Dob-log

Psalm Tones for Night Prayer: Psalm 90(91) - Tone VIII G & G*

2012-01-31T20:50:00.001Z

So, back on track with a psalm tone which is recommended for all the Sunday psalms (Sunday I and II can be recited on any day) as well as Tuesday and the second Psalm on Wednesday.

(N.B. According to the 1968 Enchiridion of Indulgences hosted at ourladyswarriors, the second Psalm on Wednesday - De Profundis - has an indulgence attached. If you learnt the tone it might help you to remember and recite the words. Another indulgenced psalm is the Miserere, for which the suggested psalm tone is VII, but it'll be a while before I get to that one.)

That's convenient, but also perhaps a bit boring, so I'm going to do two versions of the tone this time. I see that there are three alternative terminations, but two of them are very similar indeed. I'll do those two now and come back to look at the third termination another time. This time lets look at the tone first:

You can see for yourself that the mediant and the terminations are based on a single stress, and in both of our terminations there are two preparatory syllables. So here's the text:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most Hígh*
and abides in the shade of the Almíghty
says to the Lord: "My réfuge,*
my stronghold, my God in whom I trúst!"
[..]
Upon you no evil shall fáll,*
no plague approach where you dwéll.
For you has he commanded his ángels,*
to keep you in all your wáys.

They shall bear you upon their hánds*
lest you strike your foot against a stóne.
On the lion and the viper you will tréad*
and trample the young lion and the drágon.

It so happens that there's no flex written for Psalm 90(91), so I put one from another psalm in at the end. From Psalm 142(143) for Tuesday:

I muse on what your hand has wróught†
and to you I stretch out my hánds.*
Like a parched land my soul thirsts for yóu.

MP3 here.

Now, if you look again at the terminations:

...you'll see that only the final neume is different; instead of a one-note neume, it's two notes, returning to the note of the stress. You can hear the difference here. I think it sounds somewhat more monkish. Anyway, it gives you another option.

I think by now I shouldn't need to go into detail about the mechanics of it anymore. If I'm wrong and you'd prefer me to explain something, let me know in the comments. In the meantime, I can finally get on with learning the next one for Wednesday and Thursday!

Plutocracy

2011-12-21T13:00:00.001Z

I don't have a Word of the Day or Thought for the Day feature. Never mind.

Word of the Day
plutocracy - Government by wealth or by the wealthy. Also, a State governed in this way.

Thought for the Day
I wonder why people aren’t using the word "plutocracy" more, in the current economic/political climate.

11/11/11

2011-11-12T02:58:00.001Z

So, yesterday was November 11. On Facebook I read noble status updates about Remembrance Day (the timing's a bit different here, so nothing doing on that front.

Meanwhile, in our office, the weakest premise for a cake that I can recall has been adopted. At 11:11, the call goes out:

These ~~Romans~~ Italians are crazy! I shouldn't complain; there was even spumante. I note that they sought to render it a less arbitrary cake with a reference to the feast of St. Martin of Tours. You're fooling no-one!

Those things under CHE are meant to be maroni:

Che (due) maroni! - What (a pair of) chestnuts! - What (a pair of) balls! - What a pain in the arse!

Funny thing language...

Psalm Tones: Psalm 143(144) - Tone VI

2011-10-11T21:14:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

You may already know that there are two different ways of numbering the psalms, one based on the Septuagint and one on the Masoretic text. Eastern Orthodox translations use the numbering of the Septuagint (Greek), Protestants the Masoretic (Hebrew) and Catholics tend to put both numbers.

Why do I mention this? Because this little factoid has confounded my modest plans. I assumed that the Lutheran Liturgical Prayer Brotherhood's Psalm Tone Distribution Table would use the Septuagint numbering system. Why? Mostly absent-mindedness I think, but also because I think all the links I've seen about how Martin Luther believed a heap of things that only Catholics (and the Orthodox I guess) are supposed to believe put the notion that Lutherans are probably pretty trad in my head. Plus, a "Lutheran Liturgical Prayer Brotherhood" who sing using the traditional psalm tones? Sounds pretty tradder-than-thou to me - it'll be like High Anglicanism right? Silly me.

So I learnt the words for Psalm 90 (91) by heart (a Psalm for Sunday Night Prayer, which means you can also sing it any day of the week, you see) but with the "wrong" tone. It's not the end of the world; it seems to work okay, and I'm pleased, with my rubbish memory, to have committed some scripture to memory, but this Prayer Brotherhood probably had a good reason for choosing their tones, so I was planning on following their suggestions.

Anyway, this tone isn't listed for any of the psalms in Compline. So I just picked a psalm I liked that it is listed for:

Blessed be the Lord, my róck†
who trains my árms for báttle,*
who prepares my hands for wár.
[...]
Reach down from heaven and sáve me;†
draw me out from the míghty wáters,*
from the hands of alien fóes
whose mouths are fílled with líes,*
whose hands are raised in pérjury.

To you, O God, will I síng a new sóng;*
I will play on the ten-stringed hárp
to you who give kíngs their víctory,*
who set David your servant frée.

I've just taken some select verses, making sure to leave in a couple of flexes (joined lines) and dactyls (it means "finger" and is a metrical foot - scansion, you couldn't make it up!) to keep it interesting. I cheated and only copied the stresses which are relevant for this tone; in any case, like last time, I suggest you read it through, stressing the stresses, aloud or in your head.

Now here's the notation for the tone:

(This might be a good point to look back at the last instalment, since I'm going to use the same terminology that I did there.)

There are two differences from the last tone that I should mention. First is the termination; in tone III there's one preparatory syllable before the final stress, here, there are two. So in the third line you sing the tenor until you drop down on "hands" and sing "for" on two ascending notes (that's what the two-note neume there means) before you sing the stressed "war". So in addition to reading through the text for the stresses, you'd be well advised to look for the two preparatory syllables in the lines that contain the termination (without a † or * at the end). The second is a reminder that the intonation is usually sung only on the first line; "Reach down from heaven" should all be on the tenor for example.

I deliberately didn't mention something last time, but I'll mention it now. There's a little problem with these tones; they were written for use with Latin, and English (you will have noticed) isn't Latin, so essentially they don't quite work. But the good news is that it doesn't really matter - just fudge it! Apparently there are lots of competing methods for adapting these tones for use with English, but there's no official way and there never will be, so just do what works for you.

My version is here. If I didn't have a 9 month old daughter I would probably record a few takes until it sounded better. Meh.

Take the first line, for example. Finishes on a stressed syllable. Very common in English but very rare in Latin; that's why whoever wrote the psalm tone assumed that there would be another syllable (perhaps even two) after the stress of the flex (first on the left). What I do is pretend that the lower note is the stressed syllable. Sounds fine to me, whereas the other possibility of singing the stressed syllable on two notes sounds a bit iffy so far as I'm concerned.
For "lies" and "song" (mediant), I think it sounds better to just sing the note of the stress and forget about returning to the tenor (reciting) note until the next line
Similarly, there should be a syllable after "war" for the termination at the end of the third line. Here, I nonchalantly sing it on two notes; same with "foes", "harp" and "free".

Fratelli d'Italia pt. 6

2011-10-06T21:21:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Hmm. Been a while.

Wot, no beer? - Everyone knows that Italians know about food and wine, what I don't understand is the blind spot when it comes to beer. Obviously they find wine much more appealing, but I can't get my head round the fact that they have no interesting beer on their supermarket shelves. Obviously they don't have to be as interested in beer as we are, but it seems odd that they're not more bothered about it when they can be so anal about other comestibles.

White Bread and Sandwiches - Again, this is odd because it doesn't seem to tally with the tendencies of the Italians themselves. In addition to being more bothered about food than we are, Italians seem to be more interested in their health too. Now, we all know that sensible grown-ups eat brown bread because its better for you, and young whippersnappers are the ones who will only eat white bread and even have special hybrid bread made for them to tempt them away from the white variety. But if you go into an Italian bakery, you'll see heaps of white bread, and if you're lucky you'll manage to make out some brown stuff in the corner. Monica tells me that it's something to do with the fact that brown bread has historical associations with poverty (a phenomenon that was widespread much more recently in Italy); that's fair enough, but talk about old habits dying hard!

Then there's sandwiches. Monica doesn't like English bread; it doesn't meet her expectations, which is easy to understand if you buy normal bread in Italy, it's much more hard, so English bread seems, well, half-baked, which apparently is bad for the digestion or something (made of flimsy stuff these foreigners, eh?). Well that's fine by me; different strokes for different folks and all that. What confuses me is that when you get a tramezzino (sandwich) it always comes in this ridicuolous plasticy white bread without crusts which seems to me to be the epitome of poor quality.

Bidets vs. Shit Toilets - In Italy, everyone has a bidet. That's just how it is. The Italian abroad is generally in want of a bottom-cleaning device and surprised (possibly somewhat disgusted) to see the rest of the world getting on without them. However, while this area of fundamental hygiene seems so important to them, their spotless domestic bidets stand in stark contrast to their wretched and rare public toilets. Woe betide the hapless wayfarer who dares to do their business out of doors. You usually have to pay, they're sometimes of the hole-in-floor variety (the country that gave us aqueducts now wants us to wee on our shoes?), there's never any bloody soap, an electric hand dryer is a rarity and the paper towels have usually run out; then of course they're mucky and full of graffiti. Hold it in, that's my advice.

Ridiculous Names - I've noticed that Italians seem to have a disproportionate number of outlandish surnames. Some examples: we bought our clothes rack from the Bastardi (yes, bastards, obviously) round the corner, the rt. hon. Bocchino (blowjob) is a well-known politician and another Bocchino earned Italy 8 points in the Rugby World Cup with conversions this year, I've seen reports on channel 7 by a Chiappaventi ((arse) cheek-winds) and an "and finally" story about people who go by the unlikely name of Mastronzo ("stronzo" literally means "turd", but Italians use it in much the same way as we use arsehole, of a person, only it's ruder).

Psalm Tones for Night Prayer: Nunc Dimittis - Tone III

2011-07-05T06:16:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

While Monica was pregnant, I was thinking a bit about my prayer life, and how I could make it easier to pray with my daughter (and indeed my wife) when she came onto the scene. I thought of Compline; I like the liturgy of the hours but don't often manage to pray it and the fact that, ideally, it's a sung liturgy should be helpful, I thought.

'The sung celebration of the Divine Office is the form which best accords with the nature of this prayer. It expresses its solemnity in a fuller way and expresses a deeper union of hearts in performing the praises of God'

- Instruction Musicam sacram

[M]any of the parts, especially the psalms, canticles, hymns and responsories, are of a lyrical nature and are given their full expression only when sung.

Singing in the Liturgy of the Hours is not to be regarded as something merely ornamental or extrinsic to prayer. It springs from the depths of the person praying and praising God[.]

Jewish and Christian Tradition confirms that the psalms are closely connected with music. To understand many of the psalms fully it helps a great deal to sing them or at least to regard them from a poetic and musical point of view.

- Introduction to Morning and Evening Prayer, Anthony B. Boylan, Secretary Liturgy Commission, Bishops' Conference of England and Wales

So I did a bit of googling. I think I already vaguely knew that there were traditional psalm tones, so I tried to find some references I could use and did, but I think I'll have to be more systematic to learn them and be able to use them by heart. So, rather optimistically, this should be the start of a new series to teach other people (with the aid of specific mp3s because not everyone, myself included, can read music, let alone chant notation) the 8 + 1 traditional psalm tones, starting with the only one that I have managed to learn by heart so far.

I'm going to try and explain the principles but don't let that put you off. This is harder to write and about and read than it is to do; it's actually based on natural speech, so if you can talk, you should be up to the challenge, despite any offputting terminology you may encounter. Also, this blog entry might be quite long, but if you persevere with this one, all the other ones should be quite simple. I suggest that, if at any point, it sounds too complicated, listen to the MP3 I made rather than struggling with text on a screen.

As I say, it's based on speech; if, like me, you ever wondered why the text of the office is marked the way it is, you'll soon see why. The starting point is the text. I'm starting with the Nunc Dimittis for the good reason that it's a text to be sung at every Compline, so if you learn a tone for that, you have something you can sing for the Office every day:

At last, all-powerful Máster,†
you give léave to your sérvant*
to go in peace, according to your prómise.

For my eyes have séen your salvátion*
which you have prepared for all nátions,
the light to enlíghten the Géntiles*
and give glory to Israel, your péople.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Hóly Spírit,*
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without énd.
Amen.

The psalm tones are divided (essentially) into two halves. The asterisk that usually comes at the end of every other line marks the point at the end of the first half. The dagger, on the other hand, joins two lines, indicating that they should be treated as one. There's a little more to it than that, but more on that later. Anyway, here you can see that by joining the first two lines together, it makes a stanza of three lines into a stanza of two lines (tone in two halves). So that's the basic structure.

You remember I said that these chants were based on speech? That explain the accents. Perhaps you didn't notice them at a glance, but they're there, over some select vowels. Before tackling a psalm, you need to think about how you would say it. If you read the text above (aloud or in your head), you should see that the accents correspond to natural speech stresses. Try reading it through a couple of times, over-emphasising the stresses; obviously you wouldn't normally need to do this - it comes naturally - but to sing these tones, especially using texts that you haven't sung before, you need to be particularly aware of where the stresses fall. I put the accents into the text of the Nunc Dimittis myself since, in my copy of the Office, they're only marked on the psalms proper.

Now, we need a tone. This would be a good point at which to give a hat tip to chantblog; I basically found all the resources I wanted through that site. The author already did the same thing that I'm doing in this series, but I hope to make my one slightly more accessible. Through that site I found the Lutheran Liturgical Prayer Brotherhood's Psalm Tone Distribution Table, which takes all the effort out of selecting an appropriate tone. They say tone number 3. Fine by me. I'm going to show you (one version of) what it looks like on paper, but if at any point you think it's all getting too abstract, try listening to the MP3 first:

I cut out some detail which is unnecessary for our purposes, and I don't think you should worry about the dotted lines and empty neumes (thats what the little blocks are called) for now. Even if you've never attempted to read music before and this is all Greek to you, you can get an idea of the structure by looking at the symbols. Below the stave are the dagger and the asterisk we saw before; like I said, the asterisk marks the end of the first half. The dagger marks a point where two lines are joined together to form one line, but you can ignore it if there's no dagger in the text; it would be as if all the notes in that section were on the same line. The bit at the top right is the end of the tone (termination). It's not intentionally separate. If I had a bit more spare time I would have joined it to the rest of the tone.

I left in a little terminology, because it's related to the structure. A practical guide to the meaning of it would be as follows:

Int(onation) - Beginning
Tenor and Flex [†] - Singing on the same note (with the exception of [†] where applicable)
Mediant - Middle
[*]
Tenor - Singing on the same note
Termination (not written) - End

You start off by singing the intonation; the first syllable on the first neume, the second syllable on the two (ascending) notes of the second neume. Then you can look at the accents above the stave; the accents are your cues:

At last, all-powerful Máster,†
you give léave to your sérvant*
to go in peace, according to your prómise.

The first accent that you see is for the flex (Ma-ster). If there's no dagger, there's no flex. In fact, if you want to make life really simple, you could just leave it out anyway and sing one long line without having to think in the middle of it.

The first syllable of 'Mas-ter' is the same note as the tenor note, then you drop down for '-ter' and return to the tenor ('tenor' comes from the Latin tenere, to hold - it's a note that you hold on to) until you head up on 'leave' then down again until you head down on the 'ser-' (it's two notes on the same syllable) of 'servant' then back to the tenor note for '-vant'.

Slightly more trickly is the termination, after singing the second tenor part; that's the unmarked part at the top right. Here you need to drop down on the syllable before the accent then return on the accent before descending (again, two notes on the same syllable) - "your pró mi-se".

And that's it bascially; you sing it like that, repeating the two-line pattern of the tone over the text, following the accents until you come to the end.

MP3

Here's another version of the tone. It lacks some of the detail of the other version but, being more essential, I find it's easier to read.

Last time I deleted the various choices of termination leaving just one of the simplest ones (a). For most of the tones there are a few alternatives, of varying complexity.

I should also say that, usually, you only consider the intonation at the start of the tone and begin the 3rd, 5th, 7th etc. lines by jumping straight to the tenor, which makes life a little easier. However, the gospel canticles, including the Nunc Dimittis, should apparently be sung repeating the intonation.

Hopefully that should be all that you need to enter the world of Gregorian chant for the Office! Please let me know if you have any questions or it's otherwise unclear. I'll do my best to make it intelligible.

Internet's back (sort of)

2011-07-01T17:13:00.004+01:00

Back in May of 2009 I made a query on Wolfram|Alpha. They didn't have any info. I asked them to let me know when they did:

We have received your feedback regarding Wolfram|Alpha.

The information you were looking for is now available on our website. See:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=catholicism

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you for helping us improve Wolfram|Alpha.

Best wishes,

Lindsay
The Wolfram|Alpha Team
www.wolframalpha.com

As I believe they sometimes say in North America - neat.

P.S. In W|A, typing two things should give you a comparison - "christianity islam", for example.

Design

2011-05-14T06:50:00.001+01:00

Image via CrunchBaseOnce upon a time, when this blog was called An Anecdote Free Zone and I had a student's free time, it was hand-coded. Then one day Blogger introduced a template designer. I wanted to try it out and ended up losing my blog design, so I bodged together the one that's been doing the business for the past few years, trying my best to recover the little tweaks (personalised blog entry styles and images, not that you'd know) that I had invested modest quantities of time in.

I've finally become fed up enough with the stupid column width of this site (and why, I wonder, do Blogger think that we want about a third of the page with no content exactly?) to do the same thing all over again.

Just so you know.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.

2011-05-13T17:54:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaSometimes it can be easy to get a particular idea in your head about passages of scripture, making it less easy to look at them in another way. As a convert, this is one of those passages:

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, «How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?» Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever." These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. (Jn 6:52-59)

Copyright © Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, USCCB

It's easy to think of it as a "proof text" for the real presence, just as Matthew 16 is a "proof text" about the papacy. So I appreciated dailygospel's meditation for today by Pope Benedict, which helps to render it more devotional, and less controversial:

In the Gospel discourse that we have just heard he says, "He who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him". How is it possible not to rejoice in such a promise? However, we have heard that at his first announcement, instead of rejoicing, the people started to murmur in protest: "How can he give us his flesh to eat?".

To tell the truth, that attitude has frequently been repeated in the course of history. One might say that basically people do not want to have God so close, to be so easily within reach or to share so deeply in the events of their daily life. Rather, people want him to be great and, in brief, we also often want him to be a little distant from us. Questions are then raised that are intended to show that, after all, such closeness would be impossible. But the words that Christ spoke on that occasion have lost none of their clarity: "Let me solemnly assure you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you".

Pope Benedict XVI, Homily for the Italian Eucharistic Congress, 29/05/05 (© Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

Fratelli d'Italia pt. 5

2011-04-29T16:24:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaDriving and the death wish - I wonder what I was going to write down about this, all those months ago? We're talking about obvious stereotypes here. All very banal - Italians drive like maniacs etc. etc. etc. Nonetheless, it intrigues me. My Dad reckons I'm exaggerating, and he knows a thing or two about driving, but I feel significantly safer on the roads in England. We don't have a car, but I think it would take me some time before I felt at all happy driving here. Probably the crux of it is this: quite a lot of people die on Italian roads. A good many lives are wasted, and the fact that even I know this suggests that it's adequately reported. So why doesn't this translate into more cautious driving? Is it that they think they're invincible, or is it that they don't mind dying so much as we do?
Child safety - Very closely related is the following. I came across this (Italian) article through work. Once more unto the sterotype breach - Italians love children (there, that wasn't so bad was it?) but the article claims that "63% of Italians don't use child seats", based on 7 cities studied, "thus showing little love for their own children". The best city was Mestre, with a paltry 53% of children properly strapped in, a veritable safety paradise compared to Naples - 17%. A list of lame excuses follows: "it's only round the corner"; "the child seat's in the other car"; "it's fine - he's sat on the back seat anyway"; "he cries if I put him in the child seat", "I prefer the seat belt". It says that there's a tendency to use child safety devices in the first months, because it's more convenient, then they tend to get forgotten about. The disconnect between the depth of feeling on one hand and the actual care taken over children is, it would seem, incredibly profound.
School Textbooks - They have a different system for school textbooks over here. I guess that doesn't sound particularly earth-shattering, but in fact, it means that school textbooks are pretty much an annual news story, because the system is this: you buy them. Good news for the publishing industry, which can release a stream of different shiny new textbooks every year, bad news for parents, who have to fork out. It's a bit like for us at university, when you find, just by chance, that the course textbooks are written by your lecturer. The thing that I find strange is that they've been complaining about the system for years, but they haven't got round to doing anything about it. What naturally comes to mind is that they could copy us, and say that it's the school's responsibillity to pay for textbooks. Then we'll see if publishers can talk schools into buying a new textbook every year! I remember using a lot of dog-eared school textbooks, but somehow I still managed to get educated. In fact, I often wonder in general why governments don't copy more legislation off each other. Don't Sweden do renewable energy better than us for example? Can't we just copy some ideas off them then? I suppose politicians prefer to look original (apart from the Tories nicking the free schools idea).
Interrogation - I’m not sure what I should call this one really. In Italian it’s interrogazione, and it might not be so bad as it sounds, but it’s still pretty bad. I learnt about it when I was helping an Italian relation (my wife’s cousin’s daughter – you can’t get any closer than that) and some of her peers with their English for school. Apparently, every year, or term or something, as a test, every pupil has to stand at the front of the class and get quizzed on whatever it is that Italian schoolchildren are supposed to know. Horrible! I’m glad I didn’t go to school in Italy! I wonder what the idea is; it probably does have some positive aspects in fairness. Monica said that she observed that the English were hopeless at giving presentations at university, but I think that particular problem probably goes deeper. Anyway, the idea makes my skin crawl.

The Alternative Vote

2011-04-20T12:07:00.001+01:00

Apparently Mr. Darcy wants us to vote yes to the Alternative Vote. I'm with the Firth on this one; I'll be disappointed if there isn't a yes vote and I'll tell you why.

I don't see it as "a step in the right direction", if by that we mean a step towards proportional representation. I'm not sure I'm convinced by that idea. Strong government and a local connection to Westminster are two important things.

On the other hand...

