31 December 2022

The day of a brief handshake
with Pope Benedict XVI and
a missed ‘selfie’ in the Vatican

A brief introduction to Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican … almost missed by the cameras in the days before ‘selfies’ became acceptable and sophisticated

Patrick Comerford

Soon after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Michael McGough recalled a joke in the Los Angeles Times about three German-speaking theologians who all died on the same day.

Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger all arrived at the pearly gates at the same time and are sent together to Saint Peter’s office to find out their fates.

Saint Peter points at Rahner and says ‘Karl! In my office.’

Four hours later, the office door opens, and Karl Rahner comes out. He is distraught, mumbling, ‘Oh my, that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done! How could I have been so wrong! So sorry.’ He stumbles off into heaven, a testament to the mercy of God.

Hans Küng goes in next. After eight hours, the door opens, and Küng is near collapse. He too is mumbling, ‘How could I have been so wrong!’ as he lurches into heaven, another testament to God’s mercy.

Saint Peter finally calls in Joseph Ratzinger. Twelve hours later, the door opens and Saint Peter stumbles out, mumbling, ‘How could I have been so wrong?’

Many years ago, when I was chair of the Dublin University Far Eastern Mission, an old mission agency founded in TCD to work in Chinam I was taking part in a conference in Rome in September 2005 on the Church in China. I was part of a small group who were invited to sit in the front row at the top steps of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and I was introduced – unexpectedly and albeit very briefly – by Cardinal Desmond Connell to Pope Benedict XVI.

It was an opportunity to bring greetings from Archbishop John Neill of Dublin, and this short message was conveyed graciously to the Pope by Cardinal Connell.

It is with humour that I can still recall how it was almost a missed photo opportunity too. It was the day when ‘selfies’ were still seen as selfish and were not as sophisticated and as acceptable as they are today, and another Irish priest who had a camera that day captured the moment only after we had shaken hands, as I pulled my hand back and the Pope moved on to greet some Chinese delegates to the conference.

The photograph and reports of the meeting were later carried in a number of Church publications in Ireland, including the Church of Ireland Gazette and the Church Review.

It is more than 17 years since that conference in Rome and that brief papal handshake in the Vatican that was never properly caught by the cameras. But it came to mind this morning (31 December 2022) when I heard the news that the former Pope Benedict XVI has died.

Another figure in Michael McGough’s joke, the celebrated but controversial Swiss theologian and priest Hans Küng also died recently (6 April 2021) at his home in Tübingen at the age of 93. He has lived with Parkinson’s disease for the past eight years and who lived, taught and lectured for more than 40 years in Germany.

He engaged in dialogue with Buddhism, Chinese religions, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, became the most prominent Catholic theologian to speak in China and the first theologian to address a group of astrophysicists. His popularity was directly related to his readability, clarity, erudition, honesty, fearlessness. He was profound yet popular, intellectual yet understandable, said and wrote what he thought needed to be expressed and was passionate in his search for truth.

After seven years studying philosophy and theology in Latin at the Gregorian University in Rome, Küng was ordained a priest in Rome in 1954 and celebrated his first Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica. He completed a further three years of study in French for his doctorate at the Sorbonne and the Institut Catholique in Paris, where he wrote his thesis on Justification.

In his doctoral dissertation on Justification, Küng concluded an agreement in principle was possible between Catholic theology as set down at the Council of Trent in the 16th century and 20th century Reformation theology found in the work of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics was possible.

At 34, he was the youngest expert at Vatican II, soon joined by the Dominicans Edward Schillebeeckx of Belgium and Yves Congar of France; the German priests Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner, and John Courtney Murray, George Higgins, John Quinn, Gustave Weigel and Vincent Yzermans from the US.

His Infallible?: An Inquiry caused an uproar across the Catholic world in 1971, and made him l’enfant terrible of the Catholic Church. He questioned his Church’s teachings on infallibility, celibacy, contraception and the ordination of women as well as men.

His most popular book, On Being a Christian (Christ sein) was a best-seller when it was published in 1974, an unusual achievement for a work of scholarly theology. I bought – and I still have – the first edition in English that year.

