19 June 2021

Praying in Ordinary Time 2021:
21, Saint Philip and Saint James, Sorrento

The Cattedrale dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo (Cathedral of Saint Philip and Saint James) in Sorrento (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During this time in the Church Calendar known as Ordinary Time, I am taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week my photographs are of seven cathedrals in Italy. This morning (19 June 2021), my photographs are from the Cattedrale dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo (Cathedral of Saint Philip and Saint James) in Sorrento.

Inside the Cathedral of Saint Philip and Saint James in Sorrento (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Sorrento is a small town with only 16,500 people, but dates back to the Greeks and to the Romans, who knew it as Surrentum. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus said Sorrento was founded by Liparus, son of Ausonus and grandson of Odysseus and Circe.

In classical times, there were temples of Athena and of the Sirens. This was the only temple of the Sirens in the Greek world, and may explain the origins of the town’s name.

The cathedral, which is dedicated to Saint Philip and Saint James, stands halfway along the Corso Italia in the heart of the town, has 12th century doors from Constantinople. It was first built in the 11th century, was rebuilt in the Romanesque style in the 15th century, and has a marble altar, pulpit and throne dating from the 16th century.

The Cathedral Bell Tower is three storeys higher than the other building nearby is a landmark in Sorrento. The red and yellow stone of the tower can be seen from many street corners in the centre of the town and also from points along the Via del Capo and the Via Nastro Verde out along the peninsula.

The two lower storeys of the tower probably date from the 11th century when the Duomo was originally built. But the three upper storeys were added in the 15th century, when the Duomo was rebuilt in Romanesque style. At a later date, it was given its decorative, blue majolica clock.

The bell tower has played an important part in Sorrento’s history. The ground floor space under the archway from Via Pietà was used as a meeting place by the people of Sorrento in mediaeval times. Later, a castle was built in the open space that we now see in Piazza Tasso, and people held large meetings there.

The castle is long demolished, but the columns that still hold up the bell tower at ground floor level are believed to be a collection of old Roman columns or early Byzantine columns.

It seems as it is forever Christmas in the cathedral, for the large presepio or Nativity scene inside the main doors is on display all year.

In the 19th century, Sorrento became one of the most desirable tourist destinations in Italy, visited by Byron, Keats, Goethe, Ibsen and Walter Scott. But today it is a bustling busy tourist centre for visitors on their way to or from the Sorrento Coast, the Amlafi Coast, Capri and its neighbouring islands, or even Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples.

The Nativity scene inside the main doors of Sorrento’s cathedral is on display all year (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 6: 24-34 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 24 ‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

25 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 ‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.’

The red and yellow stone of the cathedral bell tower can be seen from many street corners in the centre of Sorrento (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (19 June 2021, International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict) invites us to pray:

We pray for everyone affected by sexual violence, particularly victims of sexual violence in conflict. Lord, we ask that you heal their scars and bring their perpetrators to justice.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

The cathedral in Sorrento at night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Mendelssohn and the Golem
defied Nazi plans In Prague

Mendelssohn on the roof of the Rudolfinum … frustrated the anti-Semitic scheming of the Gestapo in Prague

Patrick Comerford

I have taken a week off for a much-needed break, and I have been staying in Dingle in Co Kerry, and Skibereen and Glengarriff in Co Cork, visiting the Great Blasket Island and some of the other offshore islands in this corner of south-west Ireland.

I have also taken some reading with me, including Fergus Butler-Gallie’s new book, Priests de la Résistance! (London: Oneworld, 2021), a humorous but pungent account of ‘the loose canons who fought fascism in the 20th century.’

There are 15 portraits of a variety of figures, for, as he writes, ‘Wherever fascism has taken root, it has met with resistance.’

The 15 people he portrays range from Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who took bullet for a frightened schoolgirl, to Bishop Chrysostomos of Zakynthos, who saved Greek Jews with fake IDs. There are 15 people in this book, but not all are priests, nor are they canons or ‘hard-drinking, chain-smoking clerics’ as claimed on the cover, but all were willing to risk their lives for what they believed.

They include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Edith Stein, Prince Philip’s mother, Mother Superior Alice Elizabeth, Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens, and Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the ‘Sacrlet Pimpernel of theVatican’ who died in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry.

The combination of humour and pungent alacrity is introduced at the very beginning in this book as Butler-Gallie recounts the Nazi occupation of Prague, and the Czech undoing of the Gestapo director Reinhard Heydrich, who arrived in 1941 as ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia, a story that is an appropriate reflection on a Friday evening:

‘A key part of Heydrich’s programme was to demonstrate the superiority of the Reich’s Teutonic culture over all others – but especially over the ‘degenerate’ Slavic and Jewish cultures, both of which were in abundant evidence in the city of Prague.

‘As befits the birthplace of Don Giovanni, Prague is home to myriad opera houses, musical theatres and concert halls. Perhaps the grandest of these is the Rudolfinum, … its roof ringed by statues of the great composers …

‘Heydrich, so the story goes, became aware that among these inanimate virtuosi there was a stone Mendelssohn, a composer despised by the Fuhrer on account of his Jewish birth. Consequently, the Reichsprotektor ordered the removal and destruction of the offending sculptor. A group of soldiers were dispatched to the concert hall accordingly, only to be met with tight-lipped silence as to which statue was, in fact, Mendelssohn from the building’s curators …

‘Frustrated, the soldiers … sourced a tape measure with which they proceeded to measure the noses of each of the statues. Having established which symphonist had the most sizeable conk, they began to have it removed, only for an onlooker to shout up that the figure they were in fact removing was Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer.’

The real tragedy is that this story is based on a real-life event. In all, more than a quarter of a million Czechoslovak Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and only 15,000 had survived by the end of World War II.

Jews first arrived in the Czechlands before the ninth century, and Prague eventually became the home of one of the largest Jewish community. The former Jewish Quarter is a Unesco World Heritage site, and the Old New Synagogue is the oldest working shul.

Prague is the city of the Golem, and the city where Hitler planned to turn into a ‘Museum of Extinct Race.’ Historians now see inter-war Prague and Czechoslovakia as keys to unlocking many aspects of modern Jewish identity. But this is also a community that almost ceased to exist due to the Holocaust and Communism.

On Sunday evening (20 June 2021), David Kraus is giving an online presentation, ‘In Golem's Shadow: The Jews of Prague between Reality and Fiction.’

David Kraus was born in Prague into a Jewish family that was settled in Prague before the 14th Century. He was a leading youth activist in Czech Jewry in the late 1990s and the 2000s, and chair of the Czech Union of Jewish Students. He has been a lay leader of the Czech Jewish Community for over a decade, co-ordinating a number of projects in the Czech Republic.

Shabbat Shalom

Prague at night … the city of the Golem, and the city where Hitler planned a ‘Museum of Extinct Race’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford; click on imagefor full-screen view)