Something needs to change. We've been locked into a left-wing/right-wing slanging match for about a century, and it's doing us no good. I'm definitely left-leaning, but the labour government has frequently made my blood boil; it represents many of my interests, but doesn't give a flying fox about many others. I was so fed up that I even toyed with the idea of voting c*nservative. If Mark Dobson feels an inclination to vote conservative, there's definitely something amiss with the voting system.

I understand that some people view the yes vote as an anti-political vote. That's nonsense. It is anti-status quo however, and that's a good thing. As it is, both the labour and conservative party have an arrogant, intransigent attitude which is holding the country back. Part of the reason that we have a con-dem coalition is because of the labour party's refusal to work with the liberal democrats. The labour party have probably won out thanks to that (who wants to be in power at a time like this?), but the country hasn't.

I wouldn't expect to see drastic, immediate changes if the AV system was adopted, but I think it would open up a significant political space to smaller parties which do deserve greater representation because of the support that they have at a national level. This might develop in time into a significant number of seats, and perhaps further coalition governments. I think it's a mistake to write off coalition because of the present shambles; it is a conservative majority after all. In a mature democracy, cooperation and consensus should not only be enabled, but encouraged.

With AV, one of the classic excuses for voter apathy (my vote won't count) is mitigated. Voter apathy is something we should do something about. Tactical voting is another; we should be able to express out voting preferences based on what we want, not what might happen in our constituency. I heard a senior labour politician saying that he opposed AV on the basis that in a democracy, people should have one vote. This sounds sensible, but it only makes sense with a direct voting system e.g. if we voted for party (not members of parliament) or prime minister. As it is, democracy is distorted by tactical voting, and AV is a positive way of compensating for this.

As for the people who say that voting would be too complicated, I don't think I'll lose any sleep over the votes of people who can't state a few preferences in numerical order.

Michael White of the Guardian has the impression that people will be using the referendum to punish politicians, depending on whether they like Cameron or Clegg the least (a tricky choice). Anyway, don't do that – vote for a small, but significant break from the status quo.

Fratelli d'Italia - A Constitutional Interlude

2011-04-13T22:00:00.201+01:00

Image via WikipediaI almost have another instalment ready, but first I wanted to do this post, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Zosia seemed to think that this was just a series in which I criticise Italy (until what, they stop?) and I wanted to look at something more positive. Secondly, it so happens that something constitutional has been in the news recently.

Edit: The Guardian just provided me with this amazing graph of Italian public spending. They forgot to put in a figure for the money that goes to the various mafias, but it's still pretty good.

Perhaps if we start with the sensational news story. Here's an article from near the end of the Italian constitution:

TRANSITORY AND FINAL PROVISIONS
XII.
The reorganisation, in any form, of the dissolved fascist party is forbidden.

Not, you might think, a bad idea. The Italian constitution was drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War. They needed one, because, like a lot of European countries, they decided that monarchy wasn't really doing it for them. In Italy, the monarchy bore some of the blame for Mussolini's rise to power, which didn't help.

Well, if you want to constitute a republic, as a majority of Italians voting in a referendum apparently did, you'll find that a constitution comes in handy. Naturally, in light of recent events, the constitution contained elements intended to make sure that fascism, or something similar, never happened again. This makes it puzzling to me that Berlusconi gets away with such a flagrant conflict of interest in his combination of political office and media network ownership and control; it seems they left out some sorely needed safeguards against propaganda which might have created a less problematic relationship between the state and the media.

Anyway.

The news story is this. A group in the senate (like the house of lords, but I'd hope that was obvious) mostly made up of senators from Berlusconi's PdL (if I haven't got my wires crossed) put forward a motion to remove the above article from the constitution! Apparently the time has come to rethink the ban on the PNF. Really, it's amazing the things you can get away with as a politician in Italy. Political suicide in every other country I should think. Just think what it says about Catholics too; perhaps we'll see a fascist party back in Italy before we see the Act of Settlement repealed. There'll be no need to become an albino monk to give people the willies if that happens. How do you say "We're more scary than fascists" in Latin? It might come in handy.

So, moving on (but returning to complain about Berlusconi a bit later on), Italy has this constitution. I come from a kingdom, painstakingly constituted through centuries of history, not on paper, so it's an intriguing concept for me, and it's part of my wife's national identity and a future part of my daughter's national identity. I wanted to have a look. My father-in-law Carlo also wanted to have a look, because he went to a talk for the recent 150th anniversary of Italian unity which presented the Italian constitution as something to take pride in (national pride is not to be taken for granted in Italy). Coop produced a little booklet containing the complete text of the constitution and some archive photos and historical notes for €1, so I picked up one for me and one for Carlo.

To me, it seems pretty good. Maybe if we get round to ditching the monarchy we could nick some bits from it. One of the things which I found interesting is that it defines the responsibilities of the state, and this is where that man comes in; a common, and obvious, complaint about Berlusconi is that he only cares about saving his own skin – laws ad personam, they say here. This is exemplified by the (repellent) approval of the processo breve by the chamber of deputies (like the commons). He's decided that legal processes take too long apparently, and the best thing to do would be to set a time limit and cancel any cases that are dragging on a bit. It so happens that this means that he won't stand trial for a particularly tricky case of his - who cares if a heap of people are denied justice and the innocent are not absolved? But the Italian constitution actually indicates the responsibilities of the state, which makes his failure/refusal to deal with the real problems of Italy a constitutional matter.

Fundamental principles

Art. 1
Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on work.

Art. 4
The Republic recognises the right to work of all citizens and promotes the conditions which render this right effective.

This is probably the most common form of (political) complaint about Berlusconi and his government. He doesn't seem particularly interested in people who are losing their jobs. For a long time, the position of the Italian government on the international financial crisis is that it didn't affect Italy. B*llocks, obviously. I couldn't tell you the ins an outs of it, and Italy has probably been significantly less directly affected by the crisis than the UK, but people have lost and will lose jobs because of it. There's not much effective right to work for women either; obviously there's equal right legislation, but what does legislation mean? When Monica was looking for work, we knew that it was illegal to for them to ask personal questions about marital status and number of children, but they did at every single interview, to sift out women who might inconveniently excercise their right to bear children.

Edit: In the Guardian's graph, lavoro (work) is the little purple box just next to the very bottom right.

Art. 3
[...] It is the task of the Republic to remove obstacles of an economic and social nature which, effectively limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the Country.

RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS

TITOLO III
ECONOMIC RELATIONS

Art. 35.

The Republic safeguards work in all its forms and applications.
It attends to the the training and professional advancement of workers.

Here I might again note the long-term problem of precarietà (unstable work situations, especially among the young), and how this 'effectively limits the equality of citizens' and 'prevents full development'. I haven't noticed the Republic paying a lot of attention to that recently.

Edit: In the Guardian's graph, formazione (training) is the little (olive?) green box at the bottom right.

Fundamental principles

Art. 9
The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research.

Mmm. Culture. Well, I'm hazy on the details, but I recall that there was a big hoo-ha about the government's neglect of Pompei. I also proofread an article recently that said that only one of the many artistic residences available in Italy, only one was open to Italians; a sort of charitable concession by an American institution I can't remember the name of. Then, as for research, well... in addition to the governments much-contested (futile) cuts to the education system, a long-term problem here goes by the name of la fuga dei cervelli (the flight of the brains. An Italian rapper (Caparezza) recently released quite a good song about it, featuring Tony Hadley, of all people. Italians who make it through the university system don't find a research infrastructure that can take them. Italians are doing important research around the world; unfortunately not so much of it is done in Italy. The Republic is effectively exporting its talent through neglect, and losing out in the process.

Edit: In the Guardian's graph, cultura (culture) is the yellow box towards the bottom right and ricerca (research) is the higher of two little blue boxes at the bottom right.

RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS

TITOLO II
SOCIO-ETHICAL RELATIONS

Art. 31.
The Republic facilitates the formation of the family with economic measures and other provisions [...].

I think that it's worth mentioning precarietà again here. How is a young person expected to start a family when his job could simply disappear in a year? This is at least part of the reason why Italians marry so late and have so few children, a demographic issue which creates not a few problems.
Interesting again is how little notice is taken of these obligations. To me it seems that using the constitution as a stick to beat Berlusconi with is an obvious course to take for the opposition, but it doesn't quite seem to register. It's not as though the subject never comes up (in fact, Bersani was quoting the constitution yesterday on the telly) but it doesn't seem to be a popular appeal. Perhaps it's because every Italian government has been failing to address these issues, so it doesn't seem too clever to single out the PdL.

Perhaps it's just that the constitution, so far, seems too good to be true.

Moving House!

2011-04-03T13:07:00.001+01:00

Hello,

Two in one day! You lucky people. Anyway, this is just a quick note to give some good news. As I had rather been hoping, a larger place in the same complex of apartments is becoming available. Our landlord knew we were looking (and we're wicked tenants, obviously) so he asked us if we'd be interested. We had a look, and apparently 7 extra square metres makes a hell of a difference, because it seemed pretty palatial to us! So we said yes.

We should be moving around the beginning of July. Not such good news for my parents coming over for Noemi's baptism in June... but there's an extra bedroom, room to swing a cat in the kitchen and it should be cooler in the summer. Woo ha!

Daily Gospel

2011-04-03T12:54:00.003+01:00

...or Vangelo del Giorno if you prefer. I like the liturgy. I like the fact that if you go to mass daily for three years, you will hear the vast majority of the bible (something like 80-90% apparently). So I've got that Universalis banner at the top of the blog and lachiesa.it's liturgy script in the sidebar. It'd be at the top if I could CSS it into a better format, but I fear that I can't.

Anyway, I wanted to plug Daily Gospel, because it's a well made site that does exactly what I wanted. I wanted to read the gospel for the mass of the day at work. It was the first site that came up when I typed "vangelo del giorno" into Google. You can subscribe by e-mail, and for working days only if you like (thumbs up). Not only do you get the gospel reading, you also get very good and relatively varied meditations, the kind of thing you can get something out of, but still feasily find a moment for. Recently, from the Byzantine and Eastern liturgies for the Great Lent , a prayer by Saint Ephrem the Syrian for example.

Not only that, but in addition to being able to visit the site directly, they provide an RSS feed and a customisable PHP script for integration into other websites. The latter looks to be simple enough for me to use, and I know almost nothing about PHP. Plus the mandatory mobile (standard, Android and iPhone) versions.

Well done Evangelizo.org.

Fratelli d'Italia pt. 4

2011-03-24T07:04:00.001Z

Image by marc e marc via FlickrI'm on a roll, and these ones shouldn't take me too long.

Banks - I often felt that in England, the banks were rather lacklustre in their customer service. I worked all week, and had the day off on Saturday. Why did they usually close early? So I wasn't too pleased to find that it's even worse here. They mostly seem to be open in the morning even on weekdays and I think some days they're just closed, like bars. Bloody skivers. One time I had a cheque to pay in, so I had to pop in before going to work; how rubbish is that? I seem to recall hearing that Italian bank charges are among the worst, if not the worst, in Europe. Service please.
Tobacconists - This one's not annoying, just intriguing. Where do you go to buy bus tickets? Why, the tobbaconist's of course. Silly me for not thinking of that.
Prices at bars - I was opining about this one at work the other day. You can never see the prices in Italian bars. They're legally required to display them I think, but basically they're usually "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'." What I don't get is why. Surely a bar with reasonable prices which advertised them better would get more customers. No?
Display of opening hours - It happens that since I made a note to write about this, I've seen a lot more opening hours, but still - quite a lot of the time you have to guess when shops/offices are going to open. For a native it's not too hard to guess, unless they're gratuitously unpredictable (and sometimes they are: mon-wed-fri in the morning and tue-thu in the afternoon with 2 hours on sat for special appointments, for example), but even then there's usually a margin of about an hour where you're not sure when you should go out. Is it too much like hard work to put a sign up?
Bus timetables - I'm a graduate. I find it hard to understand Italian bus timetables. They seem principally to be composed of a highly detailed grid of exceptions (not on holiday, mon-fri only, mon-sat only, only during term time, not from june-august). There's very little regularity, so every stop has an individual entry (not like the summary "every 1hr" kind of thing you get in Blighty), making the visual prospect quite daunting from the get go. They tend to be geared towards schoolchildren, so you have buses every 5 minutes in the morning and every once in a blue moon during the day. If you ask the little old ladies who populate Italian bus stops if they know what's going on, they'll tell you it's a mystery to them as well. No wonder everyone drives everywhere. I seem to remember that Thatcher woman justifying cuts in the public transport budget by suggesting that if you see a man on a bus over the age of 14, you're looking at a failure. Very Italian.

Feast of St. Joseph

2011-03-19T09:50:00.004Z

Image via Wikipedia

Today is the feast of St. Joseph, which means that it's Fathers' Day in Italy, so this is my first ever Fathers' Day - it's a nice feeling.

Luckily, none of the following will be expecting a card, but happy Fathers' Day to my Dad, my brother Adrian, who's also a new father, my brother-in-law Lorenzo, whose little girl turned 1 recently, my father-in-law Carlo, and me mate James, with his two wonderful little girls and a further wonderful child in the oven.

Unfortunately it's a day mixed with sadness in Offagna. A father of two little girls took his life tonight.

To you, O blessed Joseph,
do we come in our tribulation,
and having implored the help of your most holy spouse,
we confidently invoke your patronage also.
Through that charity which bound you
to the immaculate Virgin Mother of God
and through the paternal love
with which you embraced the Child Jesus,
we humbly beg you graciously to regard
the inheritance which Jesus Christ
has purchased by his Blood,
and with your power and strength
to aid us in our necessities.

O most watchful Guardian of the Holy Family,
defend the chosen children of Jesus Christ;
O most loving father,
ward off from us
every contagion of error and corrupting influence;
O our most mighty protector,
be propitious to us and from heaven assist us
in our struggle with the power of darkness;
and, as once you rescued the Child Jesus from deadly peril,
so now protect God’s Holy Church
from the snares of the enemy and from all adversity;
shield, too, each one of us by your constant protection,
so that, supported by your example and your aid,
we may be able to live piously, to die holily,
and to obtain eternal happiness in heaven. Amen.

(Ad te, beati Ioseph, an ancient prayer to St Joseph)

Fratelli d'Italia pt. 3 - 150 Year Anniversary Edition

2011-03-17T08:15:00.004Z

Image via WikipediaToday, as fate would have it, marks 150 years of Italian unity. Hurrah! A lot of Italians aren't sure it's worth celebrating, but most people will be enjoying the day off to think about it. Anyway, it's nice timing for resurrecting my series on Italian quirks:

Extravagant waste - This would be another thing to do with Striscia. It's a funny sort of programme; does a little bit of lots of things. One of the things it does is a bit like Watchdog, but it doesn't limit itself to consumer affairs - it deals with dodgy affairs at a political level too. One of these is wasted public money. Local councils, regions or whatever, pay to develop schools, hospitals, parks, you name it, which are then instantly abandoned. It's not too hard to explain in itself, just common or garden corruption. What I don't understand is how no-one ends up in prison for it. It's clearly a crime people aren't particularly afraid to commit, because it keeps on cropping up on Striscia, but why on earth not? It might be a bit tricky to pursue the mafia, but local politicians have offices; they're in the phone book and everything. And then, it's spectacularly obvious. It's public money wasted in a gratuitously extravagant way - in bricks and concrete, and whatever one uses these days. I mean, short of building a Wasted Public Money Memorial Hospital and then driving through the streets in one of those van with loudspeakers shouting "I am pissing away your taxes!", I'm not quite sure what you'd have to do to get arrested around these parts.
Precarietà vs. Cushy Public Sector - I'm rewriting this one, apparently at a distance of 5 months from the first attempt! Here's a funny thing; in the world of work, Italy has two diametrically opposed problems at the same time. Monica tells me that part about the public sector is improving, but anyway. Chronologically, the first problem is that, apparently, public sector workers are practically impossible to fire. Perhaps this says more about employers not wanting to go through disciplinary procedures, but I couldn't tell you. Anyway, they can, by common consent, get away with murder and keep their job for life. Tim Parks told an amazing story about a woman who apparently clocked in at the office, left her coat on her chair and prosituted herself all day for years until someone decided to check what the hell she actually did. The other, more recent problem is precarietà ("precariousness"), the term that Italians use to indicate that someone is on a short term contract, like practically everyone in my office for example, and especially the young. The disastrous social effects of widespread precarietà are obvious, with workers struggling to find the stability that they need to settle down, something which helps to explain why the average Italian waits so long before marrying and having children. How the hell can a government not intervene in a matter like this? Anyway, not much use waiting for Berlusconi to do anything about it. He's too busy trying to save his wrinkly (no matter how hard he tries) skin.
Facebook - Now, seriously. Facebook is all well and good. I like Facebook; I use it. But it's not news. Something to do with an Italian love of gadgets I expect (apparently they're second only to us in wasting time on mobile phones), but every so often there's a story about Facebook on the news, about Berlusconi being annoyed about the groups that criticise him (thousands, obviously), groups that offend people with Downs syndrome, FB-based lobbying groups (as much of a waste of time here as anywhere else, I assure you). Then of course, every programme has a Facebook group, and one of our biggest clients insists on trying to do viral marketing through FB apps - trust me, it would take a seriously compromised immune system for that particular virus to take hold. Get a grip! Who gives a cazzo volante? It's only a chuffing website.
Strikes - So... why do Italians strike? I fear the answer can only be because they like striking. I'm definitely in favour of the principle of worker solidarity and striking, and Italy, like us has a long history of socialism and collective action. But here it's so futile; it's devalued currency. I can only really see it as a day off. Apparently the bus drivers strike every year, to coincide with the new school year. But how did it get this way? What happened to the Italian left that they complain so much and achieve so little? Anyway, wiser heads than mine have been trying to answer that question for a loooooooong time.
Scusa, ma... - I like this one. If you were translate this literally, it would be "Excuse me, but...". The perfect starting point for a quintessentially British phrase right? Such as "Excuse me, but I appear to have become enveloped in flames. Unfortunately the pain is exquisite. Could I possibly borrow some of your water?" In Italian, it's quite another story; there's no apology going on, it's a popular way of preparing the interested party for criticism. To take it to the extreme (as it might be understood on television for example, in one of the many 'healthy' debates), you might translate it as "Pardon my frankness, but I'd like to explain why you're a moron...". It's not always so pronounced of course, but in any case, sorry doesn't always mean sorry. Quite often it's the prelude to a thorough takedown.

A Fly Lands on Ambrose's Nose

2011-01-30T11:37:00.006Z

There's a nursery rhyme that Gabriella has been singing to Noemi. Apparently it's very old, and I couldn't find it on the interweb, but we like it.

I decided to set myself a challenge and translate it into an English version that you can sing to the same tune. I don't think I did a bad job! ~~Perhaps I'll do an MP3 later~~. Done: ambrose.mp3

«Oh, perbacco» diceva Tommaso,
«Se mi viene la mosca sul naso
Io di certo qui dir non saprei
In tal caso che cosa farei.
Che ne dite amici miei?
È una cosa che fa pensar,
che fa pensar.»
Ad un tratto la mosca pian piano
Sul nasin di Tommaso posò.
«Povero naso!»
esclamava confuso Tommaso:
Ohilì, Ohilà!
A farsi furbo così imparerà.

"Oh, my goodness" said Ambrose,
"What if that fly came and sat on my nose?
In that instance I couldn't tell you
What on earth I would venture to do.
What's the solution according to you?
It's a thinker and no mistake,
and no mistake."
The fly suddenly chose to repose,
Gracefully perched on the nose of Ambrose.
"Oh my poor nose!"
cried a baffled Ambrose:
Hey here! Hey there!
That'll teach him to think with more flair.

Noemi Natalie Dobson

2011-01-16T11:35:00.000Z

God Save the English Part 2

2010-11-24T17:46:00.001Z

Image via Wikipedia

Food: This is like shooting fish in a barrel. I shouldn't talk about English cuisine. Let's just say that after 4 years in England the only English food I really liked was apple crumble. I like cottage pie too but with an Italian touch.

I remember the first time I saw my English flatmate opening a can and pour the contents into a plate. To me it looked like cat food but as far as I knew she didn't have a cat. Then to my horror she started eating it. I had a look at the can. It said spaghetti hoops. It was just horrible and disgusting to me. Cat food is more appropriate.

But England never failed to surprise me every day. I found out that you also put spaghetti in cans. This is just mental. There ought to be laws. You should not put spaghetti in cans. Never. For any reason. It can't be done. It's against nature. Italians know that of all the kinds of pasta, spaghetti requires special care in cooking. It's very easy to get the timing wrong and then you can't eat them. As soon as they are cooked they should be seasoned and eaten because otherwise they get sticky and horrible. So to put them in a can is out of the question.
But just when I thought it couldn't be worse than this, my then friend Mark told me one day he had ravioli on toast for lunch. What? I said with my usual horrified expression. He explained me that he opened a can of ravioli and poured it on toast. I almost fainted! Images of my mum and my nan spending afternoons making homemade ravioli came into my mind and a certain feeling of disgust and pity filled my stomach. Ravioli in a can? Why do you do such things England? Why don't you love your people enough to nurture them with proper food? That day I honestly felt pity for Mark who had never tasted proper ravioli and according to me never had proper food. Thank God I saved the man from English cans and opened to him the paradise of Italian cuisine and my mum's delicious lasagne.

Loose shoes: In England you seem to have very loose shoes that you can take off at anytime and everywhere. This is something else that really shocked me and my friends during the first weeks. Students would take their shoes off during the lecture, in the library, in the cafe, everywhere. But it wasn't just students, I noticed it in the town library as well as in other public places. Why? It's not as if it's that hot in England that you need to take them off all the time and then it's just not very nice to do it in public. This is something that made us quite uncomfortable, especially if we were talking to the person who suddenly took their shoes off. A very uneasy feeling. And yes Mark, quite unihygienic too, as your countrymen do like fiddling with their feet quite a lot.

God Save the English

2010-11-06T15:17:00.001Z

Here is my revenge Mark!

I lived in England for 4 years. No day passed without me thinking "What is this?", " How is it possible..." or "Why would anyone do that...", and very very often "Bloody weather!". I missed my country a lot. I missed the changing of the seasons; in England there's only one season, the rainy one. Obviously I missed the food, the sunshine, my family and friends and more generally the personal contact. But I stayed, and I 'm happy I did because England gave me the man of my life, my lovely husband, soon to be a lovely father.

