Pope Francis taking possession of Saint John Lateran - Fr. Edward O.P.

Dear Fr. Edward,

Thank you for the poem-record of Pope Francis making himself at home. 

In our young days, we seem to have meandered the places from Angelicum and Gregorianum to St. Peters and John Lateran.

Verses in four pages allow the access of 'Insert jump break'.

In Dno.

Donald

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: edward ...
To: Donald ....
Sent: Friday, 12 April 2013, 22:50
Subject: Some more lines  --- Pope Francis taking possession of Saint John Lateran

 Dear Father Donald,

 Here are some recent lines - not the last piece which I have just finished, and over which I want to check tomorrow ("On the Power of Mary").

I do not think it can fit in with your requirements because it is four pages long.

H... would like a copy.

 I hope that the weather has improved. We have had a few days cold with snow and rather cold - after such a mild winter.

 Blessings in Domino,

 Fr Edward O.P.

Pope Calls for Courage to Accept God's Mercy

He gave his message as he took possession of St. John Lateran Basilica in Rome  

 http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/news/francis-taking-possession-of-lateran-basilica-824002 

 Apr 07, 2013

ublic Domain

Rome, Italy - Pope Francis took possession of his cathedral as Bishop of Rome
and spoke about how God’s mercy and patience should challenge everyone
to find the courage to accept his love.  

Pope Francis taking possession of Saint John Lateran

Yesterday a gentle breeze blew what seemed to be winged dandelion seeds

on the north side of the house. But it was late snow

which had settled overnight, though a direct ray melted what it struck fully.

In Rome today there was excitement at Saint John Lateran

where Pope Francis would take possession of his seat

for preaching and for  governing the Church at Rome.

The grass area around the Basilica, I found one Roman afternoon

before and after my Angelicum lectures caught up in a

Communist demonstration, is the locus for many manifestations, religious and lay.

En route I had to cross the road directly in the path

of a Communist procession on its way there:

many red flags unfurled, and many whistles blown stridently.

Two carabinieri were watching: “Can I cross?” Their shrug entailed

'On your own responsibility!', and so I did – in front of a street-wide banner slogan:

”Praise to the Revolution led and fired by the Class-conscious Proletarians!”

The last banner holder appeared normal and simpatico: I said:

“Tutte Rosse qui!” Politely he agreed: “Si Padre, siamo tutte Rosse qui!”

After my lectures I met up with them again in the Metro, shouting

“Berlinger … Berlinger … Berlinger … !,”

their sticks thumping the carriage floor with triple, rhythmical precision.

Today the roles were changed. A believing crowd occupied the grassy space,

with orderers organising the crowd-alignment along his Jeep-route,

more found in one-piece red or two-piece black and yellow.

We were watching a spiritual social contract:

the Church of Rome, its clergy and its people

were receiving its new Supreme Pastor

in a cryptic succession for three hundred years

and then quite public for eighteen hundred years,

though historians of ecclesiastic polity accept that earlier Popes

were chosen by popular (Roman) acclamation,

not in buildings under key as only the highest few were vote-casters.

The successive linkage    

 was assured within a  long unity of individual reigns.

Some short, some long, but more conducted with an eye on the sovereign fact

of the successive sharing of the identical Petrine charism communicated

from heaven alone to each and every individual bearer,

with each electoral cœtus intent to discern the pre-choice of heaven.

So does the Kingdom of Heaven establish its earthly participant Church.

Pope Francis has a quiet voice and yet a vigorous step.

The result has been an undramatic but worthy liturgical performance.

The formal prayers are almost whispered without change of expression, but everyone is more than comfortable, even though they sense

the finalising of a wide-spaced accommodation must follow.

He's punctual, and from his person spreads a joyful intensity of concentration

to which large crowds conform, spreading easefully,

even among the same polizotti

who now smilingly raise up presented  babies, some who are sick,

for Papal kissing and brief fondling.

The crowds gave him instant acceptance, rising to the highest degree,

sustained by warmth reflected back upon a giver-without-limits,

without time-limits too. All derived through priestliness

displayed from experience, and recognised from experience

of what they now expect in greater measure still, as divine Love

rises from the month-long succession of experiences:

so, “Siamo totalmente con te!”

He enjoys the much that he can do: love given is like the atoms, inextinguishable,

spreading like fires in nature.

His smile not limited; a public exterior not unlike Blessed John XXIII and,

like him, not ashamed to give the wisdom of his heart,

now more open to a communication in personal wisdom

than has become the case.

The congregations must be sharp to hear and taste it to its depths.

Saint John Lateran's different from Saint Peter's.

Michelangelo followed Bramante's beginnings;

created a space, which broadly extends itself about the transepts.

Saint John  Lateran's uni-axial.

A long look at the Papal Cathedra is broken

by the narrow columned altar, which rises to a storage space above for relics,

the outsides for displaying pictures within gem-like mosaics -

like so much basilica-walling, mosaic patterning framing

records of pre-renaissance piety.

The building was falling down …

The state of the Constantinian Basilica of Saint Peter had deteriorated even more. Yet it was appropriate to follow the tradition that the remaining high altar was exactly above the place of Peter's burial and retain the original site.