At the end of 1979, the Vatican revoked his missio canonical or license to teach as a Catholic theologian at the University of Tübingen, where he had been Professor of Dogmatic Theology from 1963. In the end, he retained his professorship in the university's secular Institute for Ecumenical Research, which he had founded and directed since the early 1960s.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was involved in removing his teaching license. As dean of theology at Tübingen in the early 1960s, Küng had offered – and Ratzinger accepted – a professorship at Tübingen. But the future Pope left academia, and later headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Inquisition, for 25 years under Pope John Paul II.

By the time I became a post-graduate student at the Irish School of Ecumenics (1982-1984), Hans Küng was seen as one the most influential theologians in the world. I was doubly blessed, because one of my lecturers, the late Revd Dr Robin Boyd, had been a doctoral student under yet another great German-speaking Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.

Many of my colleague priests remember Hans Küng’s visit to Dublin in 1985, and still regard his lecture in Trinity College Dublin during that visit as one of the seminal moments in their theological lives.

In the 1990s, Küng took on the task of preparing a ‘Declaration Toward a Global Ethic’ for the Parliament of the World Religions in Chicago in 1993. The most referenced part of the declaration was the proposition that there can be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions.

Little did I realise when I met Küng at that lecture in TCD almost 30 years ago that I would later share the distinction of contributing to a book with him.

In 2000, to mark the millennium in a particularly Christian way, The Irish Times ran a monthly series of features, commissioned by Patsy McGarry. The series opened with a contribution from Hans Küng, and continued each month with distinguished contributors who followed in his wake, including Jerome Murphy O’Connor, Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Sean Freyne and Andrew Greely. Each month, I completed the features with a series that built up into ‘A brief history of Christianity.’

The features were collected and edited by Patsy McGarry in a book, Christianity, published by Veritas in 2001. The opening chapter was Hans Küng’s opening feature, and the second half of the book was my ‘Brief History of Christianity.’ The cover illustration was an icon I had bought in Rethymnon in Crete in 1989.

To the surprise of many, Küng requested a meeting with Ratzinger shortly after his election as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. The two had retained a distant respect for one another and maintained a limited correspondence over 45 years.

In On Being a Christian, Küng quoted the German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who said: ‘There is one thing I would like to tell the theologians: something which they know and others should know. They hold the sole truth which goes deeper than the truth of science, on which the atomic age rests. They hold a knowledge of the nature of man that is more deeply rooted than the rationality of modern times. The moment always comes inevitably when our planning breaks down and we ask and will ask about the truth.’

With the Revd Dr Alan McCormack (then Dean of Residence, Trinity College Dublin), and Archbishop Nikitas (Lulias) of Thyateira and Great Britain (then Archbishop of Hong Kong) at the conference on the Churches and China in Rome in September 2005

Praying at Christmas through poems
and with USPG: 31 December 2022

’What we call the beginning is often the end …’ – TS Eliot. A lakeside winter scene on the Farnham Estate in Co Cavan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Christmas is not a season of 12 days, despite the popular Christmas song. Christmas is a 40-day season that lasts from Christmas Day (25 December) to Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation (2 February).

Throughout the 40 days of this Christmas Season, I am reflecting in these ways:

1, Reflecting on a seasonal or appropriate poem;

2, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

As we prepare to say farewell to 2022 and to welcome 2023, once again I am reminded of TS Eliot’s words in ‘Little Gidding’:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice …
And to make an end is to make a beginning.


‘… last year’s words belong to last year’s language/ And next year’s words await another voice’ – TS Eliot ... tangled bicycles abandoned in the snow in Dublin’s Temple Bar, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

And so, for my Christmas poem this morning, I have chosen the last part of Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ the fourth and final poem in his Four Quartets. The Four Quartets – ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), ‘East Coker’ (1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942) – are best understood within the framework of Christian thinking, theology, tradition and history. In these four poems, Eliot draws on the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics, such as Saint John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

The ‘deeper communion’ sought in ‘East Coker,’ the ‘hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing,’ and the exploration that inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim’s path along the road to sanctification.

Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding and Bishop Hugh Latimer (right) in the north window of the Chapel in Clare College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Eliot visited the village of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire only once, in May 1936. Three centuries earlier, it had been the home of a religious community established in 1626 by Nicholas Ferrar, and the Ferrar household lived there according to High Church principles and the Book of Common Prayer. Charles I visited the community in 1633, and he returned in 1646, fleeing Parliamentary troops.