Talk to your baby: This is actually something I came across a few days ago reading the Guardian online. But it provoked my usual reaction of "How is it possible? Why? What?". Basically, the article talks about the difficulty that English parents encounter in talking with their little ones. It starts with a question: "Do we need to talk to our babies?". And I say: "Do we need such a question?" Of course you need to talk to them, but most importantly, it's not a need, it's a pleasure to talk to babies. Apparently not for the English. They need to be taught, they need resources and materials from the National Literacy Trust to talk to their offspring. This left me quite bewildered as my husband would say. Personally, I just need my baby. I started talking to him when I was 4 months pregnant and I've carried on since then.

TTYB aims to help parents and carers to get
over the embarrassment factor – "I feel stupid talking to my baby" – by showing
how much difference such communication makes to emotional and learning skills
later in life.

I can't believe a parent could feel embarassed talking to their baby. After 4 years in England I can believe an English parent could feel that way. But it's still something beyond me.

"facing-baby" buggies. A simple idea, but one which – if well executed and
developed in large enough numbers – can have a disproportionate impact on
countless lives.

You can rotate the buggies as much as you like but you still need to talk to your babies. That's what makes the big difference. Good grief, how on earth can you find talking to your baby embarassing or even stupid? What can actually have a disproportionate impact on your babies is if you talk to them! Not if you rotate the bloody buggy! I simply can't get my head around it and this happened quite a lot during my stay in England.

Taps: Yes, taps. Cold water, hot water: that kind of tap. Let's talk about it. My dad coming out of my loo exclaimed: "Bloody hell Monica, am I back in Pakistan? Didn't progress reach this country?". Wise words dad, wise words. I wish I had an answer.

We had a mixer in the kitchen sink, but even with that I could tell you which side the hot water and the cold water were flowing out without mixing. Impressive! Why on earth you've got this separate taps business I don't know. Why? Why? Is it that difficult to make a mixer in England? In the morning I always had to decide whether to scald my face with hot water or freeze it with cold water because even if I decided to open both taps and mix the water in the sink, by some kind of English magic the water wouldn't mix properly. In England the hot and cold water are parted like the Red Sea. So very annoying! I wish someone could explain to me the existence of separate taps in the 21th century in a progressive country like England. To me it's a mystery.

Door opening etiquette: Well, this is something me and my friends found pretty annoying during the first few weeks in England. We got used to it in the end but it was still a bit/quite annoying. The very first week we slammed doors in the faces of many English people but we noticed that people opened doors for us, so we gathered that something was wrong. Hard to say what. So we applied the door opening etiquette. But it was annoying. Reminding yourself at any given point in the day when passing through a door to look behind you in case anybody was around so that you can leave it open. And there are such heavy doors in England! At least build lighter ones if you want me to keep them open for you every time I pass through them. Going to the library on rainy days was always a nightmare. You had to hold an umbrella and books and make sure to hold the heavy door open for the person behind you. Don't get me wrong (yeah, yeah - and the rest - ed.), it's not as if we enjoy slamming doors on people's faces in Italy. We leave them open if someone is really close or if someone has problems getting the door open. In England you leave doors open for people miles away from you! That's too much! I would enjoy it a bit more if you made lighter doors.

The Rinsing business: This is something that really shocked me and my Spanish, French and German friends. To find out that English people don't rinse when they wash up. Gosh, that's very very strange at the very least. And very unhygienic (it was only a matter of time - ed.) at the most. Do you realize, English people, that you are actually drinking and eating soap? The fact that after a bit the foam disappears from the dishes doesn't mean that they are clean! I just can't think about all the bacteria breeding on those dishes and I just can't think about how many times I've eaten and drank from those glasses. Before drinking or eating, I would make a mental (mental is right - ed.) sign of the cross and recommend my body to God. This is not just me being paranoid. All of my European friends agreed with me and they all had the same shocked face as I still have when I think about it. This again is something I can't get my head around.

Fratelli d’Italia pt. 2

2010-10-18T18:44:00.003+01:00

Image by marcoPapale.com via FlickrPart 2: we shift to television, as I said before.

TV Debates Generally - I already mentioned politicians arguing on televisions, but they're certainly not the only ones. On Striscia la Notizia they frequently draw attention to the phenomenon with a sort of chart called I Nuovi Mostri ("The New Monsters" - I believe it's a nod to something rather more cultural) where they basically run through the people who've made arses of themselves on TV in various ways during the week. Some people seem to get invited onto TV shows specifically to argue - if you didn't know that Berlusconi was behind Italian TV you might suspect Jeremy Kyle had something to do with it. The thing I really don't understand is the lack of intervention by TV presenters. There's a certain naivete about it all: when someone, either in the audience or properly in front of the cameras, is shouting over the top of someone else, so that the whole spectacle has become entirely farcical, a presenter might implore some dignity, a bit of calm, but the idiot somehow retains use of the microphone. Note to Italian TV people: when you take a microphone away from someone, it makes them harder to hear. Thank you.
Repetitive, Crap TV - The most obvious criticism that you can make about Italian TV is that it's lousy. I generally get told at this point that English TV isn't up to much at the minute, plus, you have to stay up later than I do to watch the good stuff. Fair enough. Bad television isn't strange in itself: what I'm curious about is the way in which it is bad. There's a spectacular lack of variety: a good number of programmes are on every working day, such as Renegade (old, American, shit, ugly protagonists with bad clothes) and Squadra Speciale Cobra 11 (silly German series about a special branch of the traffic police with implausible storylines and obligatory scene with cars exploding on the Autobahn - Monica reserves a special scorn for Germany's contribution to Italian TV). There are also programmes on every day which aren't bad, but there's simply no need to repeat them, such as The Simpsons ('Woo-hoo!' = "Mitico!" btw) and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which even runs on Saturday I think - basically, you can tell that it's the day of rest when even Gerry Scotti isn't on the idiot box. I was recently reminded of the extraordinary fact that the Mayans (before the Spanish decided to destroy their civilisation) believed that the sun would cease to rise if they ceased to offer human sacrifices. One wonders how such a situation could arise, but I suppose you start small. Perhaps in 100 years, Italians will believe that the sun will not set if they neglect to broadcast Striscia every single day of the week including Sunday (or Veline/Velone/Paperissima to appease the god of the summer hiatus), as is their current practise.
Films on really late - More of the same scheduling madness. Again, I am penalised for my early nights, but it seems a bit over the top to me. Some of the best films that I see in the terrestrial schedules begin at somewhere around 11:30, whereas the lousy ones (Big Mama is on at a watchable time this evening, for example) get the primetime slots. The way I see it, the films must cost the channel the same amount no matter when they broadcast them, though the revenue from advertising must be higher before midnight. So isn't it in their own interest to give us the best films in the evening, and the bollocks at night?
Veline
Apparently there was a feminist movement in Italy once. This explains why there is civil divorce and legal abortion. However, I frequently wonder what happened to all the feminists; there's still rather a lot of work to do. I allude in this instance to the veline, properly speaking a feature of Striscia, but representative of Italian TV in general. With varying degrees of sobriety, there are a lot of women on TV whose only purpose is to act as eye-candy. Striscia's veline, as the wikipedia article says "perform short dance breaks or stacchetti, always finishing up on the news anchors’ desk. They usually perform in swim-suits or tank tops and sing pop tunes as they dance." They do nothing else, except for the strange style of staged publicity that they have here for the shows' sponsors. Apparently the veline are meant to be a parody of the bimbos (strange use of Italian by us by the way - a bimbo is a male child) but I don't buy that story for a minute. Now, I have an ambivalent relationship with feminism (if you were to use the term "feminist literary theory" for example, I would immediately feel contempt) but I'd feel happier if they came back and addressed this outrageous affront to the dignity of women. As I say, this phenomenon exhibits itself with varying degrees of class: the most crass examples I'm aware of would be Ciao Darwin and Chiambretti Night, which I can't watch and the most tasteful Che Tempo Che Fa. But the last example is perhaps the most depressing, because it's a good programme, but they employ this completely superfluous Scandinavian woman. She may be elegant, she may have a reasonable amount of clothes on, but she's still purely decorative.

Update: I received, in response to the last part, a link to a documentary on the subject. And I see that there's even an English version.

Fratelli d’Italia

2010-10-15T12:04:00.003+01:00

Image via WikipediaI would have liked this to be my first ever proper bilingual blog post, but for reasons which will soon bcome clear, this is not really on the cards. I only have so much free time...

Anyway, this is inspired by an exchange in the kitchen at work. We were talking about English pronunciation, which led, naturally enough, to the conclusion that the English are strange. It must have been Manu (that’s Emanuela, not Manchester United) because I proceeded to vent my indignation in her direction, with a combination of gusto and bad Italian – my cool was lost, though I wasn’t at all offended. Us, strange? That’s a bit bloody rich considering what goes on in this country – that was the gist of it. Ever heard anyone in England start a sentence with "If this was a normal country..."? Me neither, but in Italy, every now and then...

I didn’t get to the point of saying “You want a list?”, but I thought it might be fun to blog one. Some of these things I just find interesting, and some I find very annoying. The only key element is that I think they’re a bit (or bloody) odd.

Berlusconi
I know, I know – it’s too obvious. However, in the same way that the Nazis tend to find their way into discussions on morality, if you start talking about Italy’s problems, there’s one of them which is always, inexplicably, on the telly. Where to begin? A man who clearly should not be left in charge of organising a piss up in a brewery, who is a gaffe generator of Prince Philippian proportions, whose political efforts are all concentrated on keeping himself out of trouble, who thinks that Italy gains by association with Muammar al-Gaddafi (who’s always popping into the country for a visit), who is a walking conflict of interest as far as his media empire is concerned, who is compromised by his alleged criminal history which he (coincidentally of course) takes measures to ensure are not investigated – I’m amazed that a single Italian could vote for him, let alone the requisite majority.
Berlusconi’s Smile
I feel that this deserves an entry in itself. If I were in charge of Italy, I don’t think I’d be smiling. He, on the other hand, always has this cheesy grin on his ridiculous mug (which, by the way, is beautified with a hairdo that looks uncannily like shoe polish) – happy as Larry. There’s no small amount of discontent in Italy at the moment; how is it that no-one has taken the trouble to punch that smug grin off his face?
The OppositionOn paper, being the political opposition in Italy must be a piece of cake, right? "Hey," they might say, "you know that moron who's in charge of the country, the one who looks like a used car salesman? If you vote for us, the worst that could happen is that a different moron will be in charge." At this point I imagine the populace desperately breaking down the doors of the voting stations. It's not quite like that. You can't entirely blame the electorate. They don't (by their own admission usually) really do politics here. I've been here about two years, and if you asked me what policy differences exist between Berlusconi's Popolo della Liberta and the principal left-wing opposition party, the Partito Democratico, I honestly couldn't tell you. I may be partially to blame for this, because reading the papers is something I never got the hang of in English, let alone Italian, but I'm sure the PD could get their message (always assuming that they actually have one) onto TV if they put their minds to it.
Politicians on TV and in the Camera
Two words that you might hear a lot in Italy are "pazienza" (patience) and "vergogna" (shame). They like to tell each other that they should have these important characteristics. In the case of the second, the sense is "You ought to be ashamed of yourself". This applies especially to politicians I think. Now, Italians don't have a problem with talking, and sometimes shouting over each other, whereas we don't. It takes some getting used to, but there's nothing essentially wrong with it. Variety is the spice of life. On the other hand, when I see Italian politicians on TV I often find myself thinking "But you know you're on TV, right? That people can see you, and that you're behaving like a child?". They call each other names, shout over each other, throw tantrums, refuse to let other people speak, and so on. And it's not much better in their parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. I seem to recall a fight breaking out once. If you think Prime Minister's Questions can get a bit juvenile sometimes, think of Italy and count yourself lucky.

I made a list of things to cover, and I've just done 4 of about 27, plus things continue to occur to me. It so happens that the list switches from politics to the telly at this point, plus, I've had request to break this mother down into smaller sections, so I will.

Brewing

2010-10-10T14:04:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia Just a quick note to say how much I'm appreciating my parents' birthday present (birthday in may, but the moment was not opportune) - the BruBox! Apparently to the extent that I'm basically giving them a little publicity. They don't supply direct, but they do list stockists.

It's a little cube for brewing 10 l of beer in about the simplest way possible. I reckon I might even manage to do it with a small baby about. It's something of a godsend in this mysterious country where they know (almost) everything about food, but nothing about beer...

I wonder how I'll get the next packs.

N.B. It does make a bit of noise though. I'd advise the presence of multiple walls between the kit and, say, a pregnant wife.

Say it with water! pt. 2

2010-10-03T18:19:00.000+01:00

A follow up post. Mostly because I had a look at the video that my friend mentioned in the comments. He asked me to let him know what I thought, and I asked him if I could blog about it, so here we are. I transcribed the bits I wanted to mention in the video, but I only took down references to the bible, so perhaps the translation used was a bit different.

There was also a comment from Scott which is worth putting up if I am blogging again:

Just to point out, since you began the discussion, that not every instance of "baptism" in the New Testament means a baptism of water. When it says "so many of you as were Baptised into Christ Jesus", it does not mean water baptism. (like when Jesus says "you cannot be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised in".

Most theologians consider there to be three baptisms:
1. Baptism of Salvation
2. Water Baptism
3. Baptism with the Holy Spirit

The video makes the same point more explicit: "baptism" means "immersion", and can be interpreted, according to context, in ways which have little to do with water. As I said at the time, I don't see anything in the bible which says that Romans 6:3-8 isn't related to water baptism. What's more, John 3:3-8 links spiritual and water baptism. I also think Romans should be read in the light of Matthew 28:18-20, but that is perhaps a bit abstract.

Leaving aside the factual accuracy of whether or not most theologians say that there are three baptisms, it is in any case possible that they occur simultaneously. The fact is that a wealth of interpretations are available. My starting point is the teaching of the Catholic Church rather than the bible, partially for that very reason. I won't say any more on that here, but I will give you a link to a previous post about the same thing.

Moving on to the video more explicitly ... well, I'm back where I started really: I'm not really sure where the idea of baptism as an expression of faith comes from. I can't think of a passage that suggests it. My friend said that biblically "it's a public statement of a decision to join/follow" and the video repeatedly stresses that public aspect.

My friend was kind enough to say that it'd be okay for me to blog on the video (I don't think it's his technically) so I'm very conscious that I shouldn't be gratuitously critical, but I just don't see it. I think I went into the biblical picture of baptism pretty thoroughly for some bloke with a keyboard and an internet connection, but the verses that indicate that baptism is an expression of a pre-existing spiritual reality - I just didn't see them. Where are they?

"...a person being baptised in the name of Jesus is saying publicly that they've been immersed in Jesus and that they're taking on his characteristics."

"The bible says that a person has a spiritual baptism as soon as they believe in Jesus."

And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of his glory.
Ephesians 1:13-14

For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
1 Cor 12:13

It doesn't say that baptism expresses immersion in Jesus, it says "we were all baptized by one spirit into one body".

As for "the bible says that a person has a spiritual baptism as soon as they believe in Jesus", I just think that's wrong, especially the "the bible says" part. The verse given from Ephesians - which in fairness probably isn't intended as a proof text - doesn't even mention baptism. You might perhaps read it together with other passages to make this argument, but to me it seems that this is simply a case of going beyond the text.

More technically, if you look at the points that I marked in italics, you'll see that the second is translated by the NIV as "having believed". The word is πιστευσαντες in Greek, and, from what I understand from John Dobson, that's a straightforward literal translation. Now, "having believed, you were marked" could be read as "at the moment that you believed, you were marked", but it isn't necessarily the case. The only certainty is that belief comes before being marked. If for example I say that Steve, having caught the 8:45 to Exeter, went to the 11:15 church service, there's nothing logically wrong with what I say, though you may wonder what Steve did to kill the time. Therefore, that "as soon as they believe in Jesus" also seems unwarranted to me.

I marked "when you heard" as well because I noticed that it actually has the same form as πιστευ-σαντες; it's ἀκου-σαντες. I'm sure that there's a good reason why the NIV translators went for "when you heard" but equally I think that "having heard" may perhaps be more literal. I won't labour the point because I'm still learning Greek after all.

"...but the bible also says that alongside this inside experience, the outside experience of water baptism should happen too."

Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Acts 2:38

"They're saying Jesus has washed away their sin"
"They're saying that Jesus took the punishment for their sins at the cross, washing them clean in God's sight[.]"

And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name.
Acts 22:16

It doesn't say that baptism should happen in addition to a spiritual experience, it says "repent and be baptized [...] for the forgiveness of your sins". And it doesn't say that baptism expresses being washed clean of sin, it says that we should "be baptized and wash [our] sins away, calling on his name." Does baptism wash our sins away? Does calling on his name wash them away? This verse (or at least this translation) doesn't make it clear. Taken together with John 3:3-8 and Acts 2:38, I think the natural conclusion is that water baptism somehow washes our sins away. St. Peter even writes that "baptism [...] saves you". (1 Pt 3:21)

"They're saying that, in Christ, they've been born again to a new, eternal life with God."

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
Romans 6:4

...having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.
Colossians 2:12

The bible doesn't say that baptism expresses being born again, it says "we were [...] buried with him through baptism [...] in order that we too may live a new life" and that we were "buried with him in baptism and raised with him through [...] faith". Both verses say that baptism into death actually precedes new life. And Jesus says "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water" (and the Spirit) (Jn 3:5).

They're saying that they now carry Jesus with them at all times.

[A]ll of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:27

The bible doesn't say that baptism expresses carrying Jesus with you, it says that whoever is baptised has "clothed [them]selves with Christ."

Perhaps this has been a bit repetitive, but basically I don't just disagree with the emphasis that the video was placing on publicly expressing faith, I don't even understand what the biblical basis for it is.

My Music

2010-09-26T14:30:00.000+01:00

I'm pleased to say that my mp3s now have a (hopefully permanent) home again:

The Ego Pegs
What I want from Idiosyncracy
Misc

Say it with water!

2010-09-12T20:06:00.004+01:00

A friend of mine in Exeter works for a local independent church (unless I'm getting my wires crossed) and just publicised an event of theirs on Facebook:

Say it with water!

3 Sunday afternoons to help you explore baptism before you take the plunge!

I thought straight away about the difference in belief expressed by that catchy title, but I didn't feel like saying anything at first. By the next day someone had left a comment saying "Love that slogan!" so I decided I would after all:

We think about baptism in a different way (which we think is biblical or we wouldn't believe it). Whereas I'm not really sure where the idea of baptism as an expression of faith comes from. I can't think of a passage that suggests it off the top of my head.

To which my friend replies:

What else is it? In the Bible it's a public statement of a decision to join/follow.

So here I am to tell you what I and my church think baptism is, beyond an expression of faith.

The Sacrament of Baptism

I was a little surprised by the question (perhaps it was rhetorical) because the bible says quite a lot more about baptism and he does know the bible, I'm sure.
Anyway, we call baptism a sacrament. A sacrament, in brief, is a symbol of grace and a means of grace i.e. baptism both symbolises an important spiritual reality and is an important spiritual reality:

Celebrated worthily in faith, the sacraments confer the grace that they signify. They are efficacious because in them Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies. - CCC 1127

More specifically on the subject of baptism, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says this:

Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament. - CCC 1257

I'll write something on what that doesn't mean towards the end.

Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit (vitae spiritualis ianua), and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: "Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word." - CCC 1213

Baptism before Christ

I think it makes sense to step back a moment before looking at Christian baptism. From the perspective of someone who doesn't know the gospel or Christ, the physical act doesn't suggest an expression of faith in itself - it suggests washing. That's an image that the bible adopts for Christian baptism, but also expresses the ministry of St. John the Baptist:

And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. - Mark 1:4-5

Rather than an expression of faith exactly, it seems to be a symbolic washing in token of repentance for sins. They even confess their sins at the same time. The prophet who prepares the way for Christ makes it clear that baptism is an expression of conversion, and we in hindsight know that we need that conversion in order to live according to Christ:

John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "[...]Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.["...]

"What should we do then?" the crowd asked.

John answered, "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."

Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"

"Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them.

Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?" He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely—be content with your pay." - Luke 3:7-8,10-14

So far there's no reason to suppose that anything beyond the symbolic is happening at all, and yet in the course of Jesus' ministry we learn that it seems to be something very special. When he asks the priests and elders "John's baptism—where did it come from? Was it from heaven, or from men?" (Mt 21:23-27) he deliberately asks a dangerous question. To the people, evidently, it was heavenly, and what's more, the priests and elders couldn't confidently refute this belief.

In fact, that question might be taken to represent the two viewpoints discussed. For Catholics, baptism is very much "from heaven" - the Catechism says in fact that it is Christ who baptizes - whereas many Christians, although not saying that baptism is truly "from men" (no-one is saying that we invented it ourselves), stress that it is the witness of men to faith in Jesus.

But whatever the baptism of John was (I'm not entirely sure myself now) what is clear is that Christian baptism is greater:

"I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." - Matthew 3:11

This opens some questions as well, like the meaning of and whether there is a difference between baptism in the Holy Spirit and in fire, and if so, to what moments in the life of the Christian in the Church they correspond. However, I'm not sure myself and I'm happy to move on because there's a lot more to say without dwelling on things I don't understand. The bible makes it clear in many passages that baptism is more than just washing your body.

Baptism is salvific

Eight people went into [the ark] and were brought safely through the flood. Those flood waters were like baptism that now saves you. But baptism is more than just washing your body. It means turning to God with a clear conscience, because Jesus Christ was raised from death. - 1 Peter 3:20-21

It's amazing what you can miss when you read the bible. St. Peter writes that baptism saves us, and I didn't notice for years. He also recalls St. John's message of repentance, of "turning to God with a clear conscience". Another verse indicates that baptism is salvific, but it comes from a disputed passage in the bible which apparently does not exist in the "most reliable early manuscripts" (NIV). Here it is, for the sake of completion:

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. - Mark 16:16

Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life

Another symbolic aspect of the act of baptism is the concept of death and resurrection. Descending into the waters represents death and rising again represents participation in the resurrected life of Christ. A pair of episodes in Jesus' ministry suggest a link between baptism and Jesus' passion and death, the request of James and John, where they accept the same baptism as the Lord (Mk 10:32-40), and an exclamation of Jesus (Lk 12:49-50). St. Paul writes much more explicitly:

Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. - Romans 6:3-8

I apologise if I went a bit over the top with the highlighting, but it's a relatively long passage to read on a screen and I wanted to emphasise the phrases which are especially relevant. Baptism, writes St. Paul, is our means of dying to Christ. "If" we have died "like this" then we can share in his resurrection and a new life.

