A weekend in Venice
For the last 10 days, there’s been little opportunity to explore the city of Rome. The scheduled activities of the day begin at 8:45 with Morning Prayer (although my days often begin at 5:30-6:00 with a trip down to the seminary gym. While I expected to be the only one there at that hour, I was pleasantly surprised; there are often 4-6 seminarians working out at that hour, as well as 1-2 of those on the Institute for Continuing Theological Education with me.) and classes haven’t concluded until 6PM most evenings. Needless to say, walking the streets of Rome after a lengthy day wasn’t on the agenda – although we would occasionally go out for a short gelato walk!
This week (the week of September 27th) we’ve been spending long days listening to Msgr. James Moroney talk to us about up-and-coming changes in the Mass. Back in 2000 Rome promulgated (published) a new Roman Missal … which is the prayer book we use at Mass. The thing is, the book was promulgated in Latin and needed to be translated into English before we can use it at Mass. Well, they’ve just recently finished the translation and are in the process of getting ready for its use in the United States in December of 2011.
Will there be changes to the Mass. Absolutely! Most of the changes, though, will be specific to the celebrant … although there will be some changes to the people’s parts. But rather than going into detail about the changes in this blog, rest assured that we’ll be having Liturgy Lessons at OLG sometime after the new year … to discuss some of the up-and-coming changes; we’ll also talk about why some of the changes are good and important to make. We’ll also have numerous bulletin inserts explaining the changes as well.
To help ‘wind down’ from one constant week of class, and to prepare for another non-stop week of classes, nine of us opted to spend the weekend in Venice. We hopped an express train to Venice after class on Friday 9/24 and stayed there until late Sunday afternoon. We were quite concerned when we saw the weather forecast on Friday morning; it called for an: 80% chance of rain on Saturday and a 70% chance of rain on Sunday. BUT, as you’ll be able to tell from the pictures in the video the forecasters in Italy are about as “on target” as the forecasters are in Northeast Ohio! The weekend was stellar! The nine of us constantly broke up into different groups, so in addition to some great sight-seeing, we also got to spend time getting to know each other a little better – and shared lots of stories about our experiences of priesthood.
The short break between lunch and afternoon class is nearly over, so I’ll “check out” now. As long as you have a good connection to the internet, make sure to view the video in HQ (high quality); it’ll look a lot better!
Oh, and if you can’t make out the words on the brick, they say: “Something strange happened here” (And, yes, that statement predated our visit to Venice!)