The community at Little Gidding maintained 24 hours of prayer, including long hours of night vigils. Little Gidding was a place ‘where prayer has been valid’ and where ‘prayer is more/Than an order of words’:

… You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.


Eliot started writing ‘Little Gidding’ after completing ‘The Dry Salvages.’ However, his work on ‘Little Gidding’ was delayed because of his declining health and his dissatisfaction with earlier drafts. ‘Little Gidding’ was not finished until September 1942, and was published the following month in the New English Weekly.

In ‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot relies on ideas also found in ‘In Memoriam,’ written by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1850. But he also imagines at the beginning a meeting with meets Dante; and there are hints throughout the poem too of Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Mallarmé, Ezra Pound and WB Yeats.

As he imagines meeting Dante in the fires of war-time London, Eliot also recalls Brunetto Latini in the depths of Hades who had cried out to Dante in Canto XV of the Inferno. The dead master warns Eliot of the fate of his poetry:

and pray they [your words] be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both Bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.


The tomb of Lancelot Andrewes in Southwark Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

In ‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot draws deeply on the Catholic faith as set out by the Caroline Divines, particularly by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), who also influenced his Ariel poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1930). Andrewes was also one of the key translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

He echoes Lancelot Andrewes in his Christmas Sermon of 1618 – which Eliot constantly draws on in his work – in paradoxical lines that crystallise the significance of the Incarnation:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

… A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.


Set in mid-winter, which is like a ‘spring is its own season,’ when ‘the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,’ ‘Little Gidding’ speaks of this ‘dark time of the year,’ with its ‘windless cold,’ hedgerows that are white from snow rather than the May bloom.

But, while Eliot’s one and only visit to Little Gidding was in May 1936, the poem has hints of being set in these days shortly after Christmas:

‘Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice


It is possible too read back into these lines hints of the later London Blitz, for Eliot was an air raid warden when the most devastating strike his London on the evening of 29 December 1940. German aircraft attacked the City of London that night with incendiary and high explosive bombs, causing a firestorm that has been called the ‘Second Great Fire of London.’

‘... You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid’ – TS Eliot … the Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Little Gidding

Stepping through the devastation, Eliot imagines revisiting the chapel where Nicholas Ferrar and his community had lived and prayed in the past:

… You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.


The destruction of the Little Gidding Community 300 years earlier did not bring an end to either prayer or hope. Just as he is caught between two years, Eliot sees himself caught between war and peace, between devastation and the promise of new life, between two worlds, between two periods of time, but with the promise of renewal and transfiguration:

… History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.


Despite the destruction all around him, Eliot is reassured by the words of Julian of Norwich:

All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.


He links the end of the year, with the end of Christ’s life on the Cross, imagining ‘three men ... on the scaffold.’

In ‘Little Gidding’, Eliot emphasises, time and again, time and our place within it. He focuses on the unity of the past, the present, and the future, and sees how the eternal is found in the present and how history exists in a pattern.

He concludes that in sacrifice an individual may die into new life. But out of the frost and fire come life, the fire of destruction and the rose of perfection are united, and the rose of the soul can blossom, for then ‘the fire and the rose are one.’

Remembering Little Gidding

‘And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire /And the fire and the rose are one’ … a candle and a rose on a dinner table in Minares restaurant on Vernardou Street in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Eliot was buried in East Coker, but in 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, he was commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey with the installation in the floor of a large stone inscribed with words from ‘Little Gidding’:

... the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living.


The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding was founded in 1946 by Alan Maycock, with TS Eliot as one of the members, to celebrate the life of Nicholas Ferrar and his community in Little Gidding, to help maintain the church there, and to arrange pilgrimages, visits and hospitality.

A trust was founded in the 1970s to buy the farmhouse for a new community and as a place of retreat. This community became the Society of Christ the Sower, but was dissolved in 1998. The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding was re-established in 2003. Ferrar House is owned by the Little Gidding Trust, while the church is the responsibility of the Parochial Church Council. The friends also work closely with the TS Eliot Society.