Through Baptism we are freed from sin

A pair of passages indicate that baptism is linked to the forgiveness of sins:

"Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."
[...]
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation." Those who accepted his message were baptized. - Acts 2:38,40-41

This passage also hints at a salvific meaning, since those who accepted St. Peter's message of salvation were baptized. The other passage is perhaps more strong:

'And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name.' - Acts 22:16

Through Baptism we are reborn as sons of God

Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.*"

"How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.'* The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." - John 3:3-8

The asterisks indicate where the NIV gives the alternative translation "born from above", suggesting a heavenly, perhaps sacramental, act. Being "born of water" does immediately suggest baptism as the means of being born again, even if this is controversial. It is important to consider Christ's concluding instruction in St. Matthew's gospel:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. - Matthew 28:18-20

The fact that Jesus instructs his followers to baptize after teaching, more cryptically, that we must be "born again / from above [...] of water" is very leading. It is similar to Jesus saying "If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." (Jn 6:51 see also 35,55-57) and then taking bread and saying "Take and eat; this is my body." (Mt 26:26) - for there to be no connection would be very surprising.

Through Baptism we become members of Christ and are incorporated into the Church

For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. - 1 Corinthians 12:13

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. - Galatians 3:26-28

A further passage covers quite a lot of areas:

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. - Colossians 2:9-15

An interesting passage because it suggests that baptism is a replacement for circumcision, or rather that circumcision foreshadowed Christian baptism. Circumcision was of course a requirement for the Jews, it marked you out as one of the people of God. And "fulness in Christ" also makes us his people, members of his body. Associated with baptism, again there is new life in Christ, again there is forgiveness of sins.

And this baptism that makes us one in Christ gives us good reason to consider all baptized Christians as brothers:

Baptism constitutes the foundation of communion among all Christians, including those who are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church: "For men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. Justified by faith in Baptism, [they] are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church." "Baptism therefore constitutes the sacramental bond of unity existing among all who through it are reborn." - CCC 1271

Having gone through all that, it's clear that, even if you don't agree with me and my Church about the specifics, the bible has a whole heap of things to say about baptism other than that it's an expression of faith.

What the Catholic Church doesn't say about Baptism

You have to be clear about these things, because someone might think baptism is strictly necessary for salvation. It's not so.

The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptized are "reborn of water and the Spirit." God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments. - CCC 1257

Every man who [...] seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity. - CCC 1260

That phrase "he himself is not bound by his sacraments" bears repeating. God gives us baptism as a gift, a means of salvation, but God does as he wills.

There are quite a few instances in the New Testament where God seems to have other ideas, but then God's always doing that - it's rather his style. When the good thief is told he's going to paradise and it seems unlikely that he's baptised (Lk 23:39-43) that's fine - it's God's grace operating without human intervention, as it only too obviously can do. The same kind of thing applies when there's a separate baptism with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5), when baptism come before the Spirit (Acts 8:15-17) and when the Holy Spirit is received before baptism (Acts 10:44-48).

Ho hum - nearly work time again

2010-08-21T15:54:00.000+01:00

I wanted to do a final post before setting off back for Sassuolo, but it might be a bit bitty, as I've been, well, just relaxing, and Monica's not really up for the beach at the minute. To the left is our baby, but more on that later. I'm due back at work on Thursday and we have a gynaecologist appointment on Tuesday, so the plan is to head back on Monday on the train.

What I've been mostly up to is working through Learn New Testament Greek by John H Dobson. A bit before I met Monica I was thinking that it was a shame I'd lost my German, because I was pretty good at that and I like language, and maybe it would be a good idea to try and have another go. I didn't want to learn a language that I didn't actually have a use for, or that I couldn't practise without making a particular effort. I spotted the above book in SPCK ("Is Christian Knowledge different to the usual kind?", I recall Norris asking once) and got about a third of the way through it before losing momentum. I tried again later and got a little further through. Then I met my Italian wife-to-be and learning Greek was understandably displaced with learning Italian.

Fast forward several years and I feel confident enough with my Italian to get going on Greek again. I also figure that it's now or never (or at least significantly later), since becoming a father leaves little time for learning Greek. Armed with splendidly helpful and free MemoryLifter and generous 3 week holiday, I've been getting on pretty well and enjoying myself. When you get on to about a third of the way through, you start reading from the New Testament itself (you need a copy) and the course is specifically designed to help you get to grips with the basics so you can feel like you're making rapid progress. I'd highly recommend it.

Back to the baby. We had the morfologica on Wednesday, which is when they take a load of scans of the baby and take loads of measurements too, to find out if everything is going okay. It is, in short. Monica was worrying beforehand. She does worry. It's all very exciting anyway. There was a TV-sized screen in front of Monica so we could see everything, and it all looked very swish. It was somewhat like being on the bridge of the starship enterprise. Plus, it highlights various flows in real-time with colour-coding, which makes it look as though a series of atomic explosions is going on inside one's wife, or perhaps that the photon torpedoes are ready to be launched. And then, when you've got used to the idea of seeing inside your baby's brain (they should do one for wives) and heart (textbook - the doctor kept on going back to look at it and opining that it was perfect) - Bam! 4D view of baby! Even if for some reason the colour they decided to use was that of earwax. We got a DVD with two short clips of that.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Been going for coffee at the new bar pretty regularly with Carlo. Went again on Thursday for an ice cream with Giovanna but the place was packed and noisy and I didn't feel like queueing. Working through the games section in Il Messaggero. On holiday, basically. Nearly over though, and probably back to (lack of) service as usual.

In the beginning was the Word

2010-08-17T10:45:00.002+01:00

Image via WikipediaI'm not a theologian. Nor have I studied linguistics. On the other hand, I'm a lifelong Christian become Catholic with a BA in English Literature who works in translation. Both these areas interest me.
Occasionally the following pops into my head, and I thought I'd blog it: isn't it funny that human language doesn't seem particularly aligned to Christology, given the centrality of Christ to Christianity (natch) and the big deal that is made of Jesus the Word of God:

In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came into being,
Not one thing came into being except through him.
[...]
He was in the world that had come into being through him,
and the world did not recognise him.
He came to his own
and his own people did not accept him.
[...]
The Word became flesh,
he lived among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth.

John 1:1-3,10-11,14

God said 'Let there be light,' and there was light.
[...]
God said 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals and all the creatures that creep along the ground.'

God created man in the image of himself,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:3,26-27

Man is made in the image of God, through the Word, whose glory is full of truth. All of creation bears the imprint of God, man especially so. Both these passages at least hint at the Holy Trinity (let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves), which, as has often been pointed out, allows the affermation that "God is love" (1 John 4:8) to make sense; since God is a community of persons even before (causally) the world was created, love can be a part of his nature – the Father loves the Son, and the Son the Father, and so on. And if he is a community, then communication is also part of his nature, part of his unity. The Word even became flesh and dwelt with man.

And yet, from this vision of God and man which suggests that language isn't just something that we do, it's an essential part of who we are we move to the reality of people who can't talk to one another because they don't have a common language. Something fishy would appear to be going on. Back in my first year at university we took a little look at linguistics, or at least at two broad schools of thought in linguistics, structuralism and post-structuralism. I can't remember in great detail what they were about, and what specifically distinguishes them, but I remember discussion of (or perhaps just listening to) how words are related to meaning. In any case, you don't have to be a linguist to appreciate that words seem to be somewhat arbitrary: a dog, for example, is a Hund in German, a chien in French, a cane in Italian, and so on and so forth. What I think marks to the passage from structuralism to post-structuralism is essentially the same thing that marks the passage from modernism to post-modernism: the former, inspired by the enlightenment, attempts to classify and provide a logical internal structure (again, natch) for understanding language, the latter sees how bloody difficult this is and gives up, abandoning examination of the relationships within language for relativism and (proudly?) proclaiming that meaning is in fact a myth.

We've got something of a disconnect on our hands: is language essential, unifying and full of truth or is it arbitrary, unable to unify us and devoid of meaning?

I have to admit that I don't have this clear in my own mind. Both visions seem pretty extreme; I guess that the solution lies somewhere in the middle, as it is prone to do. I certainly don't doubt God's revelation, but it's also very easy to follow the logic of the post-structuralists. Of course, revelation does give us an account of the matter. However, unfortunately it's one of those incidents where God comes out looking like a bit of a cosmic jerk on the face of it:

The whole world spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary. [...] 'Come,' they said, 'let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we do not get scattered all over the world.'
[...]
'So they are all a single people with a single language!' said the Lord. 'This is only the start of their undertakings! Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they cannot understand one another.' [... T]here the Lord confused the language of the whole world and from there the Lord scattered them all over the world.

Genesis 11:1,4,6-7,9

I'd prefer not to get too bogged down in defending God's reputation – perhaps that's a topic for another time – but the passage itself is surely fundamental, given the topic. Note again, that God seems to act as Trinity on this occasion as well. God deliberately limits man's ability to communicate, to stop him doing whatever he wants to do. In fact, perhaps this is obviously for the best after the fall. We all know very well what a mess we've made of the whole world with the percentage of our brain that we do use, just think of the damage we would have done by now if we'd devoted all of our grey matter to it! On the other side of the equation however is Pentecost:

When Pentecost day came round, they had all met together, when suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and there appeared to them tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak different languages as the Spirit gave them power to express themselves.

[...]
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven and addressed them in a loud voice:
[... T]his is what the prophet was saying:
In the last days – the Lord declares -
I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity.
Your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
your young people shall see visions,
your old people dream dreams.

Acts 2:1-4,14,16-17

Here we effectively have the tower of Babel in reverse, as I'm not the first to say. And here we have the Trinity and consequently Christology. As he promised, the Son has sent the Spirit, the Spirit in whom we are adopted sons and can say "Abba, Father!". We are co-heirs with Christ and members of his body, caught up in the life of the Holy Trinity, and in this first Pentecost of the Church, preached by the apostles, God sees fit to restore unity of language as a miraculous sign of the outpouring of his grace.

The post-strucuralists gave us a pretty bleak vision of language, but that's not the only way of looking at it. Disparity of language doesn't seem to actually be a bad thing in itself. I think it's fascinating personally. Looking back at the creation account, we see God's creative action through the Word and we see man made in his image. Human languages are of course the result of creativity. God has made us co-creators in his image, and different communities of people have created their own languages, through which they have communion. As it's very fashionable to say nowadays, especially in response to people who are complaining about declining standards in English, this is also a continuing process, and involves, whether we like it or not, the concise text messages sent among groups of disenfranchised youth. "Word made flesh" might in fact be an apt expression to describe the development of language among mankind. Also, I understand that St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the great variety of life and difference in creation is an expression of the glory of God, praised by all his works in chorus. And though I might sometimes have a little trouble in the supermarket here in Italy, perhaps its more important after all that Gods praises are sounded with a variety of sounds.

That's all I can think to say on the matter. I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg. I'd like to know what a proper Christian linguist had to say about it, but I don't remember seeing many books on the subject. It might be a niche interest, but I'm sure someone other than myself must find it interesting.

Happy Assumption/Ferragosto!

2010-08-15T12:39:00.001+01:00

Image via WikipediaFerragosto is a special time of the year, when Italians like to simultaneously queue on motorways. I think I read somewhere that this is a Roman tradition (presumably without the motorways), but the Church decided to celebrate the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the same day. I think they may have overestimated common sense levels, because many Italians prefer queuing on the motorway to going to Mass.

Anyway, I thought I'd take this occasion to look at a Marian thingamy. Yesterday (we went to the vigil Mass because it's easier on Monica at the moment) the Church gave us the following first reading:

David assembled all Israel at Jerusalem, to bring up the ark of the Lord to its place, which he had prepared for it. And David gathered together the sons of Aaron and the Levites: And the Levites carried the ark of God upon their shoulders with the poles, as Moses had commanded according to the word of the Lord. David also commanded the chiefs of the Levites to appoint their brethren as the singers who should play loudly on musical instruments, on harps and lyres and cymbals, to raise sounds of joy.

And they brought the ark of God, and set it inside the tent which David had pitched for it; and they offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before God. And when David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord. - 1 Chr 15:3-4, 15,16;16:1-2

That may not seem a particularly relevant reading for the Assumption, but it is. Mary has long been considered as the new ark of the (new) covenant. The lost ark bore the Ten Words of the law and manna, the bread from heaven. Mary bore the Word made flesh, the Bread of Life which came down through heaven. What's interesting though, is that the connection isn't only the result of the imagination of the early Church, it's also alluded to by St. Luke and St. John.

Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting since the cloud stayed over it and the glory of the Lord filled the dwelling. - Ex 40:35

Now when the priests came out of the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord, and because of the cloud the priests could not stay and perform their duties. - 1 Kgs 8:10-11

When St. Luke narrates the annunciation, he uses the same Greek word used in the Septuagint to describe how Mary will be overshadowed with the glory of God:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. - Lk 1:35

There is a similar series of allusions in the visitation, to 2 Samuel:

David went to Baalah of Judah, from there to bring up the ark of God [...] They transported the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of Abinadab's house which is on the hill. [...] David and the whole house of Israel danced before the Lord with all their might. [...] That day David felt afraid of the Lord. 'How can the ark of the Lord come to be with me?' he said. So David decided not to take the ark of the Lord with him [but] the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-Edom of Gath for three months, and the Lord blessed Obed-Edom and his whole family. [Bringing the ark up to the city of David,] David danced whirling round before the Lord with all his might. - 2 Sam 6:2-3,5,9-11,14

Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could into the hill country to a town in Judah. She went into Zechariah's house and greeted Elizabeth. Now it happened that as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in the womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said 'Of all women you are the most blessed and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord?[' ...] Mary stayed with her some three months and then went home. - Lk 1:39-43,56

As far as St. John is concerned:

Then the sanctuary of God in heaven opened, and the ark of the covenant could be seen inside it. Then came flashes of lightning, peals of thunder and an earthquake and violent hail. Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, robed with the sun, standing on the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant, and in labour, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth. [...] The woman was delivered of a boy, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre, and the child was taken up to God and to his throne[.] - Rev 11:19-12:2,5

One wonders what the ark of the covenant is doing in heaven anyway. I mean, its been lost for centuries despite the best efforts of the nazis, and in the meantime, the very Word of God has come to earth, tabernacled among us and, having ascended to the Father, sent his Holy Spirit to dwell in temples which are situated in the most unlikely of places – in men.

However, there is a new ark in heaven, and St. John seems to associate it with this woman who can be readily identified with Mary, even if we can also see different interpretations. Obviously there's nothing here saying explicitly ark = woman either, but the way the images run together is telling. St. John has already done the same sort of thing when he writes that one of the elders says "Look, the Lion of the tribe of Judah [...] has triumphed, and so he will open the scroll and its seven seals" (Rev 5:5) only to see the seals of the scroll broken by ... a lamb. (Rev 5,6,7,8)

I think it's interesting to see these links because it provides a key to understanding the Marian dogmas, especially her perpetual virginity (as well as the virgin birth) and immaculate conception. It was an appropriate sign of the holiness of Jesus Christ that the womb that bore him bore no other child and that she knew not a man, as it was not permitted for just any man to enter the holy of holies. It was also appropriate that the mother who bore him was free from the stain of sin; the sinless Mother of God was a fit dwelling place for the Son of Man who has conquered sin.

I'd like to recommend Mark Shea's three books "Mary: Mother of the Son" on the subject of all things Marian. Mark was an atheist, then an evangelical, now a Catholic, so he knows how to approach the subject of such a strange-seeming phenomenon as devotion to Mary in a way which is sympathetic to the sceptical.

Back to Offagna!

2010-08-07T15:41:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Hey hey!

Well here I am again in Offagna with my beautiful wife again and on my unprecedeted 3 week summer holidays. Life is good.

Wednesday, my last day of work, went about as well as could reasonably be expected. Half an hour before home time, I ran out of work, not a particularly frequent occurrence in itself, and especially handy given that I was planning on getting up at 5:30 to catch the train from Sassuolo. I was playing it rather safe, but better that than risking missing my connection.

Obviously I was knackered, but the journey went very well. My seat was at the end of the carriage at a table with some girls and a woman, and though I had feared a boring, insular journey (3 of the 4 of us had our iPods out to start with) I cunningly managed to strike up a conversation with the one who was reading the book of the film of Robin Hood (with Russell one-face Crowe) in English so we ended up chatting for most of the journey. I like talking to people on trains. I know that in theory, you can end up cornered by a bore, but it's never happened to me.

Offagna's changed a bit. The manky old bus stop that I used to wait in for the coach/bus to my Italian for foreigners lessons has been replaced with a little bar in the centre of a new roundabout. A big improvement. I popped there after dinner with Giancarlo, who approves of the coffee. It's not as if I've become a connisseur or anything (indeed, I'm not even sure how to spell it) but I would tend to agree.

It was a long day, the day I arrived. As I mentioned previously, I got up at 5:30. Once I was starting to settle down in Offagna after the ample meal which always awaits me here (what a thing it is to have Italian in-laws), Monica had rather a shock. She said that she felt her heart stop, and then it began to beat very strongly. She panicked, got to her feet, and then she lost her vision for a moment. Monica, as you may know, can get very anxious, and if that happened to me, I'd be pretty anxious too. We went to the pharmacist's for some advice, who advised us to go to the doctor's. Monica does not hold Offagna's local doctor in high regard, so she probably wouldn't have gone except that the usual doctor was away and there was a locum (is that right?) covering his holidays. Whether or not he's a good doctor, he has an inspirational Mussolini calendar and a little bust of him behind his desk, so I think I'd probably avoid him too. The doctor though it was probably a reflusso (update: Neil says it means reflux) which was aggravated by the fact that everything in Monica's upper body is a bit closer together now she's pregnant, and further exacerbated by the fact that she got up suddenly in panic. So we decided to go to A&E to get a check. This is something I've done myself actually. When I was working at the Exeter RD&E hospital, I had a pain in my chest and had it checked out (rather oddly meeting my old Exeter University Choral Society conductor, who was working at the reception) because it doesn't pay to ignore these things, even if it does turn out to be nothing. I won't go into how it happened, except to say that we went to the wrong hospital, and from thereon in, the whole process was dealt with very badly, but we were there for about four hours, and only left after midnight. In any case, Monica's fine, but she'll have to pay attention to not eating big meals, and eating frequently instead.

My sausage was a bit cold by that point.

One of the other things that's changed is that my little niece Beatrice has got bigger. I understand that this is in accordance with the general trend. Monica had been telling me for weeks on the phone, but she is a very happy baby. She's always laughing, and I should hope so too, because she cerainly eats enough to be a very happy baby. She was a little wary of me at first, because I haven't seen her for some time and she's forgotten who I am, but she got over it pretty quickly. We took her out for a stroll the other day, and saw another of Offgna's little novelties, the Mary Poppins bookshop. Nice. Bought a couple of cards at exorbitant prices.

Other than that, not much to report. Brought a few books with me: A Concise History of Italy, which I'm rereading because I've forgotten most of the contents, Learn New Testmant Greek by John Dobson and The Two Towers in Italian. It's something of a celebratory time here in Offagna, because Fabrizio the deacon has finally got his upgrade to priest, and is celebrating his first mass in Offagna tomorrow in the Church of the (really) Blessed Sacrament.

Berlusconi

2010-07-31T11:57:00.000+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

The man is a dangerous fool. I would have liked to write something much stronger, but I'd hate to turn people off the gentler religious content here.

Just read this from the Guardian. He's trying to censor Facebook and blogging.

He's trying to censor Facebook and blogging. It's not enough that he basically owns Italian TV, has incredible influence over the papers, intimidating the ones that criticise him and governs the bloody country, he's trying to censor the Internet like in, you know, communist China!

Seriously - do us all a favour. Write to your local MP and tell them that you're very concerned about the activities of a certain intellectual pygmy who has somehow contrived to become the prime minister of a country in the European Union. That you, in point of fact, could have sworn that you saw your own prime minister in the same room as the man, speaking to him as if he didn't represent a serious threat to society.

Saintly Catholic scientist types

2010-07-31T08:46:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Since Monica's been away, I've been listening to Catholic Answers Live a bit. I like CAL, but I don't usually listen because they're a bit long, and there're 10 of the buggers every week, so it's a bit impegnativo. But give it a listen if you haven't. It's easy to find the podcast, either through the site or iTunes. I like the host they have now; the old one was a bit earnest, but they replaced him with a Canadian who's always messing about.

Anyway, I like it, and I like learning new things, such as the existence of two Catholic scientists who otherwise would not have passed under my radar. ~~One is a Saint~~ (*) and the other is having his cause for sainthood postulated.

The one I just found out about is St. George Jackson Mivart (see also Catholic Encyclopedia). I went to the trouble of editing a video of the CAL show that mentioned him so here it is:

It's only 2 minutes, and it saves me from paraphrasing other people, but he's an interesting person.

The other person I found out about is "servant of God", Jérôme Lejeune. No mp3 to fall back on here - he did important research into Down syndrome, discovering that children with the disease have an extra copy (called a trisomy) of a chromosome in chromosome 21. From the wikipedia entry, I have also just learnt why my wife is currently knocking back the folic acid. He doesn't have a cause for sainthood because of the science, obviously, but because of the love he showed to Down syndrome children.

So I found that quite interesting and hopefully you did too. It's good to find out more about your brothers in Christ, and the many gifts that they offered to Christ, the Church and the world.

Update

* Confusingly he may not be a Saint after all. The wikipedia talk page says he's simply named for St. George. Why does life have to be so confusing?

Albums Meme

2010-07-24T11:41:00.003+01:00

Just remembered that I like these meme things, so, inspired by the fact that I've just finished transferring my music into iTunes (woohoo!), I've decided to start another one. It's a bit lighter than a prayer meme...

First album you bought? (obviously)

Pulp - Different Class. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

The artist with the most albums in your collection?

