12th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 5 Comments
Now that my meetings in Rome are behind me, I can begin focusing on the Pilgrimage in the Footsteps of St Paul. I’m staying at the moment at the Beda College where we have Dominic Byrne studying for the priesthood.
The Rector, Monsignor Rod Strange, is an old mate of mine and I always find the hospitality there first-class. It’s all the more welcome after a few quite gruelling months in the Archdiocese and a couple of fairly intense meetings in the Vatican.
One of the the things I’ve always liked best about the Beda College - dating back to when I taught here - is that it’s just across the road from the Basilica of St Paul’s Outside the Walls. It’s one of the great churches of Rome and is built over the tomb of St Paul which is now splendidly on view after excavations beneath the papal altar. (more…)
15th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 1 Comment
I did a radio interview this morning about the Pilgrimage with Genevieve Jacobs of ABC Canberra. She asked at one point whether we were going to Damascus, and that made me think of other missing steps in our Pilgrimage in SOME of the Footsteps of St Paul - missing steps in the Middle East. Damascus is one of the obvious ones, but again it’s a long way from Greece, Turkey and Italy. Paul might have had the time, energy and money to sweep the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but unfortunately we don’t. (more…)
16th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 1 Comment
One of the most difficult things to know about St Paul is whether or not he ever got to Spain. We know from the Letter to the Romans that he definitely had it in mind, and it would have fitted well with his sense of himself as one sent to preach the Gospel where others hadn’t gone. By the standards of the time, Spain was quite accessible - only seven days sailing from Ostia, the port of Rome.
16th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - No Comments
Word came to me from Canberra that the pilgrims had left - a little late but they were up and away. I sent a text to Fr Francis Kolencherry who is handling the logistics of the Pilgrimage. I just wanted to wish the group Buon Viaggio. I didn’t expect a reply from the plane, but I got what I expected from the ever reliable Fr Francis - a reply from Singapore once the pilgrims had made it that far. He told me that things were fine and that they were having fun. I tried to imagine what that might have meant on the flight from Sydney to Singapore. But I was glad to hear it because fun has always been part, if not the whole, of the pilgrimage experience. Chaucer’s pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales are shown as having quite a rollick. Let’s hope we’re still having fun by the end of the journey.
18th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 3 Comments
I suppose today counts as Day 1, but it was really assembly day. Most of the pilgrims arrived early this morning, with Neil and Mary Harrigan arriving yesterday and myself arriving via Budapest this afternoon. I was hoping to find Archbishop Carroll bursting out of his skin after the magic potion he’d been given in Singapore, but he was no good when I got to the hotel. He’d gone for a walk in the heat and it hadn’t been quite what the doctor ordered, although he blamed a pie he ate in Yass on Monday. He wisely decided not to join us for Mass at 6.00pm in the Catholic Cathedral of Athens which is dedicated to the patron saint of the city, St Denis.
20th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - No Comments
I’m writing this from a boat anchored off Mykonos. Perhaps I should say a ship because it’s a very big boat. In fact, compared to anything St Paul took to sea in, this is enormous. But compared to the vast floating hotel anchored close to us, our vessel looks puny.
I’ve been saying to the pilgrims that this isn’t a cruise; it’s a voyage…a pilgrimage across the water from Athens to Ephesus via Mykonos, Rhodes and Patmos. This Aegean world became the Apostle’s natural habitat. For much of his missionary life, he moved in a triangle made up of Corinth in the west, Ephesus in the east and Macedonia (Philippi and Thessalonica) in the north….with a lot of water and islands in the middle.
