Home and Away
Pope Benedict XVI waves during the Angelus prayer from the window of his private apartment in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican January 4, 2009.
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Cuba's Catholic art
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Two valuable paintings which hung
unrecognised in a small South Yorkshire church have been identified as
15th Century works of art.
The £300,000 panels, by Renaissance artist Sano di Pietro, were on
display at the Church of St John and St Mary Magdalene in Goldthorpe
near Sheffield.
When their importance was suspected, experts identified them as some of
di Pietro's largest works outside Italy.
The paintings are on show at York Art Gallery until the end of March.
Laura Turner, curator of the art gallery, said: "These panels are a
truly incredible find and we are extremely proud to be able to put them
on public show for the first time since they have been accredited to
Sano di Pietro.
"The pieces are stunning to look at but there is also a real sense of
mystery about them as so much remains unknown about their past."
Sano di Pietro
Sano di Pietro was an early Renaissance artist born in Siena
Little is known about his life although he was a pupil of Sassetta, one
of the most important 15th century painters
It is known di Pietro finished some of Sassetta's works upon his death
The two 5ft (1.5m) gold panels, which depict Saint Bernardino and an
unknown saint, are believed to have originally been part of a large
altar piece in a Tuscan church
The paintings had been on show in the Lady Chapel of the Goldthorpe
church where they were difficult to see and remained unstudied for
decades.
Nothing has been published on the paintings and it is not yet clear how
they ended up in the church.
One suggestion is that they came from Lord Halifax, who funded the
building of the church in 1916, although there are no records to confirm
this.
After being shown at the gallery, the paintings will go on display at
York Minster, which has agreed a five-year loan with the parish of
Goldthorpe.
BOSTON (CNS) -- The prayers of family and friends and
the rosary helped a Brockton couple endure a 15-hour ordeal waiting to
be rescued from their room in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India,
which came under siege from terrorists Nov. 26.
William and Geraldine Stadelmann were on the last day of a three-week
tour of India, which included a visit to the tomb of St. Thomas the
Apostle in the city of Chennai, formerly known as Madras. The following
day, the couple was to depart with a smaller tour going to Nepal to see
Mount Everest.
The India leg of the trip concluded with an afternoon reception on the
hotel's ground floor for the tourists, many of whom William Stadelmann
said stayed downstairs for dinner, while he and his wife returned to
their room to pack for their 4 a.m. departure for the airport.
"At the party we were all saying how safe we felt in India," he said in
a Dec. 2 interview with The Pilot, Boston archdiocesan newspaper.
At or around 10 p.m. there was a loud explosion.
"I thought it was fireworks," he said.
Next, he said, came a call from the hotel security, who told him there
were gunmen in the hotel and he should turn off the lights, lock the
door and open it for no one. For the next 15 hours, the couple stayed
under their bed.
From under the bed, the couple could hear terrorists move down the
hallway, pound on each door and use an explosive that sounded like a
grenade. "They would blow the door open and start shooting everyone
inside," Stadelmann said.
There was at least one gunman perched high over the atrium firing into
the rooms and down upon the people running across the bottom of the
atrium to escape the hotel.
With the sniper outside, he said his wife did not want to risk getting
up and going to the bag with her rosary beads, so she used her knuckles
to keep track, he said. "Of the 15 hours, my wife was saying the rosary
for, I'd say, 14 and a half hours."
Meanwhile, Stadelmann said he used his laptop equipped with an
international wireless Internet card to maintain contact with his family
back home.
Beyond the explosions and the gunmen going door-to-door, the greatest
danger to the couple was the fire, he said. "There were 1,000 rooms in
the hotel, so I figured our chances were pretty good. But, the fire was
really something. A fire will find you."
Stadelmann opened the windows just a crack and he put wet towels at the
bottom of the doors to block the smoke that was filling the hotel, he
said. To breathe, he and his wife covered their noses with wet towels,
too.
Because their section of the hotel was constructed of concrete, he said,
he was confident the structure was sound, even when the roof of the
atrium caught fire and its flaming pieces streamed down past their
window.