Not absolutely sure, but Captain Beefheart and his/the Magic Band is a safe bet.

Most pretentious album?

Set myself a bit of a challenge here; there are so many potential candidates: inaccessible jazz and classical music, art-rock, Marxist rock, music which is simply gratuitously obscure. I think I'll go with Ornette Coleman - Beauty is a Rare Thing. I mean, honestly, who buys a jazz box set?

Most embarrassing album (that you don't want to get rid of)?

Cover of Second First Impression

The category which inspired the meme: Daniel Bedingfield - Second First impression. The difficult second album! I didn't actually bother putting this one on iTunes though - I was listening to Gotta (sic) Get Thru (sic) This instead. Cough.

Most under-rated album (by other people, not you)?

Longpigs - The Sun is Often Out. All killer, no filler. Don't understand why they didn't manage to put another half-decent album out afterwards.

An album you own because of a particular person?

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Weasels Ripped My Flesh. When I was doing my A-levels, my English Lit teacher went off on pregnancy, and the Vice-Principal did a stint of teaching to cover her absence. Nice man. He was quite the ex-hippy, and I forget how it happened, but he lent me this album, which I bought. Odd, considering the scorn that Zappa pours on hippies.

Last album you bought?

Two together, as it happens. Abba - 18 Hits (Monica felt that Abba was a gap in my collection, and she had a point I feel) and Fabrizio De André - Anime Salve

Prayer Meme

2010-07-22T20:39:00.010+01:00

James got tagged for a meme, which I liked the sound of. He didn't tag me for it, but as I feel like doing it:

Name your three [...] favourite prayers, and explain why they're your favourites. Then tag five [people] - give them a link, and then go and tell them they have been tagged. Finally, tell the person who tagged you that you've completed the meme... [The Liturgy and the Sacraments are off limits here.] I'm more interested in people's favourite devotional prayers.

Not that these are in order of preference, but first would be the Jesus prayer.

There is no definitive version; it's a sort of continuum starting simply from the Holy Name of Jesus itself to a phrase based on some healing miracles of Jesus and the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector:

Jesus - Lord Jesus, Son of David [or Son of the living God], have mercy on me, a sinner!
(Mt 20:30-34, Mk 10:46-52, Lk 18:35-42, Lk 18:9-14)

This is also a liturgical prayer, but never mind. Consider that the original Greek of the gospels for "Lord, have mercy!" became the the ecclesiastical Greek of the penitential rite: "Kýrie, eléison."

I suppose the main reason that I like this prayer is that it never seems out of place! It's also simple and easy to remember. I understand that some Orthodox Christians actually use it as a form of constant meditation, though that still sounds like a pretty tall order to me. I've found it very helpful in times of temptation.

And consider what's being requested too:

"Lord," they answered, "we want our sight."

"Rabbi, I want to see."

"Lord, I want to see,"

It was Fr. Robert Barron of the Word On Fire podcast (he's American, but don't hold it against him; I suspect he's a convert from evangelicalism - he always begins his homilies with "Friends, ...") who pointed out to me that with this prayer, and consequently in the penitential rite, you're not wallowing in "Catholic" guilt, but simply acknowledging your radical dependence on Jesus to see the world through God's eyes, recognising the extent of your spiritual blindness and asking for the healing that we need in order to be conformed to Christ - that is, to become men, made in the image of God.

Then there's the litany of the saints. It's long (though in fact, like the Jesus prayer, I don't believe there's a definitive version), but the obvious part goes like this:

St. Peter, pray for us.
St. Paul, pray for us.
St. Andrew, pray for us.
St. James, pray for us.
etc.

Looking at it on paper, it probably seems dull as ditchwater, not helped by the fact that there are rather a lot of saints to invoke, if you're in the mood, but I find it a beautiful prayer. Something to experience rather than read - like all prayer then. There's also the fact that, at least in my experience, it is sung rather than recited. The major part of it is a very simple chant that a child could pick up pretty quickly, but it draws you in, it helps you to meditate on the fellowship, witness and intercession of our brothers in Christ.

That's the obvious focus of the prayer, the communion of the saints, and it so happens that this is a doctrine which is dear to me. When I became Catholic, I had the distinct impression of entering a larger world, and the saints have a lot to do with that. How awesome to think of all the heroes of faith who intercede for me in the Church, the body of Christ, the one mediator between God and men! Evangelicals are great at fellowship compared to Catholics - on a practical level they kick our arses frankly, but when I think of the universal -in time and space - Church, of the men and women who are on my side in the struggle against sin, the world and the devil, it doesn't seem to matter so much.

Another part of the reason that I like it so much is because it reminds me of so many particular positive moments, mostly at Sacred Heart, my old parish in Exeter: my reception into the Catholic Church at my first Easter Vigil, a beautiful ordination I went to on my birthday one year with James and Ben, my stint with the awesome Sacred Heart 11 o' clock Choir, my own wedding. It's an important enough prayer for me that I wanted it there on that day, and I wanted to sing it to proclaim my love and commitment to Monica to the whole assembly of God.

Than there's the Angelus. Again, I won't quote the whole thing (though it's not long). Here's what seems to me to be the crux of it:

V. The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary.
R. And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary...

V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
R. Be it done unto me according to your Word.
Hail Mary...

V. And the Word was made flesh.
R. And dwelt among us.
Hail Mary...

As a Catholic, I'm a pretty lousy with Marian prayer; to me the rosary seems as though it's designed to confuse me (I repeat a vocal prayer 50 times while trying to meditate on something else?) but this one speaks to me. In case you didn't know, one of the reasons that we Catholics venerate Mary is that she is the disciple of Christ par excellence. This prayer doesn't actually have that much to do with angels, but is has a lot to do with that discipleship; Mary accepts that message and mission of the Lord (no small matter; remember that, if people put two and two together, she was cruising for a stoning?) in her heart and becomes the Mother of God, of the Eternal Word made flesh in her body. Evangelism? She literally brought the Word of God into the world.

It's a short, largely scriptural prayer which reminds us of the importance of discipleship and evangelism. That's good.

I'm blogging this here, but I'll do the tagging part on Facebook.

Update:

An hon mensh for Psalm 27:

One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Yay!

2010-03-20T13:06:00.002Z

Not sure I can remember how to post on here again. Have not been on here in yonks!

Well my piece of interesting and good news is my school is out of special measures. YAY!

I just wanted to post on here really I am sure you all know.

Hey where has my picture gone?

The bells, the bells

2010-03-08T12:57:00.003Z

Image via Wikipedia

Last Saturday Monica and I went to S. Antonio's for confession with Don Alcide and Monica spotted some bells at the back of the church. When we'd all done with confessing, Don Alcide asked me if I'd seen them, so I said "Yes;" this being the fact of the matter "what are they doing there?"

S. Antonio's used to be run by capuchin monks (friars I'm pretty sure, but the newsletter call them fathers), but relatively recently it came back into the hands of the diocese, due to the financial crisis I think. Incidentally, this means that Don Alcide has a lot more room than one priest really needs. Anyway, it seems that the capuchins meant to put up some bells to replace the speakers that they'd been making do with. Apparently this is an unusual thing to do in this day and age, but they wanted to. However, with the parish being returned to the diocese, it got put on the back-burner.

But now they're sitting at the back of church waiting to go up, for Easter I gather, and they were blessed at the 11 o'clock mass last week. Unfortunately we weren't there so that we could go on a guided tour of Sassuolo (don't worry Sunday obligation fans, we have options) but I wanted to put up the texts on the bells, because it's good stuff. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the translations, because the original texts are in Latin, and I translated from the Italian translation, but I don't imagine it's that far off:

First Bell

Image: Blessed Virgin Mary

My soul magnifies the Lord

I praise the true God,
I call the faithful,
I gather the Clergy,
I mourn for the dead,
I shatter the lightning,
I solemnise the feasts.

Second Bell

Image: St. Francis of Assisi

Seraphic Patriarch

I believe, Lord, but that I may believe more firmly.
I hope, but that I may hope much more.
I love, but that I may love more ardently.
I have repented, but that I may repent more intensely.

Third Bell

Image: St. Anthony of Padua

Father of the poor

May my voice be the terror of all demons.

Fourth Bell

Image: St. Pio of Pietrelcina

I am crucified even without the Cross.
My word is a word of life.
I summon you for holy things; come.

Fifth Bell

Image: Angels

Glory to God in the highest heavens

All the Angels, the Heavens, all the Powers, the
Cherubim and the Seraphim ceaselessly proclaim:
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY.

Merry Christmas everyone!

2009-12-25T13:41:00.005Z

Gosh,

Well, a lot has happened since I last sat down to blog. I'd better have a go at summarising it all. Then when I'm finshed Monica will tell me that I've forgotten something important. Such is life.

I'm in Offagna for Christmas. Right now I'm on the ground floor, listening to Hoffnung's Music Festivals, what Mum and Dad got me. This because our laptop is dead again, only this time it seems properly dead. We got a bit over a year's worth of work out of it, and since it only had a year's warranty, and since it seems to be the mother board and processor that are dead, there's not much to do except buy another one. Ho. Hum.

At least we managed to get back to Offagna for Christmas. We had snow in Sassuolo what seems like an eternity ago, just the once, but it didn't even start to thaw until Christmas Eve Eve, when we were due to catch our train back. The snow we could have coped with, but after the snow came, it drizzled a little bit, and the drizzle froze and became ice. I don't think I'm prone to exaggeration - let's just say it was a little awkward to get to work. Anyhow, the trains were all in chaos (it's only fair to say that there's always chaos on the trains in Italy for Christmas) - 500 mins delay anyone? - but we managed to get onto a carriage without heating and lighting, and I was pretty pleased with that. There was some confusion at Bologna I think, and we changed onto a slower train, but it all turned out in the end really.

There'll be plenty of people reading who have no idea how my work's been going so I'll tell you; it's going well enough for them. They said they were going to give me 9 month contract, and then more recently they said a 4 year contract, as an apprentice. Nothing signed yet - I'll be lot happier when I sign something. Anyway, we found ourselves (or rather Monica found us) a place in the centre of Sassuolo, son in the new year we'll be moving there. Work is rather mental at the moment. Work is always mental around Christmas of course, but I don't thnk it's just that. Anyway, it's lovely to have a nice long, Italian-style break.

We haven't been the most socially-active of bunnies, but we've visited some places in the vicinity, Modena, Reggio-Emilia and Fiorano. Fiorano is just over the way from Sassuolo, in the hills, and has a Sanctuary, which is very posh like. By an odd coincidence I have discovered that an IT bod, Adriano, at work directs the choir of the Sanctuary, so it looks as though I may have finally found somewhere to sing - hurrah! We managed to catch a few free Christmas concerts too. As it's some kind of centenary of Handel, we managed to hear some selections from 'Messiah', even in Italy. We also heard some famous arias from the opera in a teeny tiny room, which was very good, even though you can't get opera singers to sing quietly, so we spent a long time with our ears vibrating.

I assure you that I'm not writing in order of importance, just as things come to me. I'm an uncle! Vanessa gave birth to Beatrice. She had to have a C section, and Beatrice was premature, was breathing a bit poorly and managed to get a bit of jaundice as well, so unfortunately she's not with us for Christmas, but she's essentially fine. We're all looking forward to meeting her properly, but it seems we're still in for a little wait.

What else...

I will have already told you about Italian Christmases, so I won't spend too long on that, but just say that we spent Christmas Eve eating seafood round Monica's auntie's place. Carlo made a wicked sauce for the spaghetti. Today, for Christmas, it was the nuclear Zagalia family plus husbands. Soon I shall be speaking to Mum and Dad on Skype with any luck.

A week in Sassuolo

2009-10-12T18:58:00.003+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

You can tell that a corner has been turned in technological-interpersonal relations when your mum says she's surprised you haven't updated you blog.

So, a week ago we arrived in Sassuolo, after a train journey of a bit longer than three hours, with the two biggest suitcases we could get our hands on, to sign the paperwork for my tirocinio, essentially low-paid work experience. But, very much on the plus side, they're paying for our accomodation, so it actually works out very generous, especially given that we're essentially staying in a hotel. It seems a bit ridiculous really - we've been very lucky. I forget precisely what we did that day, but it won't have been too much 'cos we were cream-crackered.

The most reasonably-priced supermarket is just over the road, and today Monica informed me that they have HP brown sauce, Colman's mustard, Weetabix and Jordan's cereals, which, sadly, but in all honestly, is a bit mind-blowing.

My first working week started on a Tuesday. It's a 20 minute walk, which I can't really complain about. We are at the edge of town though really, which is a bit of a bore. It took me quite a few efforts to find the quickest route using a map. They're not big on labelling streets in Italy. Monica seems to think it's much of a muchness in England, but I don't think so.

For the first week I was working entirely on one series of documents for one client, to do with cars. It wasn't gripping stuff, but it was useful, because I kept on seeing the same terminology over and over again, and I was revising it, so I saw both versions. The revision seems to be paper-based, which is charmingly low-tech, but I'm not quite sure that the disadvantages don't outweigh the benefits. The work environment seems pretty good - a bit less today I think, but then it's Monday even in Italy. Tomorrow I finally get a computer and another job to do.

On Saturday we had quite a frustrating day really. Monica saw a cheap iron in the publicity for a supermarket. We needed an iron because the hotel doesn't have ironing facilities for the guests, but you can pay for them to do it for you - sod that. We went for a 20 minute walk to buy the iron, among other things, 20 minutes back in order for the iron to break pretty much instantly and Monica to take an extended look on the bleak side of life until we went back to the same place to buy a more expensive iron, and shell out for the adaptor* and extension lead that we needed to buy in any case. And then we walked back. Then we found out that a letter form the Student Loans company dated April had arrived in Offagna (quite a sense of timing that the postal service have, eh?) which seems to indicate that Monica has to cough up a number of hundreds of quids, plus she has to see the doctor about something. Humph.

Sunday we went to mass, obviously. We decided to try S. Antonio because they seem to have loads going on, a choir, two seperate groups for married couples, Rinnovamento nello Spirito and so on. We were a bit disappointed. We had a peek at the church during the week, and Monica isn't keen on the architecture. I think she finds it harder than I do to look beyond these things; I'm not mad keen on it myself, but I don't think it's that horribly modern actually. I don't know if they do this in English Catholic parishes, but here sometimes you get someone popping up at the lectern and giving brief reflections/commentaries on the mass. It's usually pretty trite and you want them to let the priest get on and say mass because the ordinary liturgy is rather more inspiring. They had one of those. It was the music that really let it down though. Perhaps you'll think me unkind, but I would have found it easier to worship without the music group (it wasn't really a choir - I could see that coming in all honestly). The musicians were pretty okay actually, but the mix was all wrong**; you couldn't hear the words of whatever they were singing, and there didn't even seem to be any hymnals - in Italy you're just expected to know the words. We couldn't really hear the singers, just enough to know that they were a bit ropey. I bet that they practise with the instruments too loud as well, so they never really hear themselves. I'm not just a young fogey, I promise - I like guitars and whatnot, but it jsut didn't come together - it was more of a distraction from the liturgy than anything, and I don't need any help with being distracted.

Well, that was negative way to end that blog entry. Never mind. Until the next time I, or someone else (hah!), blogs, toodle-oo.

* Because it's not enough to have one kind of silly European plug in Italy, they have two which seem to alternate at random, and you can only plug certain everyday eletrical appliances into a given socket!

** I don't know quite what it is about Italians and mixing desks, but they don't seem to mix (so to speak). Italian sound set-ups, whether in church, on the radio or the television, always make me think that I could do better with one hand tied behind my back.

Book Review: The Story of a Soul

2009-09-20T15:52:00.005+01:00

I say book review, but I don't know if this isn't going to more preamble than review.

When I was living in Gordon Road in Exeter, a Catholic in a house full of people who went to Belmont Chapel*, "an independent, evangelical church with strong bible teaching", I found a textbook lying round from a course taken by (at least some of) their contact workers. This one was from a module on the history of the reformation, and I had a nosey because it never hurts to know how people with opinions other than yours see things.

One of the things it mentioned was the cult of the saints. It was some time ago so I can't recall the exact words, but the gist of it was that the Church's stress on the importance of venerating saints made people feel distant from God; it set up an image of impossibly perfect people who are better than us and closer to God than we are, whereas us grotty sinners need to beg them for salvation and do everything the Church tells us. Naughty Catholic Church.

Now, there's something in the first part of that, but only because any truth can be distorted: "[W]here sin increased, grace increased all the more[. ...] What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" (Romans 5-6) The above is not what the Church tells us about the saints, though of course priests are quite capable of preaching error, or preaching badly. The Church's doctrine of the saints is a joyful things, but the devil is a dab-hand at making what is good appear evil, and what is evil appear good. There's a lot of joy on offer for a practising Catholic, and a lot of guilt for a lapsed Catholic - the same, in point of fact is true for any kind of Christian, although perhaps less explicitly.

For now, it suffices to say that the saints are our brothers in Christ, because they are as much part of the one body of Christ as we are, and "neither death nor life[...] will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8) which is inseparable from love for our brothers: "[I]f we love one another, God abides in us." (1 John 4) The Church singles out the saints for us as people who lived holy lives, so that we can follow their example, as they followed the example of Christ. (c.f. I Corinthians 11:1) I wrote a lot about the saints a while ago, here, here and here.

I should probably start talking about the book now shouldn't I? I already blogged saying that I wanted to read (or listen to) The Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, because trying to follow the example of the saints without getting to know them doesn't make a lot more sense than trying to have a relationship with God without praying. The best way, I thought, to dispel this gloomy picture of perfect little plaster-saints that have nothing to do with us muggles is to find out about them.

Well, it wasn't quite what I expected. I liked the beginning a lot, reading about her family life, the trials and the graces, and somewhat predictably, her sweet demeanour. She's easy to like, and reading that part is like spending time in the company of a child - no bad thing, which is a part of St. Thérèse's message. James recently blogged about a writer at the Tablet (the Catholic Weekly we all love to hate, and which always seems to get airtime on R4's Sunday programme) who inexplicably described St. Thérèse's family as dysfunctional. I can't think of a more strange adjective to apply. Rather annoyingly, this seemed to me to be the picture of a perfect family, and where I was hoping to find the saint surprisingly similar to me, I found myself musing on whether I would be a saint too if I'd had that family (all self-delusion of course - and I'll just take a moment to thank my Mum and Dad for all that they've done for me in my life).

The middle section of the book, which is really the majority of it, describing her life in the Carmelite order, left me cold lots of times. It seemed that, far from escaping those plaster-saints, I'd found the perfect example of one; she enjoyed suffering, was filled with seemingly effortless love for God, was delighted to be forgotten and ignored - in short, the complete opposite of me, and the kind of person I feel the urge to slap around for making it all look so easy. The experiment definitely looked to be failing. Yeah, yeah, she suffered terribly - so what if she liked it so much?

What really redeemed the book for me was the final chapter. Until then it's all autobiography; the last chapter is supplied because she becomes unable to write. Now, I think it's worth saying at this point that I don't think many saints would want to be recognised as such - it stands to reason, you don't get to be a saint without a little bit of humility. I was reconciled to St. Thérèse by the witness of those who knew her. Especially towards the end, St. Thérèse talks about how she offers her sufferings to God for sinners, for missionaries, for priests. She talks about her love for mankind and her intention never to stop offering her life for her brothers even after death, never to rest until the end of the world and the beginning of eternity.

Love. Predictably enough, that's what sums it up, and whereas St. Thérèse's own words often didn't agree with me, the witness of the nuns to her tireless intercession and self-giving love for all the suffering and weary children of God did finally get through to me. It's very hard to describe - you'd have to read it you know. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was an apostle of God's love; That probably sounds very trite, and shallow, and very plaster saint, but you shall never appreciate what it means unless you get to know her, and that holds for all of the saints of God.

* Just because you can use Blogger to make a web-site, it doesn't mean you should. What happened to the nice hand-made site guys?

Earthquake

2009-09-20T08:49:00.004+01:00

Hey,

Apparently no damage has been reported, so I don't suppose it'll touch the British papers, but just in case...

There was an earthquake last night, that we felt at about 6, I think. 4.6 On the Richter scale, depth of 37km. The area affected was between the provinces of Ancona and Macerata and the epicentre was between Montefano e Santa Maria Nuova (Macerata, not the one near us).

Like I say, no damage reported, except to Monica and Vanessa's psyche.

P.S. Monica would prefer me to mention that the bed was shaking for under a minute (the number of seconds is in dispute) and the furniture (especially the display cabinet) was making disquieting noises. I think she's worried I might have made her sound like a wuss (pappamolla). She's not. I wasn't so worried, but I suspect that's more due to ignorance than anything else.

Work Trial

2009-09-18T19:24:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone,

Good news, I've got a 3 month work trial with a translation agency called Omnia based in Sassuolo. That's further north and more inland, in Emilia-Romagna, the land of spaghetti (alla) bolognese, parmesan, Parma ham and lasagna. It's quite a way away, but the accommodation will be arranged (possibly free) for both of us in a way we can manage. It's quite a specialised agency, which deals with mostly technical translations, manuals etc., for agricultural and earth-moving vehicles as well as cars. I shall have a bit to learn.

If the trial works out, it'll be a proper apprenticeship deal, and the salary would pretty good considering the current climate, not enough to start a family with unfortunately, but enough to manage on and start from.

We're pretty pleased and relieved even it only ends up being for three months. Thanks for all your prayers - you can carry on if you like.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Again

2009-08-10T09:22:00.005+01:00

I thought I'd blog something I was interested in which just happens to be topical. A little while ago James was criticising something that Archbishop Vincent Nichols said in an interview with the Catholic Herald. When I looked at that interview, I noticed this:

[B]y avoiding personal Confession do Catholics miss out on a unique encounter with Jesus himself?

Of course they do. [...]

I've been assured that when the relics of St Thérèse come then one of the things we must be prepared for is a huge increase in personal Confession. There were a couple of hundred youngsters up at the Brightlights festival in north London last weekend. At one time there were 15 priests there hearing Confessions on and off during the Saturday.

So there is something very precious about Confession and I think Catholics realise that. One of the things it is is a profound human truth, because all sacraments bring together the human realities and the divine intervention. It's a profound truth that we have to confess, that we have to face and name what we have done that is wrong. Otherwise the human process of healing, which grace builds on, doesn't begin. Sooner or later we have to do that.