Sea travel in Paul’s day was such a precarious business that he often preferred to go overland. It may have taken longer and been much harder work, but it was less hazardous than sea travel in an age when ships hadn’t mastered the art of tacking into the wind which was always adverse in the sailing season if travelling in the Mediterranean from east to west or south to north. If the wind were adverse, as it often was, then you could be becalmed for days or weeks. Even when the wind was favourable, the ships were small, hard to steer and very unstable even on the mill-pond of the Mediterranean. They tended to stick as close as possible to the shore or to lurch from island to island as best they could. (more…)
20th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 1 Comment
The island of Rhodes has a long and colourful history, much of which is on show as you stroll through the town and visit its monuments as we did today. In places like Rhodes, you realise that the ancient world didn’t vanish. It may have been demolished in a sense, but the bits and pieces were all gathered up and reconfigured in later times. We have no idea, for instance, what happened to the Colossus of Rhodes after its destruction in an earthquake well before the Christian era. It was so huge (and even huger if we includes pedestals etc) that it couldn’t simply have vanished. In all likelihood, its many fragments were reincorporated in various ways into the town we now see. It’s the same with the pagan gods. They didn’t vanish; they were reconfigured.
22nd June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - No Comments
Patmos and Ephesus is a big double in one day, but that’s what it’s been for us. I’d been to Ephesus about twenty-five years ago, but I’d never been to Patmos, even though the place had always intrigued me. The tradition of St John’s presence there and of Patmos as the place he wrote the Apocalypse is strong, but in the end I don’t know what to make of it. I know all the scholarly arguments which suggest that the Apostle John didn’t write the Apocalypse, even if it bears the hallmarks of the Johannine tradition. One of the fascinating things about the New Testament is the way in which it weaves together in a great tapestry all the different strands of primitive Christianity - the Pauline, the Johannine, the Petrine and so on. Each was a distinctive voice - if I may change metaphor - but all the voices are brought together triumphantly into a single harmonious voice which bears witness to the communion of the Church inwhich there are many different voices but no cacophony; only the harmonics of Paradise.
Whatever the empirical truth - which is probably irretrievable - Patmos was very evocative on a glorious Aegean morning. These islands rise like bare rocks from the sapphire waters, yet in the morning light the islands themselves seemed like jewels. Travel on the water was a nightmare for Paul, but he must have breathed a sigh of admiration as he saw these jewel-like rocks rising from the mirror waters on a summer morning. (more…)
24th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - No Comments
We have made it to the edge of Europe - or at least to the edge of Europe as the Roman Empire understood it. We are at Kavala which used to be Neapolis, the port at which Paul first set foot upon the soil west of the Dardanelles (or the Hellespont as it was the called). This is the thin stretch of water which separated Roman Europe from the province of Asia Minor which included much of the western part of Turkey. Not far from here was the city of Philippi where Paul founded his first European community.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we’re told that Paul came here after a vision of a Macedonian man pleading that Paul come across the water to help them. The vision was convenient because it certainly matched Paul’s sense that he had received a divine commission to preach the Gospel where no-one else had been. At this stage, Christianity had certainly reached Rome, though we’re not too sure how and when. But Macedonia was virgin territory for Christian missionary work.
Whatever about the vision, the decision to launch a European mission was a huge one for Paul and his team. I can imagine long team meetings discussing the pros and cons. Then once the decision was made, there must have been more meetings discussing the strategy - who would go where and when and how they would operate once they reached European soil. The risks were enormous. How would they be received? What if the whole thing came to nothing? Would they even survive, given the likelihood of persecution? What would the Church in Jerusalem think? What would be the response of Paul’s opponents who had created such havoc in Asia Minor? These were surely some of the questions that Paul, Silvanus and Timothy discussed. (more…)
28th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 2 Comments
We came to Rome a little more briskly than did Paul. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that, after leaving Malta, the ship put into Syracuse for three days and then headed from Sicily to the Italian peninsula where it touched down at Reggio Calabria. After a couple more days, they came to Pozzuoli near Naples, the birth-place of Sofia Loren. Paul stayed there for a week with believers he found there. Then we have the laconic punch-line of Acts: “And so we came to Rome”.
Christians from Rome, we are told, heard of Paul’s arrival and came to meet him at the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns. The Forum of Appius was about 75km from Rome, so this was a considerable act of homage. They would then almost certainly have passed through Velletri and entered Rome through the Porta Appia, better known today as the Porta San Sebastiano. Then he would have been taken to the place of his house arrest which was, according to tradition, on the Aventine Hill in the home of his old friends Prisca and Aquila who had prepared the way for Paul in Corinth and Ephesus and now did the same for him in Rome.
