Posted on 07/24/2008 1:18:25 PM PDT by NYer
.- Having returned from his visit to Australia for World Youth Day, Pope Benedict XVI has moved to his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. After three days of rest, he will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki on Friday and travel to the northern Italian town of Bressanone the following day.
In Bressanone, a German-speaking town near the Italian border with Germany, the Pope will stay with his brother Father Georg Ratzinger in a medieval seminary from July 28 to August 11. According to ANSA news agency, a grand piano has been installed at the seminary for the two music-loving brothers.
Pope Benedict will also spend time with Milly, the seminary’s cat, who will be cared for by Sister Superior Maria Pieta. Besides Sister Pieta, only rector Ivo Muser will remain at the seminary during the Pope’s visit.
According to the local diocese, Pope Benedict will stay in an apartment decorated in “extremely sober” style and read, play music, and enjoy strolls in the mountains.
He is scheduled to deliver his customary Sunday Angelus from the town square on August 3 and August 10. Bressanone Mayor Alberto Puergstaller will reportedly grant the Pope honorary citizenship on August 9.
The Pope first visited the town with his brother and older sister Maria in 1970 and spent time at the seminary while he was a cardinal.
After his Bressanone visit, Pope Benedict will return to Castel Gandolfo where he will resume regular general audiences. On Friday, August 15 he will hold Mass at the local parish.
He will reportedly remain at Castel Gandolfo through late September, excepting a visit to France from September 12 through 15.
Wishing him a peaceful and relaxing vacation ... he has earned it.
I didn't realize his brother was a Father!
I didn't realize they were from Kentucky.
Technically, he's a Monsignor.
Rare picture of Georg & Joseph Ratzinger in 1945
I didn't realise there'd been a new Anschluss.
Both Mozart and Schubert wrote a lot of music for piano 4-hands, much of it commercial, but some of it quite profound. I suspect the two brothers are holed up with a grand piano and a shelf-full of sheet music.
Holy Father, have a restful vacation with your brother. I will be thinking of you when I read the book of your life as told by Chico the cat you have befriended. =^..^= :)
I see that he will see another cat, a girl by the name of Milly. I do hope his brother will update him of his cat friend, Chico. Truly the Pope has earned his rest after two big trips to America and Austrailia. =^..^=
Ahhhh ..... another fan of this book! Freeper boagenes is reading the book right now and inspired me to pick it up again. It would be awesome if he used this time to finish the 2nd volume but, rumor has it, that he is working on his 3rd encyclical which is due to be published in the Fall.
Anyone who hasn't read this book, and who is a devout Christian (I reiterate, you don't have to be a Catholic to read it, I'm Lutheran), is doing themselves a grave disservice if they don't get this book and read it. I have never been so moved by anything I've read about Jesus, nor have I ever found anything where every page is filled with so much insight and depth. It's a deeply spiritual read.
According to Amazon.com and Ignatius Press, the book will be released in September. That would mean that the encyclical will be made available on the Vatican's Web site before then.
I purchased the book several months ago, read a small portion and then abandoned it to read another book. Thanks to your 'endorsement', I returned to it the other night and can't put it down. I'm midway through the Beatitudes. Ratzinger was always renowned as a great theologian. Like you, I would love to spend a quiet evening with him.
VATICAN CITY, 25 JUL 2008 (VIS) - On Monday 28 July, the Holy Father is due to travel to Bressanone, a small city of 20,000 inhabitants located in the Italian alpine region of Alto Adige, where he will spend a period of vacation in the local seminary, until 11 August.
The fact that the Pope has chosen to go to Bressanone "represents a novelty with respect to earlier years" when he went to Les Combes in Valle d'Aosta and Lorenzago di Cadore, explained Holy See Press Office Director Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J. in an interview. "The place is associated with many memories of Pope Benedict's life", said Fr. Lombardi "and has particular value for its German-language culture. What we call Alto Adige and in German is known as Sudtirol is, in fact, a fundamental area for German-language culture and the Pope, as a highly cultured man, will certainly feel at home there".
The director of the Holy See Press Office went on to point out that during his fortnight in the mountains "the Pope has no scheduled appointments, apart from his traditional meeting with priests from the diocese and the surrounding areas" which this year will take place on 6 August, and the praying of the Angelus on Sunday 3 August and Sunday 10 August.
After his return to Castelgandolfo on 11 August, the Holy Father will begin to prepare his forthcoming trips: to the Italian city of Cagliari on 7 September, and to Paris and Lourdes in France from 12 to 15 September. In October, the Synod of Bishops on the Word of God will meet "and the Pope is already preparing himself. It is possible that he may dedicate time - if he is well-rested and able to work - to the second part of his book on Jesus or to completing his social Encyclical, which we have been expecting for some time. Or who knows", Fr. Lombardi concluded, "but that he may have something else in mind: last year he gave us his Encyclical on hope which, in a certain sense, we were not expecting".
.../POPE VACATION/LOMBARDI VIS 080725 (360)
Yes, the second part of the Jesus book! You hear, Benedict? Now, get to work!
...It can make clear in its fashion wherein the indispensability of the article about the universal judgment of all men "according to their works" lies. It is not part of our task to consider in detail how this assertion can coexist with the full weight of the doctrine of grace. Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of the grace that frees helpless man and, no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the Christian enjoys, on the one hand, the liberating, detached tranquility of him who lives on the excess of divine justice known as Jesus Christ. There is a tranquility that knows: in the last analysis, I cannot destroy what he has built up. For in himself man lives with the dreadful knowledge that his power to destroy is infinitely greater than his power to build up. But this same man knows that in Christ the power to build up has proved infinitely stronger. This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God's unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. It becomes possible to do one's own work fearlessly; it has shed its sinister aspect because it has lost its power to destroy: the issue of the world does not depend on us but is in God's hands. At the same time the Christian knows, however, that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game that God allows him and does not take seriously. He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward of what has been entrusted to him. There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions. Faith in the Last Judgment holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment. Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialize the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity. --Ignatius Press edition, 1990, p.324-5.
I already bought it. It’s sitting on the top of my book stack, and it’s my next read as soon as I finish “Jesus of Nazareth” - though at my current pace, that won’t be until sometime in about 2010.
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