I heard more about St. Thérèse's relics coming to the UK on Sunday last weekend; unfortunately you won't be able to hear that now, as they've had another transmission since then. They said the same thing about the spiritual fruits that her relics are bearing, the increase in confession etc.

It so happens that I've been meaning to read her Story of a Soul for some time. She's a Doctor of the Church, which means that it has been officially declared that through her writings the whole Church has derived great advantage. She's known for her "Little Way", a recognition that heroic deeds and great acts are not necessary to achieve great holiness but love can be lived out in the least of actions. Though she undertook the religious life, the "Little Way" has proved especially helpful for the laity.

So where am I going with all this? Well, the wonderful people at Librivox have just made Story of a Soul available in audio format. This is good for people like me, who like the fact that, say, Project Gutenberg has the text online, but would rather gouge out their own eyes than read a book from a monitor.

So, Librivox's Story of a Soul is here, and comes with helpful listening options (MP3s to download directly, individually or zipped, RSS feed, iTunes subscription, Chapter-a-day).
It's slightly less conveniently here in MP3 as well, at Maria Lectrix.
Or if you're a real glutton for punishment, you could read it online at Project Gutenberg.

Well, I hope I didn't just waste my time typing that. I'm really looking forward to listening to it myself.

Interviews, Translations, Handel, Jazz, Spoleto, Ferragosto

2009-08-09T08:56:00.005+01:00

Good morning and a very merry 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) to you.

It's been quite an eventful week, especially for us. On Monday I updated my CV with the details from Intrawelt and phoned the Student Loans Company to check whether I had to declare the one off payment - apparently I don't. Then we e-mailed it out to the addresses that Monica had been collecting over the previous week. It was a pretty good response. I had a phone call from another translation agency in Bagnacavallo (Bathehorse? Horsebath?). First they asked me to interview as a Project Manager and then they changed their minds and said that they'd like some translations from me first, which I haven't received yet. I also had an e-mail back from another agency asking for me to do some test translations, which I did, and bloody hard they were too. Another e-mail said there weren't any internal positions but, subject to some test translations, they'd consider me as a freelance translator. I had to reply saying that I wasn't sure I could because I don't have a P.IVA, which I would need if I were to be self-employed. Last but not least I had a call for an interview in Rimini for teaching work, so that's where I'm going on Tuesday, for an interview plus a language test that I'm told should take around 2 hours in all.

Rather remarkably, I've managed to see three concerts, all free, in the space of a week, one in Osimo and the other two in Offagna. It's very true that generally speaking there's not a lot to do round here, but on the plus side, the summer is packed with free events of good quality. We went to Osimo with Gio(vanna), Marghe's sister who's another friend of Monica's, to listen to some pieces for organ accompanied by an orchestra by Handel. It was very good. The organist had a tough time. I think it was a period instrument. In any case it was an upright affair that you have to play standing up. To add insult to injury, the multiple pages of sheet music, which the organist was attempting to manage on his own until this became untenable, didn't really fit on the music holder and the wind (it was in a courtyard) kept blowing the sheets around. Well done him. The concerts in Offagna were both jazz, part of a series of "Jazz and Wine" (not Jazz e Vino, because English is more cool, you see...) On Friday we went down to the, um, villa(?) where we buy our wine from and listened to bebop in the garden. That was my favourite; sax, piano, double bass and drums. The sax was very good, the pianist was mental - possibly a little too much, the percussion was outstanding - we weren't so keen on the double bass though. The acoustic was excellent, especially the drums. Monica said she liked it, but it didn't grab her so much. I thought it was great, but I was perhaps too tired to take it all in. I'm not good at listening to music at night. Then yesterday it was another quartet, led by a famous Italian jazz guitarist (Franco Cerri), backed up by a Hammond organ, double bass and drums. I didn't like it so much - there was considerably less swing and I'm never really convinced by jazz guitar anyway. The drumming was good, but without any reall swing, as I say, and he kind of ruined it by relentlessly using the cymbals so it was difficult to hear the percussion underneath. We did like the man on the double bass though. I think I quite like the Hammond organ - in small doses. I coulcn't imagine playing it every day though...

What with us living with Monica's Mum and Dad, we're always keen on the idea of getting away to get some time to ourselves, but without work this seems like something we probably shouldn't splash out on. However, as I just worked for a month we decided to go away into the mountains (everyone's at the beach at the moment you see, but if we're both still unemployed we can go when it's quieter) for a bit of relaxation. So we're off to Spoleto at the end of the month, staying here, which looks lovely. Looking forward to it.

As I said, everyone's at the beach at the moment. This is because in Italy, the whole of August is basically holiday time. Lots of offices shut down for at least a few weeks. This means that the roads are horribly congested just now. Imagine that all English bank holidays happened back to back and you'd have some idea of how lousy it is on the roads right now. It's linked with Ferragosto, a celebration that dates from Roman times, but which is now linked with the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, dogmatically defined in 1950, if I've understood it correctly.

Il Testamento di Tito

2009-08-03T16:33:00.010+01:00

You may remember I translated an article on Italian party politics a little while ago. I decided I'd try and do a few more translations, a little inspired by my time at Intrawelt. I'm using a free, very basic, translation programme called OmegaT, and what I thought I'd do was translate some songs for you, because I've been enjoying some Italian music, and I thought you could enjoy it too.

So this is a song by Fabrizio de André that I like, but which is a bit scandalous. Fabrizio de André is very famous here. He died young and is very highly regarded. There are things like memorial concerts for him and his work receives scholarly attention. I asked Monica if that meant he was a bit like an Italian Bob Dylan in that regard, and she seemed to think that you could say that.

The titular Tito you may or may not know as St. Dismas, that is the 'Good Thief'. Apparently in the apocryphal Arabic infancy gospel he's called Tito/Titus instead. Like I say, it's a bit scandalous. You might make something of the turnaround at the end (he is the Good thief after all) but this is essentially his attack on the Ten Commandments.

Just to preempt any comments to the effect that the commandments have been altered in a Catholic direction, I know. I suppose Fabrizio's ten came from some kind of catechetical source where Sabbath observance is linked to feast days and adultery is linked to self-gratification et cetera. And anyone who says the numbers are wrong will want pointing out to them that the Bible doesn't give numbers to the commandments - that's tradition, which varies from denomination to denomination.

The Italian used for the commandments isn't really thee-thouish, but it is traditional, so I started from the 10 in the Baltimore Catechism, which follows the Douay-Rheims in any case.

Il testamento di Tito
Fabrizio De André

Non avrai altro Dio, all'infuori di me,
spesso mi ha fatto pensare:
genti diverse, venute dall'est
dicevan che in fondo era uguale.
Credevano a un altro diverso da te,
e non mi hanno fatto del male.
Credevano a un altro diverso da te
e non mi hanno fatto del male.

Non nominare il nome di Dio,
non nominarlo invano.
Con un coltello piantato nel fianco
gridai la mia pena e il suo nome:
ma forse era stanco, forse troppo occupato
e non ascoltò il mio dolore.
Ma forse era stanco, forse troppo lontano
davvero, lo nominai invano.

Onora il padre. Onora la madre
e onora anche il loro bastone,
bacia la mano che ruppe il tuo naso
perché le chiedevi un boccone:
quando a mio padre si fermò il cuore
non ho provato dolore.
Quando a mio padre si fermò il cuore
non ho provato dolore.

Ricorda di santificare le feste.
Facile per noi ladroni
entrare nei templi che rigurgitan salmi
di schiavi e dei loro padroni
senza finire legati agli altari
sgozzati come animali.
Senza finire legati agli altari
sgozzati come animali.

Il quinto dice "non devi rubare"
e forse io l'ho rispettato
vuotando in silenzio, le tasche già gonfie
di quelli che avevan rubato.
Ma io, senza legge, rubai in nome mio,
quegli altri, nel nome di Dio.
Ma io, senza legge, rubai in nome mio,
quegli altri, nel nome di Dio.

Non commettere atti che non siano puri
cioè non disperdere il seme.
Feconda una donna ogni volta che l'ami, così sarai uomo di fede:
poi la voglia svanisce ed il figlio rimane
e tanti ne uccide la fame.
Io, forse, ho confuso il piacere e l'amore,
ma non ho creato dolore.

Il settimo dice "non ammazzare"
se del cielo vuoi essere degno.
guardatela oggi, questa legge di Dio,
tre volte inchiodata nel legno.
guardate la fine di quel nazareno,
e un ladro non muore di meno.
Guardate la fine di quel nazareno,
e un ladro non muore di meno.

Non dire falsa testimonianza
e aiutali a uccidere un uomo.
Lo sanno a memoria il diritto divino
e scordano sempre il perdono.
Ho spergiurato su Dio e sul mio onore
e no, non ne provo dolore.
Ho spergiurato su Dio e sul mio onore
e no, non ne provo dolore.

Non desiderare la roba degli altri,
non desiderarne la sposa.
Ditelo a quelli, chiedetelo ai pochi
che hanno una donna e qualcosa:
nei letti degli altri, già caldi d'amore
non ho provato dolore.
L'invidia di ieri non è già finita:
stasera vi invidio la vita.

Ma adesso che viene la sera ed il buio
mi toglie il dolore dagli occhi
e scivola il sole al di là delle dune
a violentare altre notti:
io nel vedere quest'uomo che muore,
madre, io provo dolore.
Nella pietà che non cede al rancore,
madre, ho imparato l'amore.

The Testament of Titus
Fabrizio De André

“Thou shalt not have strange gods before me”;
it's often made me think:
other peoples, from the East
said that it was really all the same.
They believed in a strange god, a different god from yours,
and they didn't do me any harm.
They believed in a strange god, a different god from yours,
and they didn't do me any harm.

“Thou shalt not take the name of God,
thou shalt not take it in vain.”
With a knife planted in my side
I cried out my pain and his name:
but perhaps he was tired, perhaps he was too busy
and didn't listen to my pain.
But perhaps he was tired, perhaps he was too far away.
I certainly took his name in vain.

“Honour thy father. Honour thy mother”
and honour their cane as well,
kiss the hand that broke your nose
because you asked for a bite to eat:
when my father's heart stopped
I felt no pain.
When my father's heart stopped
I felt no pain.

“Remember that thou hallow the holy days.”
Easy for us thieves
to enter the temples, flooded with the psalms
of slaves and their masters,
without ending up bound to the altars,
throats cut like animals!
Without ending up bound to the altars,
throats cut like animals!

The fifth says "thou shalt not steal"
and perhaps I've obeyed it,
emptying in silence, the swollen pockets
of thieves.
But I, lawless, stole in my own name,
those thieves, in the name of God.
But I, lawless, stole in my own name,
those thieves, in the name of God.

“Thou shalt not commit impure acts”;
that is, don't spill your seed.
Impregnate a woman every time you love her, and you'll be a man of faith:
then the desire vanishes, the child remains
and hunger kills many sons.
Perhaps I've confused pleasure with love,
but I haven't begotten pain.

The seventh says "thou shalt not kill"
If you want to be worthy of heaven.
Look today at this law of God,
nailed three times into wood.
Look what's become of that Nazarene,
and not one less thief dies.
Look what's become of that Nazarene,
and not one less thief dies.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness”
and help to kill a man.
They know the divine law by heart
but always forget to forgive.
I've sworn falsely by God and on my honour
and no, it doesn't give me any pain.
I've sworn falsely by God and on my honour
and no, it doesn't give me any pain.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods,
thou shalt not covet his wife.”
Tell it to those, ask it of the few
that have a woman and something else:
in my neighbour's bed, already warm with love
I felt no pain.
Yesterday's envy isn't finished yet:
now I envy your lives.

But now that evening comes and the darkness
takes the pain from my eyes
and the sun slips beyond the dunes
to violate other nights:
I, seeing this man as he dies,
mother, I feel pain.
In compassion that refuses to hate,
mother, I've learnt what love means.

Translation Trial & Locals

2009-07-25T09:07:00.005+01:00

I've got a week left of the trial, but I already know how it's turned out. When I had the interview, Alessandro talked about a particular contract for the trial period. Being English, I thought I would have something to sign on the first day, and probably some things, like bank details, to pass on. Nothing doing.

With a week to go, I thought it'd make sense to check what was going on so I asked to talk to Alessandro. We only talked about the contract in passing, because he told me his decision about the trial, which is that I haven't got the job. He said that there was no problem with me personally or with my level of English (as if), but that my level of Italian was too low, based on feedback from other people. This, apparently, wouldn't be a problem in other circumstances, because after a year I'd probably be fine, but they're looking for someone with the right qualities from the off. He did, on the other hand, say that some freelance work could be possible.

So there you are. Those of you who know me (and who else, I wonder, is reading?) will know that I'm not the over-confident type - I'm probably more aware of my limitations than is helpful - but I must say it seems like a mistake. Of the mistakes that I'm aware I made, one was major. Almost every day, I proofread translations which were clearly much, much worse than the translations I was doing, in terms of English, and which contained objective errors that I could easily spot. In fact, it was quite an ego trip, seeing that real-life translators were getting paid real money for what I could see was trash, and I could turn them into something better with relative ease.

There's another 'English' there called Paul, who I worked quite closely with at the start and who does the job most similar to what mine is/was. He said he was surprised and said kind things about my level of Italian and said much what I said above about the quality of "professional" translators. He also said that Alessandro had been looking for a mother tongue proofreader for ages, which makes the fact that he hasn't taken me on seem doubly peculiar. Consequently I entertain vague hopes that he'll change his mind, though I'm obviously not counting on it.

In other news, controversy in the village. The Medieval Festival (my word, that's an unexpectedly swish site - why didn't they get it translated? I would have done it for free...) started last Saturday and finishes tomorrow. Anyway, one of the features is a 'disfida in arme' ('weapon challenge') between Offagna's 'Rioni' ('Districts'). Our district (Torrione) won it, but S. Benardino weren't happy with the result and asked for an appeal. Torrione said they would withdraw their participation from the Festival and proceeded to take all their flags down (there are a lot of them about). In the end Torrione still won, but one thing led to another and there was fighting in the streets. Monica's Dad, Carlo, and Don Luca, the young priest, had to keep trying to separate them. Apparently one guy might have needed an ambulance. So that's village life for you.

Translation Trial

2009-07-11T10:34:00.001+01:00

Monica and I were talking for some time about relocating to another city or two where we were more likely to find work. We took a long time to come up with any plan of action though, because I'm pretty ignorant about Italy in the first place, and these are strange times, so it was hard to know where to try. Nor did anyone feel especially competent to advise us. But we finally came up with a few ideas, and instead of relocating (because nowhere's a safe bet), we decided just to send out speculative applications to companies we could find in the yellow pages that we thought might like an English native speaker. I also started a 54 day rosary (that's a pair of triple novenas, if you're wondering – one for please, one for thank you) for the intention of a job for me.

We started out with the places closest to us, because it's not like we actually want to leave Offagna, so the closer the better. We got going with this on a Friday. On Saturday morning I had a phone call from Alessandro Potalivo – Intrawelt is his company. That caught me rather on the back foot. In any case we talked about my CV and we arranged an interview on Monday. It was a strange sort of interview – he invited Monica too and his wife came in for the latter half as well – but it's how I got the trial period I'm on. Essentially he said he could do with a mother tongue proof reader, but not everyone who speaks English can proof read, which is perfectly fair.

What is a strain is the hours and the commute. Office hours are 8:30-18:30 and even with a generous break of 1-1½hrs (I've not taken 1½ so far), it's still more hours than I've ever worked. If I get the job we'll try and get a place in Porto Sant'Elpidio as soon as we can, to ease that particular strain. I get up at 6:40 and get back home at 20:10, more or less.

As to how it's going – quite well I think. It's a mixed bag – What job isn't? - but I think I'm doing quite well. I don't know if Alessandro will take me on, but we shall see. What did surprise me was that I'm doing translations about as much, or at least not significantly less, than I'm doing proof reading. That wasn't was I was expecting at all, but I seem to get by, after an initial shock. I've made some mistakes, including quite a big one yesterday where I parsed a verb into the wrong person, but, the way I see it, they're hardly even my fault - I never said anything to indicate that I felt my Italian was up to translation work. One good thing about the job is the variety. Translation agencies translate whatever they can, so you end up with all sorts. Even if the bulk of the job is boring financial paperwork, I've worked on a recipe for sweet and sour ribs (thank you unrequested Google image search for teaching me that “6 pieces of green onion” means “6 spring onions”) a little article about Iceland's lᴓveli lakes and, slightly less excitingly, but still better than finance, different tyre categories. It's also a very quiet office for the most part, though it is a good, friendly atmosphere. We use a little messaging system, so you don't tend to hear those brief, everyday sorts of queries because it's all being typed out silently. I feel sorry for the girl who works all alone on the reception desk (though she's not just the receptionist) especially.

With regards to actual proof reading, I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but it's harder than I thought, and for reasons I wasn't expecting. Perhaps I am naïve. One thing that was made very clear by Paul, another Englishman (or perhaps he's Irish actually) was that one of the major problems in the translation industry is the quality threshold. Essentially, anyone who speaks two languages can say “I'm a translator”, with hilarious consequences. But a good translation, in short, is made by someone translating into their mother tongue, with a good knowledge of their own language (which, as is only too apparent to me at least, is by no means a given) and a good knowledge of the subject matter. So finding a good translator isn't exactly a piece of cake.

About 50% of the time, when I proof read, it's more like a re-write, or that it's me doing the translation. I'm not sure precisely how many of Intrawelt's translators are technically freelance, but they certainly almost all work remotely. The team I work with is made up, for the most part, of project managers, which is to say the people who co-ordinate the translation by dishing it out to various translators. Anyway, we receive these translations through the ether and sometimes I find it very hard to believe that these people are really English mother tongues. No exaggeration, I assure you. I have to assume either that they're translating in the wrong direction, for whatever reason, or that they've somehow bluffed their way onto the records as English mother tongues, or more charitably that though they're technically mother tongues, they've been living and working in another language for so long that they've lost their grasp on English, which may not have been amazing to begin with.

If anything's going to stop me getting this job, I expect it'll be this, that I can proof read an intelligible English text, but I can't fix a god-awful translation that I don't understand in either the original or the “English”. We shall see.

You wouldn't want nuns to fall out of windows would you?

2009-06-10T09:04:00.003+01:00

Because if there were any more vocations to the convent where we stayed for the weekend, that's probably what would happen. Here, have a read:

Benedictine Convent "Santa Maria delle Rose"
Via Castello, 18
62020 Sant'Angelo in Pontano, Macerata
ITALY

September 2008

Dear Sir

We are a Benedictine monastic community of strict observance, dedicated to praising the Lord and praying for every man on earth.

We are 30 sisters, the majority of whom are very young, from Italy and from other parts of the world (Belgium, Poland, Canada, Mexico and Taiwan).

The Lord is surprising us, continually sending us new young women who want to embark upon our Benedictine life, that unfolds in a harmonious alternation of Ora et Labora (Prayer and Work). In this way, as St. Benedict recommends in the Holy Rule, we sustain ourselves with the work of our hands.

The old convent is by now too small for our needs and for this reason we think that it is the will of God to construct a new one that, while remaining in the spirit of St. Benedict, will make tangible in its beauty the love of God for each person. We are sure that the Lord will carry this work to completion.

We are writing to ask for your help according to your means.

The new convent will be erected in Passo Sant'Angelo, where the Lord has already provided us with a gift of beautiful land and the authorisation to begin construction.

May the Lord bless you, your family and your work. We are praying for you.

Mother Abbess and community
Tel/Fax: (+39)0733/661206 or (+39)0733/978909 E-mail: francescadegregoriis@virgilio.it

If you would like to participate in the construction:

Banca Delle Marche:	IBAN: IT26 M060 5569 1600 0000 0002 225	BIC/SWIFT: BAMAIT3AXXX
BancoPosta Italia:	IBAN: IT89 A076 0113 4000 0003 6806 743	BIC/SWIFT: BPPIITRRXXX

That's their letter. I'd like to add some words of my own:

The Mother's not kidding that the Lord is surprising them. At one time it seemed that the convent was bound to shut down for the lack of vocations, but now the place is teeming with young sisters, and quite an international bunch of sisters too. They are not chalking this up to co-incidence, but to the will of the Lord to do a new thing. They've already received requests to found new convents abroad, not so much in developing countries, but in countries where the Gospel has faded out of public life and where they would be sheep among wolves.

I might also mention that the New Movements of the Church have had a large part to play in this. That is to say that many of these young women were drawn to this ancient way of life precisely because they responded courageously to the call to live out their lay vocation, the priesthood of all believers. They haven't "escaped" - they're full of life and they're doing battle "against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" on your behalf and on the behalf of everyone you love.

We're grateful for the love, the hospitality, and the words that they gave to us during our time there.

N.B. There are enough English-speakers in the convent that, should you wish to send a letter or an e-mail, I'm sure it will be gratefully received.

Nuns and Voting

2009-06-09T08:31:00.003+01:00

This weekend we went to the Benedictine convent of Sant'Angelo in Pontano, "Santa Maria delle Rose". That's where Monica's friend Marghe(rita) has taken the habit and taken her temporary vows (if I err not). Apparently she "expires" (her own word - like passing your sell-by date) within a year, so she's pretty close to the final commitment. She's been there four years now. We felt the need for a retreat, if only a little one, and Marghe is Monica's best friend, present company excepted, so we decided to take a weekend break there.

It was great.

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,
for He is going to say,
"I came as a guest, and you received Me" (Matt. 25:35).
And to all let due honor be shown,
especially to the domestics of the faith and to pilgrims.
- Rule of St. Benedict

One of the things that this means is that I ate very well (though the tea was Lipton). Monica didn't eat so much, for she is a delicate individual with delicate insides, and when we arrived, the only other guest was fasting (practically two days), with a room right next to the dining room, so we couldn't really bang on about the food too much. She was a girl called Sonia on the (Neocatechumenal) Way and we felt a bit sorry for her because she was very young, fasted a lot and evidently had a very emotionally overwhelming time - notwithstanding the fact that she'd fasted, she didn't have a lot of appetite afterwards.

We didn't have any kind of programme for the retreat, so we basically ate, joined in with the Office, the Mass, spent time with Marghe and talked with Madre Diletta (Diletta meaning "one in whom delight is taken" rather than Delitta which is almost Italian for "crime") who Marghe recommended to us as a person through whom the Holy Spirit speaks.

