The Wedding Rehearsal
Fr Bill: Hi Wayne and Amanda, is everyone here?
Amanda: No, Father Bill, we are still waiting for Gloria the fifth bridesmaid and Emily-Jane and Jason the Flower Girl and Page Boy. They have been at a fourth birthday party. Here they are now. My dad couldn’t come. We will tell him what he has to do.
Fr Bill: OK, men – you can sit in the front seat. Ladies, come with me to the porch. Grant, you’re one of the groomsmen are you? It’s not usual to wear a cap in church. Thank you …
Now Amanda, you line up your bridesmaids in the order you want
Emily-Jane, you and Jason will walk in front.
Emily-Jane: No, I don’t wanna.
Fr Bill: Come on, be a good girl… Jason will hold your hand. That’s right.
Emily-Jane: Waaaah! Jason pinched me.
Fr Bill: When the music starts, the bride’s attendants will proceed slowly down the aisle. You have decided on Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s good. I don’t think your first suggestion “You Light My Fire” by Rancid Yogurt was really suitable. Now girls, you’ll have to be careful not to giggle on Saturday.
Right, here we are at the altar…
Goodness, that’s taken an hour. I have to go to a meeting. We’ll finish with a prayer to help us focus on the beautiful sacrament that we are celebrating on Saturday. Are there any important questions before we go?
Yes, Amanda, what is it?
Amanda: Jason has just been sick Father. Where can I find a bucket and mop?
Holy Disorders
At the recent Sydney Media Congress sponsored by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Varcha Sidwell, producer of the ABC program “The Abbey” described the task of directing clergy at an event as comparable with ‘herding cats!’
In the same vein someone else has said that concelebrating priests sometimes look like a row of unmade beds.
Anti-pastor?
According to Bill Bryson in his book Mother Tongue, Italians have 500 names for the different types of pasta. It bespeaks the Italian familiarity with their Catholic culture that one of these variations of pasta is known as strazzapreti – strangled priests!
Angels, Demons, 666 and All That
Apparently even Osservatore Romano has been kinder to the latest Dan Brown film than it was to the Da Vinci Code. In part it may be because the producers of Angels and Demons have been careful to be less offensive towards the Catholic Church than was the case with the Da Vinci Code.
The mixture of pseudo-science and pseudo-history that Dan Brown churns out captivates a huge audience in a conspiracy-hungry society. As the Catholic Church has the oldest and largest closet in history, where better to forage for skeletons?
In the 19th Century an anti-Catholic propagandist claimed that the Pope’s title ‘Vicarius Filii Dei’ contained the Roman numerals that added up to 666, the number of the Beast of the Apocalypse. (The ‘u’ in Vicarius is equivalent to ‘v’.) The fact that the Pope does not have this title and that the
Apocalypse was written in Greek not Latin was of little account.
Dan Brown is an heir of those 19th Century theological astrologists who loved to mangle history for the sake of propaganda or entertainment or both. John Henry Newman suggested, as a counter attack to the 666 claim, that Queen Victoria may have been the Beast of the Apocalypse! She came to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837. Multiply 18 by 37…
Perhaps Dan Brown could see in all this the seeds of a new book or film.
Suppose that one of today’s Swiss Guards is in fact a great grand-child of Nicholas II, the last of the Russian Tzars and consequently a very distant relative of Queen Victoria.
MI5 (the UK’s Secret Service) learns that the guard in question, unknown to himself, possesses secret documents that prove that the Stuart family, claimants to the British throne, never really renounced their rights. (A touch of reality in all this is the fact that the last of the Stuarts, the brother of Bonnie Prince Charles, was a Cardinal, Henry Benedict Stuart. He was known to his friends as King Henry IX. He died in 1807 and is buried in St Peter’s Basilica. Does Mr Brown know this? His perfervid imagination would surely run riot if he did.)
In our scenario MI5 begins to remove the Swiss Guards one by one. Who in Whitehall is ordering this?
Meanwhile, back in the Bavarian Alps the Illuminazis, a remnant of the S.S. (their average age is now 87) are planning to blow up the Sistine Chapel.
Admittedly some of the loose ends in this plot need to be tied together. Mr Brown’s script writers will accomplish this easily. Combined with superb photography the possible film “Vampires in the Vatican” may outstrip “Gone With the Wind” as a box office success.
– Fr Ron Line
