasive relativism threatens to obscure the unchanging truth of the nature of man.
(Poor quality translation by me.)
Distraction: I must confess that when I heard the Pope’s unusual trun of phrase at the end of his homily (‘The Church now belongs to you!’), it did remind me of a well known traditional melody.
Laus Crucis 