I love singing the Psalms. We decided to make the effort to get up for the first prayers of the day, which means getting up around 5-6 at the weekend and neither of us regretted it at all though we did get quite tired out. The convent is a bit of a peculiar one. It looked at one point as though it was going to close down due to the lack of vocations, but God had other ideas, and it's currently packed out with young women. One of the consequences of this is that, for a Benedictine convent, it's a madhouse, and another is that their singing (about which I am certainly not complaining) isn't up to the high standards that are rather expected of the religious orders - so they were quite impressed when I just turned up and sang. Without going into detail, it was great, and it was nice simply to have a straightforward acoustic - San Tommaso is pretty echoey, so it's hard to follow a melody you don't know.

We were very fortunate to have the amount of time that we did with Marghe - you'd be surprised at how busy nuns in an enclosed order can be, and it was good to catch up, especially for Monica of course. Practically the first time Monica spoke to me it was to confide in me how hard it was for her that her friend was entering the convent - she misses her. But it was also very good for my Italian, not just with Marghe, but with everyone. It was very easy to listen, and to speak, which is not something I can take for granted here.

I'm not going to go into what we talked about with Madre Diletta, but suffice to say we received a lot of comfort and a lot to think about, and we're very glad that Marghe suggested it.

Now, theirs is an enclosed order, but it was time to vote over here too, and the Church makes a big deal of voting (Carlo blames the Church for supporting Berlusconi, among other things) so they go out in groups to vote. We went with Marghe's lot as an excuse for a stroll, and one of the nuns, on learning that I was from Sheffield, proceeded to tell us more than I could remember about the Yorkshire metal industry. Pfft. Sant'Angelo in Pontano is a very nice place, and there's a beautiful view of the mountains, behind some of the greenest hills I've seen in Italy (not so green as England), so it was nice to see the nuns having a chance to appreciate that as well.

We very cleverly scheduled our retreat so that we had to vote when we got back to Offagna tired from insane prayer schedules. It was a bit funny to vote in Italy, but the system is basically exactly the same as in England. Monica asked me who I was going to vote for, but apparently I wasn't meant to tell her, because then everyone would know. This is a little village after all. Monica says if people know how you vote, you get labelled - s'probably true everywhere. I voted PD anyway. I had half a mind to vote UdC because of their family policies, but they're rather a minorty party, and I'm not sure how much you can legislate for strong families. I also like the idea of the IdV, because if there's one thing Italy needs, it's a continual, real struggle against corruption. Di Pietro, the leader, was a judge at the time of Tangentopoli ('Bribesville', a scandal that destroyed the Christian Democrats, completely reconfiguring the Italian political landscape) before founding his party as a response to the corruption. But I couldn't condone all of their programme.

Anyhow, same story here as in the rest of Europe. The PdL, Berlusconi's centre-right party, in coalition with the Lega Nord (racists) seem to have done it again. The IdV have made good progress, and I hope they continue to do so.

The European Elections

2009-06-04T16:19:00.002+01:00

I decided to do a rough translation of an article on the various parties and their manifestos in Il Messagero because it seemed like a good way to a) help me vote sensibly b) practise Italian and c) give you a window into Italian politics, should you want such a thing.

Here we vote on Saturday and Sunday. We're away for the weekend at a nunnery for a personal retreat, so we'll have to vote when we get back on Sunday.

If you want to ask any questions, do. I know that there are tons of typos - this does not concern me. I think it's pretty interesting to compare this with British politics.

Here it is:

Popolo della Libertà (People of Liberty): first objective: becoming the largest party within the European popular parties
The first objective of Berlusconi is to make the PdL the most numerous group of the PPE, thus the leading party, thereby conditioning the choices of [the European popular house?]. The PdL has undersigned the programme of the PPE, that, after unrestrained laissez faire, ending with the world finiancial crisis, is now staking everything on the “social market economy”. The financial markets must submit to fixed rules. Job creation is a priority, given that unemployment is on the increase, as well as investment in green technology and renewable and nuclear energy.
Then the struggle against illegal immigration, a common policy on asylum and the Blue Card system for immigrants. Pension reform and tax policies for families. Also a stronger EU that will renew its partnership with the USA, more control of world financial markets from the Monetary Fund and re-inforcement of the UN.

Partito Democratico (Democratic Party): Economic Emergency: supporting workers and businesses in crisis
The PD is relying heavily on social-economic themes. Modification of the stability pact (to remove investment and reserach expenses from the deficit), issuing of European public qualifications to develop infrastructures and a fund for supporting workers and firms struck by the international crisis. The development of social shock-absorbers, from a minimum income to support for low salaries.
Then the “green economy” following Obama, an obligatory Erasmus programme in the universities and achieving equality between men and women. Management of the immigration problem by the EU: struggle against illegal immigration, black-market work and human-trafficking, but also integration, common rules on asylum, and entrusting border control to the EU rather than single states. Co-operation against organised crime and defence of Schengen, creating a European police force.

Northern League: No to super-state Europe
less immigrants, more security
More than a programme, Carroccio proposes a manifesto against beaurocracy from Brussells. The league doesn't want a “continental super-state”. The alternative is that of a “Europe of the peoples” with a confederal model in which the member states maintain their unaltered sovereignty. The League's document recalls the battle for Europe's Christian roots: a separate chapter is dedicated to the refusal of Turkey's entry into the EU. The participation of Ankara “would make the idea of a Europe founded on common roots, which are Christian, collapse”. Fiscal federalism, defense of Malpensa as an international airport, defence of the family and no marriages except between a man and a woman. Also: regional autonomy in waste-management and re-introduction of customs duties to beat unfair competition from the far-east and elsewhere.

Unione di Centro (Union of the Centre): The family above everything
aids, relief and subsidiarity
The centrists of the UDC are relying heavily on the Europe of families. And they've put together a manifesto in which the defence of the family is the central nucleus: the family founded on marriage, as the Catholics consider it; family policies that aim to defeat poverty, without the redistribution of wealth as their goal, to be applied in terms of subsidiarity and not welfare, that don't regard solely welfare, but also tax relief, school, bioethics and employment. A fundamental principle is that a European citizen's capcity to contribute must be based on the size of the family in his care. Immigration also to be managed with a view to the family: “Illegal immigration and violence, exploitation and xenophobia – they are fought with family unity and Europe must take up the fight”.

Left and Liberty: Reduction of working hours. Yes to civil partnerships and gay marriages
Vendola and company are looking to the European socialy salary for the unemployed and also propose ther reduction of working hours and taxation of large estates, instability, reduction of the differences in EU payments. Renewable energy rather than nuclear, bio-construction, quality agriculture, consumer protection and struggle against the climate emergency. On civil rights, Left and Liberty wants a Europe that recognises the decisive role of the individual conscience in the great ethical questions: Yes to liberty of treatment, to the use of stem-cells, to assisted fertilisation, to civil unions and gay marriages. Equal opportunity and freedom for women and men. No to the Gelmini reform, quality public schools and universities financed by public money. Against armaments and in favour of disarmament.

PRC-PDCI: Minimum salary, private incomes to be taxed and dismissals blocked
Another Europe is possible is the title of the manifesto presented by the anticapitalist list formed by the PRC and PDCI. “We are opposed to a laissez faire, technocratic Europe”, it declares. The joint programme sustains that the workers mustn't pay for the crisis of capitalism. Therefore, a plan for full employment and a fund financed by the taxation of private incomes and financial speculation is necessary, as well as the blocking of dismissals and delocalisation. The firms that make use of public contributions can't dimiss workers or use the funds for relocating production. A European contract and minimum salary, a social income for the unemployed and an adequate pension. Among the proposals: public control of credit, nationalisation of the banks, closure of detention centres for immigrants, the dissolution of NATO. Renewable energy and no to nuclear.

Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values): More transparency and inelegibility for the condemned. European social pact
Italy of Values presents a 12-point programme. The party of Di Pietro intend to carry their flag for the defense of legality into Europe: transparency in European finance, inelegiblity for the condemned and European sentences to be respected within 60 days of their approval. The IdV says yes to the affermation of civil rights (in particular civil unions and living wills), and would like the obligation to study a second European language from infancy. On immigration it asks for the regulation of the flow of migrants on the basis of solidarity, of regular employment and of capacity for subsistence. Help to the unemployed, a European social pact for the ditrubution of aid and social shock-absorbers in relation to support capacity, to the nuclear family and to the possibility of relocation.

The list of Bonino: “The United States of Europe, immediately”. A vote against 'partyocracy'“United States of Europe, immediately. For a European homeland against the Europe of homelands”, the slogan of the Bonino-Pannella list and the most European of all. The exact opposite of that procliamed by Bossi's League, that is the desire to have a strong, united Europe guiding us, overcoming selfishness and national myopia. One of the strongest slogans exclaims: “For the Liberation from 60 years of 'partyocracy' Let us call together the Italians for the great 'American' reform, liberal and federalist, lay and non-violent, for a new governing class, an alternative to the one we have, for an open society like the one proposed by our referendums, often approved by the overwhelming majority of the Italian people, but then betrayed by 'partyocracy'”. The radicals denounce: “Not only democratic elections” undermined by disinformation and “violation of legality”.

Pilgrimage to Loreto

2009-05-24T13:44:00.003+01:00

I was thinking that it's been a while since I blogged, and that it's really been a while since I let anyone know what I'm doing except over the phone, so I'm going to try and be more regular.

What's more, you Dobson people, I'd like to know what you're up to as well - so if you blogged a bit as well, that'd be great. And there's Skype too.

Anyway, rather conveniently, this weekend we've done something for a change. We went on the diocesan pilgrimage to Loreto. Now there's a risk that may sound hardcore, but, if Wolfram|Alpha is to be believed, it was only a3.735 mile walk away, or 20 seconds at the speed of sound.

We got a lift to Crocette from Monica's Dad, because the coach from Offagna was a bit steep (€7 each) and picked up a booklet each and we were off, with a Madonna of Loreto carried up at the front, and various people carrying speakers all the way through the crowd. We basically walked across the main road - people are used to this kind of thing in Italy. The speakers didn't work very well, and sometimes cut out completely. I don't know quite what it is, but pretty much all of the audio equipment in Italy seems to be really clapped out and unfit for purpose.

It was good, but it was more rosary than I can deal with really. We prayed 2 and a half sets of mysteries, and walking in a crowd in the heat (we've had a warm spell here - pre-emptive summer temperatures) makes it difficult to concentrate. For those of you who don't know, the main point of the rosry is to meditate on events in Jesus' and Mary's life i.e. The Annunciation, Mary's visit to Elisabeth, The birth of Jesus, his presenatation at the temple, his being found among the teachers of the law there. So if you can't concentrate it detracts rather.

And when we got to the end, it was the mass of the Ascension with the bishop, who was atypically brief in his homily (apparently he had to be up for something early this morning). All in all, a good day was had by all.

Schools nearly finished in Italy. They have an immense summer holiday. And in the last weeks of school, even goody-two-shoes' like Monica bunk off apparently. Plus, the first weeks a new school year are infallibly interrupted by strikes. So this means that the children we've been helping with English and sundry other scholastic disciplines won't need our services soon, and we'll have more free time to look for work but less money. We intend to go to the beach and look for seasonal work.

Talking Dirty (Yes, it's rude.)

2009-05-18T11:42:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Dave recently put up a link to a thing called Porn-Again Christian, a leaflet about masturbation and pornography in a Christian context. There's some good stuff in there, but I did find myself disagreeing with quite a few things, and I wanted to mention one in particular:

Many Christian pastors have tried in vain to find a mention of masturbation in the Scripture so they can condemn and forbid it. Unable to find any verses on the matter, some have foolishly used the story of Onan in Genesis 38:6-10 as their proof text. However, the story of Onan says nothing of masturbation. Instead, the story is about a man who died, leaving his wife a childless widow. The dead man’s brother was then expected to marry his widowed sister-in-law, have normal sexual relations with her, and enable her to have children. Although Onan was happy to have sex with his sister-in-law, he would pull out of her just prior to his orgasm and ejaculate on the ground rather than obey God and become a father. To argue against masturbation with Genesis 38:6-10 is as ludicrous as arguing for masturbation like one young guy did with me by quoting Ecclesiastes 9:10, which says, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might."

Now I disagree with the author, one "Pastor Mark Driscoll [of] Mars Hill Church, Seattle", on his take on the passage, but I disagree still more with the tone he takes. People who disagree with him argue "foolishly". He asserts (there is no argument - the relevant verses about the levirate law are omitted) that it has nothing to say about masturbation, rather, that it's purely about his refusal to continue his brother's line. Then he makes an irrelevant and insulting comparison between those who do think that this passage is an argument against masturbation and some guy looking for an excuse to wank in the bible.

Here's the story of Onan:

Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the LORD's sight; so the LORD put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan, "Lie with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the LORD's sight; so he put him to death also. - Genesis 38:6-10

Here's the substance of the levirate law, together with the designated punishment for defying that law:

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.

However, if a man does not want to marry his brother's wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, "My husband's brother refuses to carry on his brother's name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me." Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, "I do not want to marry her," his brother's widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, "This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother's family line." That man's line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. - Deuteronomy 25:5-10

Onan refuses to "obey God and become a father"
- God kills him.

An Israelite "refuses to carry on his brother's name"
1. He loses a sandal
2. He gets spat on
3. He gets publicly dressed down
4. His family is called "Unsandaled"

Now, I'm sure I lack many of the qualities necessary to become the Pastor of Mars Hill Church, Seattle, but at least I can pick up on the massive disconnect between those two scenarios. Is is possible that there's more to this verse than Driscoll says? Well... yes.

On Driscoll's scheme, the crime is the same in both cases, the refusal to become the father of children by his brother's widow. Consequently, we'd expect the punishment to be the same, but it isn't.

The ends are the same, but the means are clearly different. Onan does take his brother's wife, but the way he gets round becoming a father is to avoid, as Driscoll himself puts it, "normal sexual relations with her". The hypothetical Israelite simply doesn't marry her, and has a lesser punishment. The intent being exactly the same, by elimination the problem must be somewhere in here:

"Whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother."

I do know that coitus interruptus isn't masturbation - I'm not an idiot - it's a crude form of contraception, a way of escaping the natural consequences of intercourse. God doesn't seem to be sold on the idea.

Now, I'm dubious about this verse's possibilities as a "proof text" against masturbation, but I do think the following question is worth considering: If God doesn't appear to approve of the distortion of lovemaking within marriage to avoid its natural consequences, can we assume that a husband/wife masturbating themselves or each other to avoid lovemaking altogether, and its natural consequences, is somehow actually better?

Driscoll seems to speak with the voice of authority. Being a Catholic, I'm very familiar with the idea of authority; it's a consequence of Jesus' promises to the Church founded on Peter the Rock would be led into all truth and the Scriptures which call that Church the pillar and foundation of truth, declare that the faith has been delivered once for all and that the teachings of the apostles, whether in writing or by word of mouth, are to be handed down in perpetuity by those who are given the ministry of teaching by the Church.

On the other hand, why should we listen to Driscoll when we can all read the Scriptures for ourselves? Is it because he's the Pastor of Mars Hill, and has presumably been to theological college? You don't need to listen to the Pope; he has a silly hat, and repeats the things that Christians used to believe in the past, before progress happened. Listen to Mark Driscoll. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others, so when Mark Driscoll says you can have oral sex and masturbate within marriage, case closed.

However the real trouble is not that Mark Driscoll talks as if he's the Pope, but that if, instead of looking for guidance to the community which is the pillar and foundation of the truth, we pull out our bibles and say we can work this stuff out for ourselves, just me and Jesus, we can't help but be our own Pope.

The Presence of God

2009-05-03T12:04:00.002+01:00

From Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales. Some advice on "placing yourself in the Presence of God":

IT may be, my daughter, that you do not know how to practise mental
prayer, for unfortunately it is a thing much neglected now-adays. I
will therefore give you a short and easy method for using it, until
such time as you may read sundry books written on the subject, and
above all till practice teaches you how to use it more perfectly. And
first of all, the Preparation, which consists of two points: first,
placing yourself in the Presence of God; and second, asking His Aid.
And in order to place your self in the Presence of God, I will suggest
four chief considerations which you can use at first.

First, a lively earnest realisation that His Presence is universal;
that is to say, that He is everywhere, and in all, and that there is no
place, nothing in the world, devoid of His Most Holy Presence, so that,
even as birds on the wing meet the air continually, we, let us go where
we will, meet with that Presence always and everywhere. It is a truth
which all are ready to grant, but all are not equally alive to its
importance. A blind man when in the presence of his prince will
preserve a reverential demeanour if told that the king is there,
although unable to see him; but practically, what men do not see they
easily forget, and so readily lapse into carelessness and irreverence.
Just so, my child, we do not see our God, and although faith warns us
that He is present, not beholding Him with our mortal eyes, we are too
apt to forget Him, and act as though He were afar: for, while knowing
perfectly that He is everywhere, if we do not think about it, it is
much as though we knew it not. And therefore, before beginning to pray,
it is needful always to rouse the soul to a stedfast remembrance and
thought of the Presence of God. This is what David meant when he
exclaimed, "If I climb up to Heaven, Thou art there, and if I go down
to hell, Thou art there also!" [25] And in like manner Jacob, who,
beholding the ladder which went up to Heaven, cried out, "Surely the
Lord is in this place and I knew it not" [26] meaning thereby that he
had not thought of it; for assuredly he could not fail to know that God
was everywhere and in all things. Therefore, when you make ready to
pray, you must say with your whole heart, "God is indeed here."

The second way of placing yourself in this Sacred Presence is to call
to mind that God is not only present in the place where you are, but
that He is very specially present in your heart and mind, which He
kindles and inspires with His Holy Presence, abiding there as Heart of
your heart, Spirit of your spirit. Just as the soul animates the whole
body, and every member thereof, but abides especially in the heart, so
God, while present everywhere, yet makes His special abode with our
spirit. Therefore David calls Him "the Strength of my heart;" [27] and
S. Paul said that in Him "we live and move and have our being." [28]
Dwell upon this thought until you have kindled a great reverence within
your heart for God Who is so closely present to you.

The third way is to dwell upon the thought of our Lord, Who in His
Ascended Humanity looks down upon all men, but most particularly on all
Christians, because they are His children; above all, on those who
pray, over whose doings He keeps watch. Nor is this any mere
imagination, it is very truth, and although we see Him not, He is
looking down upon us. It was given to S. Stephen in the hour of
martyrdom thus to behold Him, and we may well say with the Bride of the
Canticles, "He looketh forth at the windows, shewing Himself through
the lattice." [29]

The fourth way is simply to exercise your ordinary imagination,
picturing the Saviour to yourself in His Sacred Humanity as if He were
beside you just as we are wont to think of our friends, and fancy that
we see or hear them at our side. But when the Blessed Sacrament of the
Altar is there, then this Presence is no longer imaginary, but most
real; and the sacred species are but as a veil from behind which the
Present Saviour beholds and considers us, although we cannot see Him as
He is.

Make use of one or other of these methods for placing yourself in the
Presence of God before you begin to pray;--do not try to use them all
at once, but take one at a time, and that briefly and simply.

New Life From Old

2009-04-05T20:33:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

That's the title of the blog af a chap I used to live with. He did a post a little while ago about an alternative stem cell source, and his thinking on the matter, and we had a bit of a comment box exchange.

He moderates his comments, and I think he decided he didn't want to continue the discussion, but I didn't want my last comment to be lost in the eTher, so here it is:

Hi,

I think that
it is important to delineate the respective positions. If we're talking about potential human beings that's ethically troubling. If we're talking about human beings, murder is the right word. There's quite a wide range within the word "immoral".

To say that there is no 'magical' moment of conception doesn't strike me as very important. The "moment" of conception can be understood as the beginning of the process, or perhaps the end. By selecting implantation as the 'magical' moment of the beginning of the process of personhood, you're proceeding to answer a philosophical and theological question with a scientific method; strictly speaking, an impossibility, though obviously science can and does aid philosophical and theological enquiry.

With regard to the fertilised egg not being able to be "flushed out", I believe that a baby can be rejected by the mother's body very late term, resulting in a miscarriage or stillbirth. If this were the case, that would make the criterion irrelevant. Moreover, that people die before they are implanted in the womb is no more philosophically unacceptable than that people die at any other stage. Also, I should think that a genome is a distinct individual structure. If so, it doesn't make sense to choose the structures to which you refer in preference to the genome. Neither can the mother's awareness of the pregnancy answer the question. A soul is never demonstrable from scientific observation - the mother's feelings can hardly be a more valid test. Besides, there has already been incredible interplay between the mother and the embryo in conception, where the embryo receives half of its genetic information from her.

I understand that we are currently unaware of what causes the embryonic fission that results in identical twins. This being the case, it may be that the fission is inevitable from genetic or environmental factors. In this case, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that there were two souls from the beginning. Or it is possible that there is only one soul at the beginning which becomes two. I gather you don't accept this idea, but I don't see that it's possible to reject the idea whilst maintaining at the same time that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father, [...] true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father"; He is of one being with the Father, yet is begotten, a distinct person.

Chimeras would be a separate mystery, but no more impossible than the full humanity and divinity of Christ, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, the union of the Church as the body of Christ, and that man and wife are "no longer two, but one flesh".

That we don't know how it works can't be an insuperable obstacle. We may think "that a unique genome is insufficient for personhood" but we might also think that 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish were insufficient to feed more than 5,000 people, and yet they weren't. Of course, we know that the second is a miracle - it breaks all the usual rules, but in the case of souls and "personhood", we don't even know the rules unless God tells us.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux

2009-03-24T11:00:00.005Z

It's the year of St. Paul at the moment (no offence St. Paul, but your year seems to have been going on forever), and we've been having a priest over to give talks on his epistles in the presbytery.

Said priest, in the course of his last talk, realised that some among us were being discouraged rather than encouraged by his words on Ephesians (I forget precisely why), and he therefore related an image that St. Thérèse used to cheer us up a bit.

St. Thérèse is one of only three women to be recognised as a Doctor of the Church - that is, it has been officially declared that through her writings the whole Church has derived great advantage. And here is what she had to say about the spiritual life.