When help arrived, it was a team of six Indian Army special forces
soldiers dressed in black uniforms with black bandanas on their heads,
he said. "They had everything, guns, knives and radios. They were the
real deal."
Along the way, the group had to walk past five or six bodies and at each
one his wife stopped to make the sign of the cross, he said. Of the more
than 170 killed, one was a man from Australia the coupled befriended on
the tour.
"The Indian people are wonderful," he said. Many of the hotel staff
risked their lives or were killed trying to help guests get to safety.
Their Hindu culture teaches them to be kind and concerned for others.
Stadelmann said those rosaries and the prayers of his friends and family
back home were the reason they lived through the ordeal.
"We have a tremendous faith and we were getting prayers from all over
the place," he said.
A boy carries flowers in preparation for the Day of the Dead in Mexico. This weekend Catholics worldwide mark the feasts of All Saints and All Souls.
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06-year-old
U.S. nun to vote for the first time in 56 years
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) -- U.S. Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old member of the
Religious Sisters of Jesus and Mary, will vote for the first time in 56
years and will cast her ballot for president for Sen. Barack Obama,
D-Ill.
The nun, a retired music and art teacher, has lived in Rome for 50 years
and only recently found out that she could register for an absentee
ballot without returning to the United States.
But after giving interviews to CBS News, BBC Radio and Italian
television, the New Hampshire native is not taking any more phone calls,
not doing any more interviews and not posing for any more photographs,
said a spokeswoman at the motherhouse of the Religious Sisters of Jesus
and Mary.
"Sister Cecilia is very tired," the spokeswoman told Catholic News
Service Oct. 13.
In the interviews, Sister Cecilia said she was sure Obama would win,
just like the last U.S. presidential candidate she voted for --
Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.
"I always said, 'I voted once and I won the election,'" she told CBS
News.
She said that in choosing a candidate she was looking for "a good,
straight man, a good private life, honest and politically able to
govern, of course."
While she only recently discovered she could still vote while living in
Rome, she said voting is important.
"It's important because one vote may decide," she said.
She told the BBC that she hoped that, with Obama as president, there
would be peace in the world and an end to the fighting in Iraq.
Worshippers stream into the new Cathedral of
Christ the Light during its dedication ceremony in Oakland, Calif.,
Sept. 25. The cathedral, under construction since 2005, replaces St.
Francis de Sales, which was damaged beyond repair in the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake.
After years of persecution, Christianity is
now undergoing massive growth in China.
The picture shows the Southern Cathedral of Beijing. Founded by Jesuits
in 1601, it is China's oldest cathedral.
The body of Russian writer and dissident Alexander
Solzhenitsyn has been laid to rest at a funeral service held at Moscow's
Donskoi monastery. President Dmitry Medvedev joined the writer's family, friends and hundreds of mourners at the monastery's cathedral, near the city centre.
Solzhenitsyn's writing exposed Stalin's prison system and earned him 20 years in exile from the former Soviet Union.
He died on Sunday of heart failure at his home near Moscow, aged 89.
Before entering the church to attend the service on Wednesday morning, Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of the Russian capital, said: "He was one of our strongest personalities, a unique person."
Inside, Mr Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, her sons and the rest of the Solzhenitsyn family sat in the front row of the church where more than 100 people had crowded
The Nobel prize-winning author lay in an open coffin with a wooden cross on his chest, surrounded by hundreds of candles.
Ahmad Bader Hassoun, the leader of Syria's 18 million Muslims, met with Italian journalists who were visiting Damascus as part of their own celebration of the Pauline year.
Vatican Radio reported today that Hassoun said he hoped to meet Pope Benedict in Rome and he hoped the Pope would visit Damascus before the Pauline celebrations end next June.
The Pope convoked the yearlong celebration to mark the 2,000th anniversary of St Paul's birth. The saint converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus.
Archbishop Giovanni Battista Morandini, the Vatican nuncio in Syria, told the Italian reporters that the country's two million Christians — Orthodox and Catholics — have joined together to discuss St Paul's life, writings and witness.
