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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Tag Archives: Pope

#105 Mothers’ Day

September 4, 2016

‘Gentle as a dove, cunning as a snake.’

Popeye for the ‘poorest of the poor’,

Saint Mother Teresa was canonised today.

She played her innocence impeccably, implacably.

Now her vow of poverty is upended in papal pomp and ceremony.

Beautifully…he went home to God,

She said of the beggar who’d told her

(Quoted in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize),

‘I lived like an animal in the streets but I am going to die like an angel.’

I know it’s churlish of me to ask,

But does it have to be ambrosia?

Is there no mezzo soul food to sup?

Neither scraping and foraging

Nor brutalised then flipped into blind faith.

Away from playing Mother to the Squeezed Middle,

The Other Theresa is hanging on in Hangzhou.

Despite the measured tone of her contralto voice,

At the G20 summit Britain’s position is vulnerable:

She could be squeezed until the pips squeak.

This Mother Theresa must forage in foreign affairs,

Calling in favours, hoping to scrape by.

Closer than she’d care to think

To the man of the streets who reportedly died in a state of grace.

Note that neither Mother has so far managed

To speak to us in a language we could call our own.

#45 Thrilla In Manila

January 24, 2015

To keep the rain off, the Pope is wearing a floor length poncho made of see-thru yellow plastic.

To keep off the torrential, tropical rain as he stands at the open end of his customised PopeMobile.

(This one in the style of an American army jeep, post-WWII: Il Papa transported by Uncle Sam.)

A gust of wind must have blown up from ground level, because the poncho has blown out to Michelin man proportions.

Swaddled in yellow, suitably inflated, Pope Francis might be on the point of ascending to heaven – except that Ascension seems unthinkable for this Sancho Panza; this mundane figure of nothing but a man, far too tubby to take flight.

Easy to tease even without mentioning jug ears or asking where he found Helmut Kohl’s old glasses.

(Those aviator frames didn’t stop the German people calling their chancellor ‘cabbage head’; Francis seems more of a swede.)

Feet of clay, easy to say; harder to explain why millions turned out in a tropical storm, up to nine hours before the three-hour Papal Mass was due to begin in Manila.

Six million, seven million Filipinos – the number is not even a number in the modern sense; more like those Biblical sums which mean: too many to count.

All wearing a scaled down version of the Pope’s yellow poncho.

Whatever their number, there are twice as many arms poking out and pointing upwards; with half the hands holding rosaries, the other half handling iPhones.

The rain, the light, and their beaming faces bouncing off millions of pieces of clear yellow plastic, each of these infused with the light and the rain bouncing off millions ofbeaming faces; a virtuous circle, making the whole scene translucent rather than simply see-thru.

For a moment, seeing through it all seems too cynical. As the pious are thrilled by thepresence of their pope, so piety appears to be thrilling. read more

#13 Pope’s Wedding

April 27, 2014

An earthy man with jumbo, Dumbo ears. Even as he raises the unleavened bread for it to become God incarnate, the body of Christ, it is not hard to imagine him at table – enjoying his food; also at stool afterwards – with similar satisfaction.

Pope Francis is performing a miracle – bread into body. Don’t be surprised: he does it all the time. Another one will be along in minute – wine into blood; and here are two he prepared earlier – the dead popes (John Paul II and John XXIII) which he transformed into saints before going on to celebrate mass.

 Yes, it is easy to reveal the pope and his retinue for what they partly are: men with feet of clay and an appetite for repairing the sullied reputation of the ‘holy’ Church, host to all their privileges. And then there is that gesture, performed by popes and priests alike, maintained throughout the process of consecration except when the celebrant is required to fiddle with bits of bodily bread and the carafe of bloody wine. They all do it – this gesture; and no one else is allowed to. Elbows tucked in; hands raised to shoulder height, held sideways on; palms open – facing each other. In the space between the celebrant’s hands – about the length of his forearm, there is room for all the men and women in the world. With all of us included in this space, there is God – in the instant. There is God, the moment all humanity is here. Then again, not. Nothing but a rhetorical posture which grossly distorts the universal relation between human beings – you and me and anyone who reads this and everyone who never does, never did, never will. But by trying and even by failing to formulate this relation in the prescribed gesture of a designated individual, at least therelation itself is acknowledged. It’s not heaven – we must know that; but surely better than the interpersonal purgatory in which nothing exceeds networking. Two months before the World Cup opens in Brazil (and three months earlier and four months before that), an excess of violence. In Rio, what else would they do but riot? N.B. In the relation outlined above, ‘they’ is really some of us. Denied entry to theforthcoming festival of futebol; pacified – occupied – by military police presence. Meanwhile the Catholic mass – the holdall – is simply not big enough to hold them all, all the time. Of course we always knew as much: that is why football in the first place, and why it matters more than mortal life. One night in Rio, a few blocks from the Maracana, a man hurls a long wooden pole at police lines, his body a perfect arc of strength, movement, completion. But Robocop is a long way off; the missile will fall far short. Between its trajectory and the line of police, a middle aged woman walks unperturbed, carrying her shopping. The woman is solid, earthy: she might be the pope’s sister…….or his wife.

(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

January 28, 2014

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious  swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope’s blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ.

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for ‘peace talks’ in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can’t be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms. read more

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