Little Gidding V, by TS Eliot

‘And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire /And the fire and the rose are one’ ... sunset on the beach at Paltanias in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

‘… all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well’ … sunset in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

USPG Prayer Diary:

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week is the USPG Christmas Appeal: Journey to Freedom. The Journey to Freedom campaign supports the anti-human trafficking programme of the Diocese of Durgapur in North India.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Let us give thanks for the ‘Anti-Human Trafficking’ programme run by the Diocese of Durgapur. May we give generously to the Journey to Freedom campaign and make a difference.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

‘Through the unknown, unremembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning’ (TS Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’) … there is only one, unnumbered house on Cavafy Street in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘May it be your will, Lord our God … to
renew for us a happy and sweet year’


Patrick Comerford

We are coming to the end of another year, and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve (31 December 2022).

Hanukkah and Christmas overlap every few years, but the confluence of the two holidays this year was indeed unusual. Hanukkah this year began on 18 December and ended last Monday, 26 December.

It has been an unusual year for me, with a mixture of sorrows and happiness, difficulties and challenges, health scares and the joys of love, changes in home and ministry, the end of some old certainties and setting out in new directions.

On this Friday evening, in my prayers and reflections, I am thinking about some Jewish customs associated with the Jewish New Year.

Of course, the Jewish New Year or Rosh haShanah falls earlier in the year, in autumn: this year, Rosh haShanah fell three months, beginning on the evening of 25 September and ending on the evening of 27 September. But the customs associated with Rosh haShanah are worth contemplating as we come to the end of one year and prepare for the beginning of another.

Customs vary from community to community, but there is a shared Jewish custom at Rosh haShanah of eating traditional foods such as apples and honey at the start of a New Year. This involves eating apples dipped in honey as a sign of a ‘sweet New Year.’ Other traditions include eating carrots, leeks, beets, dates, gourds, pomegranates, fish, or even the head of a sheep. Each custom has its own symbolism and associated prayer.

In Judaism, the beginning of something contains within it the potential of the whole, and what we experience on the first day of the year is a token of the days to come. Tasting the sweetness of the apple and the honey, prayers are said for the rest of the year too, that it will bring sweetness.

‘May it be your will, Lord our God … to renew for us a happy and sweet year’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Commentators note that the prayers on Rosh haShanah speak of exalted things: God’s sovereignty over the universe, and his judgment of our lives. As the former Chief Rabbi, the late Lord (Jonathan) Sacks wrote, ‘We do not pray for material blessings; rather, we do so, obliquely and gently, at the table while eating symbolic food. The custom mitigates the severity of the day and serves as a reminder that all we enjoy comes to us from God.’

Another custom associated with the Jewish New Year is Tashlich or ‘the casting.’ It is a custom to go to the shore of the sea, the bank of a river, or other running stream of water, as a symbolic enactment of the words of the Prophet Micah: ‘He will cast (tashlich) into the depths of the sea all their sins’ (Micah 7: 19).

A variety explanations has been given for this tradition. But the first mention of this custom is in the early 15th century in the Sefer Maharil of Rabbi Jacob Moellin, who died in 1425.

Water is a symbol in Jewish tradition of the knowledge that leads to virtue and peace: ‘They will neither harm nor destroy on all My holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isaiah 11: 9).

Rivers are a symbol of tears (Avot de-Rabbi Nathan 31) and so a sign of repentance and remorse: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept as we remembered Zion’ (Psalm 137: 1). Flowing water is also a symbol of time, mortality and the shortness of life: ‘One generation goes, another comes ... All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full’. A consciousness of mortality is a fundamental theme of Rosh haShanah, the Jewish New Year (‘Write us in the Book of Life’).

Some Jewish families and communities have the custom of shaking the hems of their clothing, in accordance with Nehemiah 5: 13, ‘Also I shook out my lap, and said: So may God shake out …’ (Machzor Oholei Yaakov).

Kiddush on the evening of Rosh Hashanah includes the prayers:

‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who created the fruit of the vine …’

‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this time …’

‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who created the fruit of the tree …’

‘May it be your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors, to renew for us a happy and sweet year …’

Shabbat Sahlom

Happy New Year


Hanukkah and Christmas came close this year … a rare occurrence (Graphic Design: Rosanna Kuruppu)