Michelangelo needed to redesign the whole,

encasing the cemetery spread out below where Peter had been buried

and siting the Basilica as if the inherited high altar was exactly above

the place where the as yet unexcavated area

would have been the place of burial:

near a stone niche by the emptied grave where cursive Greek inscriptions say:

“Peter is here”.

A stone box containing all the debris from that niche had been kept.

An Italian woman archaeologist carefully examined its contents,

which were very positive.

The bones (all of one man), shreds of purple cloth with gold embroidery

have been restored to that ancient niche; so he remains here.

Michelangelo's achievement in making the experience of being in this Basilica

without the intoxication either by space or by the fear of space

have been confirmed by architectural aesthetes:

the feeling of homeliness and therefore familiarity is the product

of those great columns being modelled on the proportions of the human body.

Though massive, Bramante's later bronze-cast baldachino does not interrupt

the perspectivising of the space to his “Glory” of his Peter's chair beyond.

But baroque is the architecture of movement, to which the linearities

of Saint John Lateran are unsympathetic; its inner walls display,

as in extended Museum walls, mosaics and paintings affixed therein,

its space not defined as space, despite its baroquification.

We shall see its Supreme Pontiff's Cathedra was meant to support his authority

by a strong identification of perspective with each living occupant of that seat

with an anticipated Austrahlung.

Where undamaged and safe the  nave arcades were clad neoclassically,

with great stone Saints located in between.

Then for the Basilica-like emplacement of the Roman Pontiff-Bishop

in the consecration of the stone-permanent “Mother of all the Churches”,

all this long-founded, being born and to be begotten

in its sacred, perduring Oneness,

emerging from the construction of Constantine and Sylvester

from among ancient carvings and inlaid mosaics, were early renaissance masters, rising through those gigantesque presentations to a flat,

gold-inlaid ceiling for heaven itself,

all soul-spikes outpouring from the ancientest vestiges more covered than visible,

as essence and signifying the reality of highest created praise

by the lay-presence, more outside than within,

with the Roman clergy with dominating hope through boy-like smiles,

the Canons as ancients carrying steadily the weight of years,

modelling always yet modelled always by the life of their successors,

around the still vigorous Francis after years of giving newness

to his Churches and his land:

not finding refuge in the past from necessary laborious confrontations

with the present, now poised to communicate seeds of Church-building

in the living reality, after which distended stones absorbing all the past,

not into a declining but an expanding living thrusting of infinitizing life;

gathering all who will come: Jews in their unfulfillment,

Moslems in their part-Gnostic Christian sources,

Buddhists in their reception of Nestorian Christian monastic modes,

submerged Chinese Christians in their millions weakened by splits

by state subserviants from authentic Pope-subjects,

Protestants deflected as demystericised, imperfect and finalized.

Altogether like the history of Saint John Lateran:

an ancient essence divinely graded, underlying all,

but One within the praise of all.

The imprint of the course of idealising history displayed

in forms more lasting in the present,

but all fall short of timeless Pauline Insights

preceding the Gospel writing with its witness,

all bonded by its visible and tactile tradition.

The Mother of the Churches symbolising the whole history

of Church in Churches, so like the ancient manyness from history,

though there idealised, here realised;

for each the same, and the inspiration within all is religious service.

As Popes are “Servants of peoples as servants of God”,

so the Church serves as One the one Crucified, Resurrected and Ascended

for humanity and to the Father's praise.

For the Roman Popes Saint John Lateran stands for the Roman See in itself;

Saint Peter's  is in the view of the universal Church becoming what it virtually is

under the Papal succession all participating Peter's charism to its fullness.

Elected and announced at Saint Peter's, at Saint John Lateran

he accepts and takes his seat, which confirms and formalises

the seat from which universality derives, as Pope and “Ordinary” for Everyman.

Consort and Bride have found each other; Consort has come to Bride

“from the ends of the earth”, as the Divine Will was manifested

within the united communication from the Heavenly Triad!

Now they regard each other,

make a generous marriage judgement on each other.

With the drawn-out stages of this Alliance in which the initiating Consort

underlies both, presenting to the Father

within the animation of the Holy Spirit jointly sent,

on which praise and reiteration rises and re-arises

like a united polyphony of unending Easter Alleluias;

in essential Choristered self-, universal and surrogated prolongation,

“lingering as loth to die.”

Thereby the Consort becomes more aware of the state of his Bride,

each seeing the other in connatural “sober ecstasy”.

The history of this “two-in-union” will be like a line -

a rising line of a succession of realized possibilities:

time-spikes in the general bearing of duration;

a pastoral possibility to be anticipated with unambiguous sobriety of both.

Francis speaks and comports himself as essentially a priest.

His words are heart-true and heart-warming,

motivating those who have been neglected.

But now the Insight under the deep-laid  Pastoral wisdom In Pastoral touches: he communicates a Franciscan joy, even though he makes his way along seams

more as a Jesuit.

He is demanding and can afford to be.

Mary is his Consort and Deepener;

he can speak of the compassion of the theandric Son with familiarity.

And Everyman is alerted to the arrival of a message

in the essence of all other essences.

A new beginning has opened and it will be played on with a natural spontaneity,

who will remind us of the Compassion and the Justice of God, clothed in Poverty;

in the homeliness of a spirituality

having breadth and depth because it loses itself often in the true Mysteric.

 Fr. Edward

Stykkishólmur

7–9 April 2013