1st July, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - No Comments
I’m now in Manhattan which in some ways couldn’t be further from the world of St Paul through some of which we have journeyed on this pilgrimage. Distance - if not time, given that it’s only a day ago that we bade farewell to each other - lends a certain perspective. So I find myself asking, What did it all mean? Of course the question is impossible to answer; each pilgrim will have a different story to tell. A bit like World Youth Day, this was a complex experience that moved in many different directions and at many different levels. Perhaps in the end only God can take the full measure of it. But I’m certain that each pilgrims will never hear or read St Paul again in quite the same way. They said as much as the final dinner we had on our last night in Rome. What they meant is that, trudging around some of the places where Paul’s mission unfolded and hearing his words in situ, they met the man himself in a new way. (more…)
It’s midday, Mass is over and we make our way out of St Peters to do some touristy things - some are sightseeing, others shopping, some have wandered off to find a trattoria for lunch. Its very warm and we are all aglow from the outpouring of grace we have received.
(Under the cut, read final farewells and greetings from our pilgrims.) (more…)
22nd June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 3 Comments
These days it’s not often that I learn something from a tour guide. I hope that doesn’t sound smug or arrogant but it’s just a fact. It’s part of being on the earth for sixty years and doing some of the things I’ve done. But we have had a couple of first-class guides so far, and the one we have at the moment - Iacovos, known as James - is a cracker. This guy really knows history (fair bit of Bible too) and speaks excellent English; he even has an Italian mother. He told us today that the Greek word “cosmos” means “world”, which I thought was pretty obvious. He then said - and this is what I didn’t know - that it also means “jewel”. Hence the English word “cosmetic”. Great point, I thought. The Greeks regarded the planet as a jewel, and how right they were. The first cosmonauts were moved by the beauty of the planet seen from a distance - a sapphire shrouded in lace, they thought.
St Paul in his Letter to the Romans speaks of the whole creation, the cosmos, groaning in a great act of giving birth. I thought of the light throbbing at the heart of this jewel planet, like a child wanting to leave the womb. The birth will come when the light bursts from the jewel, and the name of the light is Jesus. Until then we are aglow with the promise of the birth to come, a jewel spinning through dark space. (more…)
14th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 1 Comment
I was looking at the Pilgrimage itinerary this morning, and it struck me that perhaps it should be called Pilgrimage in SOME of the Footsteps of St Paul. Because re-reading the Murphy-O’Connor life of Paul, I can see more than ever just how many footsteps the Apostle took. He must have had a great pair of legs - not so much for looks perhaps but for function. I read the other day that the Australian fast bowlers are working hard in England at the moment trying “to put a lot of miles in their legs” for the Ashes series. Well, Paul probably wasn’t much of a bowler and I doubt that he ever embarked upon the flash fitness programs of our bowlers, but he had any number of miles in his legs. Can you imagine Paul playing cricket?! (more…)
13th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark - 7 Comments
Today I moved from the Beda College to the English College villa at Palazzola in the Alban Hills just outside Rome. I thought a day or two in the hills breathing a different air might help to fine-tune my preparations for the Pilgrimage. I’ve lived up in this part of the world before when I was a chaplain to the Marist Brothers in Nemi just down the road from where I am now. That was years ago when I was doing my doctorate. But I learned to loved this part of the world, the Castelli Romani as they call it in Italian. It’s only a stone’s throw away from Rome, but it’s another planet. I can remember driving back here in summer after meals in Rome, and you could feel the air cooling and drying as you rose into the hills back to the Castelli. In the hills here there are two lakes - the bigger Lake Albano where I am now and the smaller Lake Nemi just down the road where I used to be. Just across the lake from Palazzola lies Castelgandolfo where the Pope has his summer villa.
I did a radio interview this morning about the Pilgrimage with Genevieve Jacobs of ABC Canberra. She asked at one point whether we were going to Damascus, and that made me think of other missing steps in our Pilgrimage in SOME of the Footsteps of St Paul - missing steps in the Middle East. Damascus is one of the obvious ones, but again it’s a long way from Greece, Turkey and Italy. Paul might have had the time, energy and money to sweep the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but unfortunately we don’t.