The Vatican Radio report said Syria was not the only country that has extended a Pauline year invitation to the Pope; "other nations in the Middle East that saw the passage or presence of St Paul on their territory" have done likewise, Vatican Radio said, although it did not name the countries.
The Vatican has not confirmed any papal trips outside Italy after the Pope's September 12-15 trip to Paris and Lourdes.
However, in late July, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, told an Italian Catholic newspaper that while decisions about papal travel for 2009 have not been finalised, Africa is likely to be on the list.
"The church in Africa deserves a trip by the Pope," Cardinal Bertone told the newspaper Avvenire.
More photos and a video in the Confirmation section.
The pope celebrated an open-air mass in Sydney that organisers said drew 400,000 worshippers in the climax of a week of prayer and pop concerts during which the pontiff made a historic apology for child sex abuse by clergy.
In his final mass, the pope said the worshippers' youthful energy helped reinvigorate the church and urged them to become "messengers of love" to counter a world that was increasingly spiritually barren.
"The world needs this renewal," he said. "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading, an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair."
The pontiff, who has repeatedly railed against consumerism and greed through the week, again warned the pilgrims to avoid "the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships."
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Listed buildings.....
Rainhill Station
Millennium Centre (Former St. Ann's School)
St. Ann's ChurchThe Skew Bridge
The Skew Bridge
Milestone on the Skew Bridge.
Fr. Phil blessing the Vigil Fire.
DEPUTY Prime Minister and Minister of
Energy and Industry HE Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah yesterday
highlighted the importance of co-existence of people belonging to
different faiths in every society.
Such an atmosphere would contribute to peace, harmony, development and
help improve not only person-to-person relations but also those between
different faiths, HE al-Attiyah said at a gathering held on the eve of
the consecration of the country’s first church, The Catholic Church of
the Lady of Rosary at Mesaimeer, yesterday.
The first Holy Mass at the newly-built church will be held at 10 am
today.
Cafod Corner is a feature of life at St. Bartholomew's. It is open at the Saturday night and Sunday Morning Masses and specialises in selling fairly traded goods, with the proceeds going towards Cafod funds.
Eamonn, who is Chair person to the Parish Cafod Group gave parishioners a most interesting talk about the latest news from Cafod and the ways in which it helps the poorest people throughout the world. (See under CAFOD from our home page)
Not a very good photo, I'm afraid, but it does give a good idea of our beautiful Stations of the Cross
Bernard, our Deacon, with two families whose children are being baptised at St. Bartholomew's
Our newly refurbished Parish Centre. This Centre is used by various groups and by Little Church each Sunday. It is available for hire by outside groups.
Christmas arrived at St. Barts in style this year and
the beginning of the busy festival was marked by the display of the
beautiful crib above the entrance gate to the church grounds.
As usual Paddy and his willing compatriots took only one afternoon to go
through the complicated process of erecting the heavy structure,
connecting up the electric lighting and putting the figures on display.
Being as how it is sited at a sharp bend in Warrington Road it has the
effect of acting like a beacon to remind
busy drivers of the Christmas message in an increasingly secular
society.
Did you notice the extraordinary flower displays around the church over the Christmas period. This is one particular time of the year when the flower group really flex their muscles, so to speak, and create the most beautiful decorations to celebrate the birth of Christ.
Parishioners (and others) are invited to donate towards these displays in memory of loved ones and members of their families.
They can also do flowers for weddings and funerals and special occasions such as remembrances, celebrations, and so on.
To find out a bit more about the Flower Group please return to the Home page and click the link to 'Groups'
The first part began as intervention in a rural and public context as a ship built out of found objects on Crosby Beach. The ship was considered an appropriate image in the context of the Beach and the Port of Liverpool. The image was intended to be ephemeral and consequently was subject to the elements and natural erosion of wind and tide which would return the materials to their original state.
To take this idea a stage further the second part of the intervention is linked with the first but is intended to take place in an urban and more private space. Following further research on the icon of the ship or boat image it became apparent that the ship is a powerful symbol throughout early Christian art as well as cutting across other cultures and faiths. It is a symbol of hope, safety and refuge for souls