One of the novices, greatly discouraged at the thought of her
imperfections, tells us that her mistress spoke to her as follows:

"You make me think of a little child that is learning to stand but
does not yet know how to walk. In his desire to reach the top of
the stairs to find his mother, he lifts his little foot to climb
the first step. It is all in vain, and at each renewed effort he
falls. Well, be like that little child. Always keep lifting your
foot to climb the ladder of holiness, and do not imagine that you
can mount even the first step. All God asks of you is good will.
From the top of the ladder He looks lovingly upon you, and soon,
touched by your fruitless efforts, He will Himself come down, and,
taking you in His Arms, will carry you to His Kingdom never again
to leave Him. But should you cease to raise your foot, you will be
left for long on the earth."
- The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux
With Additional Writings and Sayings of St. Thérèse

I don't much go in for inspirational writings (because I have a heart of flint, naturally), but I find that image beautiful and consoling.

From the Office...

2009-03-08T08:58:00.003Z

...a good Sunday psalm:

1(A) Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever!

2(B) Let Israel say,
"His steadfast love endures forever."
3(C) Let the house of Aaron say,
"His steadfast love endures forever."
4(D) Let those who fear the LORD say,
"His steadfast love endures forever."

5(E) Out of my distress I(F) called on the LORD;
the LORD answered me and set me(G) free.
6(H) The LORD is on my side;(I) I will not fear.
What can man do to me?
7(J) The LORD is on my side as my helper;
I shall(K) look in triumph on those who hate me.

8(L) It is better to take refuge in the LORD
(M) than to trust in man.
9It is better to take refuge in the LORD
(N) than to trust in princes.

10(O) All nations surrounded me;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off!
11They surrounded me, surrounded me on every side;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off!
12(P) They surrounded me like bees;
they went out like(Q) a fire among thorns;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off!
13I was(R) pushed hard,[a] so that I was falling,
but the LORD helped me.

14The LORD is my strength and my song;
(S) he has become my salvation.
15Glad songs of salvation
are in the tents of the righteous:
(T) "The right hand of the LORD(U) does valiantly,
16the right hand of the LORD exalts,
the right hand of the LORD(V) does valiantly!"

17(W) I shall not die, but I shall live,
and(X) recount the deeds of the LORD.
18The LORD has(Y) disciplined me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.

19(Z) Open to me the gates of righteousness,
that I may enter through them
and give thanks to the LORD.
20This is the gate of the LORD;
(AA) the righteous shall enter through it.
21I thank you that(AB) you have answered me
(AC) and have become my salvation.
22(AD) The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.[b]
23This is the LORD’s doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
24This is the day that the LORD has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

25Save us, we pray, O LORD!
O LORD, we pray, give us success!

26(AE) Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD!
We(AF) bless you from the house of the LORD.
27The LORD is God,
and he has made(AG) his light to shine upon us.
Bind the festal sacrifice with cords,
up to(AH) the horns of the altar!

28You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;
you are my God; I will(AI) extol you.
29(AJ) Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever! - Psalm 118 (117)

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.

Culture 'n that

2009-03-03T10:46:00.002Z

If you're interested in such things, you can watch a performance of Mendelssohn's 'Elijah' online for free online, because of the uique way in which the BBC is funded. For about a week.

It's here.

Abstinence in Genesis

2009-02-26T10:10:00.005Z

Image via Wikipedia

Reading the Fathers, and Popes, and theologians, I find it remarkable how much you can simply miss reading the Bible on your own. I recently reread Revelations and it was a wholly different experience to when I read it on a Scripture Union or CYFA or something venture in my youth.

The parish here handed out free copies of Pope Benedict's message for Lent for 2009 (looking at the back I see that they apparently cost €1 for 10 pages - that's a bit steep) and I find the following:

We might wonder what value and meaning there is for us Christians in depriving ourselves of something that in itself is good and useful for our bodily sustenance. The Sacred Scriptures and the entire Christian tradition teach that fasting is a great help to avoid sin and all that leads to it. For this reason, the history of salvation is replete with occasions that invite fasting. In the very first pages of Sacred Scripture, the Lord commands man to abstain from partaking of the prohibited fruit: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gn 2, 16-17). Commenting on the divine injunction, Saint Basil observes that “fasting was ordained in Paradise,” and “the first commandment in this sense was delivered to Adam.” He thus concludes: “ ‘You shall not eat’ is a law of fasting and abstinence” (cf. Sermo de jejunio: PG 31, 163, 98). Since all of us are weighed down by sin and its consequences, fasting is proposed to us as an instrument to restore friendship with God.

First commandment in paradise - fast. Never would have occurred.

San Remo

2009-02-23T16:00:00.004Z

Apparently, Italians think they're too cool for the Eurovision Song Contest. One can't protest too forcefully against this, given that both Arnold Judas Rimmer and Carlton off of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air are too cool for Eurovision as well. At any rate, I once checked on Wikipedia how long it had been since the Italians entered a song in it. It's been quite a while.

They do, however, have their own annual song contest held yearly at San Remo. Monica told me, after being made to endure the Balkan delights of the European contest of song, about it in a sort of wistful way that made me think I would like to watch it. She was perhaps less keen to watch it when we were actually in Italy to see it. That's nostalgia for you I suppose. No-one's allowed to hear the music before the festival or the song gets disqualified, but the lyrics are fair game, so "Ti voglio senza amore” (I want you without love) was being criticised in advance.

I was looking forward to it anyway, and decided it would be a good thing to blog about. That's what I'm doing now, don'cha know. Here are some of the songs I liked. RAI has the videos online, but I don't seem to be able to embed them:

MARCO MASINI with "L’Italia” (Italy)
I like the way he sings with his hands in his pockets.
PATTY PRAVO with "E io verrò un giorno là” (And I will come there one day)
This one grew on me, though I'm not sure her voice works too well in the chorus. She's famous from way back. Not at all sure about the eye make-up.
POVIA with "Luca era gay” (Luke was gay)

This one I wasn't so keen on, and he sings in a strangulated style. However, the chorus really stuck in my head:

FRANCESCO RENGA with "Uomo senza età” (Man without age)

These are the top three in the main contest.

MARCO CARTA with "La forza mia” (My strength)
Nothing special.
POVIA with "Luca era gay”)
SAL DA VINCI with "Non riesco a farti innamorare” (I can't [manage to] make you fall in love)
Again, nothing special. Perhaps a little annoying.

Marco Carta is from Italy's X-Factorish style reality/pop show 'Amici' (Friends - even though they're clearly not) which is probably why he won - it certainly wasn't the outstanding quality of the song. It was certainly no song to win a national contest with. Monica's Dad and Lorenzo both chalked it up to bribery. To my mind, there's no reason to attribute to corruption what can be acounted for by the poor taste of the public. I think William of Ockham would back me up on this, but on the other hand, I wouldn't exactly be surprised if shady dealings had been dealt. Makes a change from complaining about the Balkans anyway.

This song won in the 'Proposte' category, which is to say they're newcomers:

ARISA with "Sincerità” (Sincerity)

We liked it. It's nice. The girl is the antithesis of stage presence though. She must be shy. Plus, I wonder where she got the NHS-style glasses from.

This last one is the winner of a new category this year, which was voted for on the web. I think the web has quite a bit to offer on the whole, but the category is a bit of a gimmick in my opinion. The song's not terrible or anything:

ANIA with "Buongiorno Gente" (Hello people)

Lent!

2009-02-22T12:00:00.002Z

For Lent there's going to be weekly adoration and stations of the cross as well as more opportunities for confession!

If I'm looking forward to Lent, does it mean I'm off on the wrong foot do you suppose?

Lent, The Bishop of Lancaster and the Web

2009-02-20T13:57:00.006Z

James recently did a post on a talk given by Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue of Lancaster Diocese to the Newman Society at Oxford University.

He says a lot of choice things about the pitiful state of English catholicism, and subsequently gives a lot of suggestions for a personal response. I thought it'd be a good way to approach Lent, so I'll post it here with some handy links.

I want to propose to all of you here tonight the following acts of sacrifice to counter the trials and troubles I have just outlined to you.

Embrace the Tradition of the Church.

To counter the rejection of the past, I want you to sacrifice the modern compulsion for novelty and fashion through embracing the Tradition of the Church, which is nothing more than the source of God's revelation, along with Scripture.

I want you to re-discover the joys and beauty of personal prayer, as well as family and community prayer. Also, to re-discover liturgical prayer, to counter an undue focus on our own human activity. So often the sacred is swamped by the volume of words, noise and activity!

I want you to re-discover the devotions of the Church, such as praying the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, Benediction. I want you to embrace the discipline of praying the daily Office of the Church; the practice of regular confession. The Holy Father goes every week, so why not us also. I want you to know the four Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council inside out, start with the wonderful Constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum.

Some helpful sites for personal prayer are here:

Sacred Space - a web-based aid to prayer run by Irish Jesuits
Pray-as-you-go - substantially the same thing, but available in mp3 form (also by podcast)

For the Office, I haven't found anything better than Universalis.

The Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council are as follows:

Dei Verbum (Word of God) - on Divine Revelation
Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations) - on the Church
Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) - on the Church in the Modern World
Sacrosanctum Concilium (Sacred Council) - on Sacred Liturgy

Embrace obedience to the teachings of the Church.

To counter the infiltration of secular ideas such as relativism, utilitarianism, and hedonism into the Church, sacrifice the automatic assumption that your ideas about doctrine and morals must be right, and the Church's 2,000 years reflection on God's revelation must be wrong.

I want you to take a leap of faith, based on trust in the person of Jesus Christ, and start from the assumption that the Church has good reasons for teaching the doctrines and morals that she teaches. Search out those reasons, make the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church the most thumbed and creased books in your libraries. Go, read the Fathers of the Church and St Thomas Aquinas' Summae, with a good guide. Go, study the books and homilies of Pope Benedict XVI, and other good Catholic literature.

And if you hear any Catholic say or teach something that goes against the teaching and discipline of the Church, as safe-guarded by the Pope, politely, but firmly, challenge them, be they a lay catechist, teacher, deacon, priest or even a bishop.

If, for some reason, you want to read the Bible online, BibleGateway works.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is available in its entirety online. To put it briefly, it summarises the teaching of the Catholic Church. It is both offical and relatively up-to-date.

The homilies (sermons) of Benedict XVI are also available online.

A passion that – as Cardinal Newman puts it – the truth is spread to a wide extent among this people of Great Britain.

It is a sad truth that many people are so alienated from the Church, the language of the Bible, and their need for salvation, that they are either indifferent or violently allergic to Christianity. Also, it is heart-breaking to admit that the behaviour of some Catholics, such as paedophile priests and the failure of some in authority in the Church, has damaged the credibility of the Church.

I am convinced that in order to evangelise this generation we must follow the advice of Newman and de Foucauld and concentrate our missionary efforts on showing the unconditional love of Christ for suffering humanity though practical acts of justice and peace. In particular, we must act in solidarity with the poor and all those on the margins of society, migrants, drug addicts, alcoholics, men and women in the sex industry, those suffering mental illness.

We must do this without any ulterior motives, such as seeking converts. We must only undertake this work to show them the love of Jesus Christ.

It is only when or if they ask us why we do this work, that we can gently begin to talk to them about Jesus, and only at the pace that they want. If they reject Jesus, but accept His practical love through our actions, we must be content with that.

Lent

2009-02-14T13:13:00.003Z

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I don't know if you've noticed, but Lent is sneaking up on us - Ash Wednesday is the 25th - so it's about time to dust off the sackcloth and then sit in the dust.

At any rate, I wanted to post some verses that I've looked at in a preparatory fashion:

You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, 'I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.' The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease. - John 3:28-30

And they said to him, "The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink." And Jesus said to them, "Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days." Luke 5:33-35

"To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,

"'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.'

For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is justified by all her children." - Luke 7:31-35

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. - Romans 6:4-11

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. - John 1:12-13

And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. - Matthew 6:16-18

'Why have we fasted, and you see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?'

Fasting like yours this day
will not make your voice to be heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a reed,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
Will you call this a fast,
and a day acceptable to the LORD?

"Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
And the LORD will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail.

- Isaiah 58:3a,4b-7,9b-11

25 Random Things

2009-02-09T09:46:00.004Z

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

I was baptised on Christmas day 1990, aged 8 (if I err not). I kept the certificate with my Sheffield City Council 50m and 400m swimming certificates for some time. Little bit of filing humour for you there.

I was nicknamed 'Dino' in my GCSE sociology class. Ostensibly this was because I resembled a pterodactyl.

I am continually bewildered by polarisation; why, for example, can't orthodox and liberal Catholics find more common ground? Why, for example, are left-wing concerns so different to right-wing concerns?

Contrary to what may appear to be the case, I don't hate Robbie Williams and Davina McCall. I just think life would be better if they were out of the charts, the news, the telly, the radio - as applicable. Fortunately in Italy no-one's heard of Davina McCall.

Mmm. Russian classical music. Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev... so good.

I really miss my old choir at Sacred Heart.

I can't quite get over the fact that PCs still exist and Amigas don't. An injustice that is quite emblematic of what is wrong with the world, to my mind. I even took an Amiga to university to write my essays with (of course) but I did cave in and got one of Bill Gates' soulless boxes before the end.

Since I married in August, I have slept in a real double-bed on but one occasion.

Monica is envious of my eyelashes. Apparently they look as though I use mascara on them. For the record, I don't.

I really appreciate confession. I had cottoned on to it's practical utility well before I entered the Church. I feel a bit sorry for those who live their Christian life without it, for whatever reason.

I went through a phase at university of leaving the house barefoot, especially to go to Mass at the university chaplaincy when it was practically across the road. Monica found this fascinating at the time, but she would never let me do it now we're married. I can only assume she doesn't want other young women exposed to the raw sexual magnetism of my naked feet.

For more or less the duration of my teenage years, I wrote music on my computer. It's here.

I can't click my fingers. I seem to get by all the same.

For a while I've nursed a vague desire to eat a locust. Not any locust in particular. That probably sounds very grim, but they're a bit like flying prawns I suppose, and I've no trouble with them. I have no desire whatsoever to eat anything's testicles however; that's a delicacy too far.

I think 'Ulysses' by Joyce is not worth my time. He can write a boring, impenetrable lump of words if he wants to and then expect the adulation of the modern world, but balls to him if he wants me to read it.

Although I think (and this is not a consensus view) that I'm generally pretty laid-back, I can get very competitive. On the other hand, this only occurs when I think I have a realistic chance of winning. If I'm not good at something, I tend to just leave it to other people. I suppose this isn't a very sporting attitude.

Probably my favourite grammatical error is the double superlative a) because it sounds funny when you hear one and b) because it has a nice name.

I am (or was in England anyway) continually disturbed by the number of men that don't wash their hands after going to the toilet. Euggh. I think we're talking about a majority here.

Crisps: what the hell is the point of crisps? They don't fill you up, they're unhealthy, and every flavour is disappointing. Write to your MP.

For several years now, I've wanted to own a filing cabinet. Not ardently, you understand, but consistently nonetheless.

I'm very sceptical about the religious benefits of faith-schools. I don't think (all other things being equal) that I want my children to go to one.

When I buy a new bit of kit, I like to read the instructions fully. I don't like the idea of not being fully appraised of all the functionality that I've just shelled out for. I did think that this was just a man thing, but it seems to me that a lot of men prefer not to read manuals. Perhaps this is because they feel that if they work out how to use it on their own, they're as good as whoever invented it.

When I was young and foolish, I decided to commit 'Shine Jesus Shine' to memory. Happily, those days are behind me.

My earliest memories (which may be lies, dreams, or both) involve me falling (or perhaps being pushed) down the stairs and a horde of ladybirds flying into my eyes.

I thought I had brown eyes until Monica said they were green. Brown, green, it's all good.

Prayer Request

2009-02-04T08:23:00.001Z

Monica's mum has had an accident. She fell and fractured a vertebra. Now she's got a month of ceiling-staring to look forward to, with attendant problems.

Could you send a few prayers her way? Thanks.

St. Anthony again

2009-02-01T08:46:00.003Z

Hi etymology fans,

Not every day that the church newsletter gives you an etymological factoid, but this week, yes:

For those who have come recently to Offagna, [the feast of St. Anthony] remains little understood because they don't know the meaning of the distribution of the blessed bread. In a time in which bread is not highly regarded, it should be a symbol of brotherhood and union. The word 'companion' ['compagno'] derives from bread: The Latins said "Cum pane", that is, being in agreement and being friends because they ate the same bread; we should be like this as well.

Doxology

2009-01-25T13:27:00.003Z

When Catholics and Protestants pray the Our Father together, there's usually an awkward moment at the end when the Catholics stop praying and the Protestants carry on. That's because we treat the doxology separately from the prayer itself. I recall seeing a footnote in one bible of mine that said that the doxology wasn't found in the earliest texts, which probably explains it in part. In a mass, they're both said quite close together anyhow. I don't intend to do a proper analysis of the doxology here, but I'll give a Young's Literal Translation style treatment.

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

Tuo è il regno, tua la potenza
e la gloria nei secoli.

'Yours is the reign, yours the power and the glory in the ages.'

e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male. #2

2009-01-25T13:16:00.002Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

in

I'm not sure if there's even a corresponding Italian word for 'into', here they use 'in', meaning 'into', in any case.

liberaci

The imperative of 'liberare' ('liberate', 'free') and the same pronoun as last time, meaning 'us' - 'liberaci'

(il) male

Now, I haven't really checked this, but it often happens that in Italian, if you stick the definite article before an adjective, it works thusly:

bello - il bello
beautiful - the beautiful one

In the biblical Greek, I seem to recall, you can legitimately translate into English as 'deliver us from evil' and 'deliver us from the evil one', so I wouldn't be surprised (even though 'male' means 'badly' and consequently is an adverb rather than an adjective) if the Italian gives the same pleasing ambiguity.

Amen.

e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

2009-01-23T10:17:00.003Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

non indurre

The negative form of the imperative using the 'tu' form (that is, 'you' - familiar) is spectacularly easy: you put 'non', which usually means 'not', in front of the infinitive (usually the -are, -ere, and -ire forms of the verb) and you're done.

'indurre' means 'induce' or 'lead', so 'non indurre' means 'don't lead'.

ci

It seems I can't get away with not running through the direct object pronouns. We looked at 'lo', 'la', 'li' and 'le' last time. I shall have to fill in the gaps. Here's the table again:

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Direct Object Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns	Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi	mi	a me
tu	ti	ti	a te
lui	lo	gli	a lui
lei	la	le	a lei
Lei	La	Le	a Lei
noi	ci	ci	a noi
voi	vi	vi	a voi
loro	li, le	gli	a loro

So the 'ci' we have here is the one in bold above, and means 'us'.

The News from Lake Wobegon...

2009-01-20T15:02:00.002Z

...where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

I was introduced to Garrison Keillor through BBC 7 radio, who started broadcasting his shows, a mix of music, storytelling, sketches and other shenanigans a little while ago in England. He is an American with a very soothing voice, and one of my favourite sections of his shows was The News from Lake Wobegon, where he talks about the goings on in his hometown.

Now it's available as a podcast. Hooray!

come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,

2009-01-20T13:57:00.004Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,

noi

We've come across 'noi' before, with the first verb conjugation. I won't check, but I will have said that even though 'noi rimettiamo' means 'we remit', the 'noi' part meaning 'we', usually the 'noi' would be omitted.

In this case it isn't left out. Our forgiveness is dependent on the fact that we "forgive [our] brother from [our] heart", and consequently the 'noi' emphasises that we have to forgive before we can expect any forgiveness from God.

li

More pronouns for you:

lo, la, li, le

Those are some unstressed direct object pronouns. There are more, but these ones can be looked at together quite independently, so I will.

You remember I hope that direct objects are the ones directly affected by the verb? That is, in the following example, the word 'it' is the direct object.

He gave it to me.

'lo' and 'la' can both be translated as it, but 'lo' can also mean 'him', and 'la' can also mean 'her'. Of course, you use 'lo' where the pronoun stands for something masculine, and 'la' for something feminine.

More simply, 'li' and 'le' can both be translated as 'them', referring to both people and things. 'li' for masculine (in the plural), and 'le' for feminine (in the plural.

So 'li' means 'them'. 'li' here stands for the 'debiti' that we forgive our debtors.

Sunday: Autism

2009-01-19T15:52:00.004Z

Just a little note to say that there's an item on autism in Sunday this week, involving a minister with an autistic son, on the issue of pre-natal screening. I don't know if I'm recommending it as such, but I thought perhaps Neil or someone else might like to know.

St. Anthony

2009-01-19T15:15:00.003Z

A little while ago, James blogged about a tradition of marking homes with blessed chalk for Epiphany, and that, being Catholics in (post-post-modern?) England, they had no idea about it until it was too late for this year. (I imagine that further google-based research resulted in him finding this.)

I think it was Ella who then asked me via e-mail (I imagine a hopeful tone in her voice) whether we at least did it here in Catholic-land. (We didn't.)

Rather, in England, you've (presumably) all missed out on the St. Anthony celebrations!

The Italians seem to like St. Anthony, and celebrate his feast in various ways, none of which is on English wikipedia, so maybe I'll put something there.

The first thing, chronologically, would be that many hundreds, and thousands, and other units of number, of bread rolls are made, by hand if I understand correctly, by volunteers for the occasion, blessed in the churches and distributed door to door. It's customary to give an offering to the parish, and you then get a number in the raffle (I know, I know) with such solidly Italian prizes as meat and wine.

The rolls are basically eaten just like any other bread rolls would be at dinner, with the cold meats, and used as a means for recovering residual olive oil from one's plate. I was told this, but the idea that blessed bread would probably have some kind of low-key ceremony was quite fixed in my mind, so I waited to see what everybody else did with theirs before I committed myself. If I had any sense I would have taken some photos of all this, but it seems that I don't.

It was good bread.

You also get fried sweets around this time, a bit like doughnuts. Castagnole, they're called, and Monica and her Mum made some. The closest thing I can think of is ring-doughnuts, but perhaps they're a little more dense, and the dough is flavoured somehow.

Next thing would be that, after the 11:00 mass, people come to the piazza to have their stuff blessed. I use the word "stuff" for exactitude. St. Anthony would seem to be a patron of quite a lot of things. People bring their pets to be blessed (with those holy water sprinkly things) because he's the patron of all animals. Some of the dogs didn't seem to want to bless each other though. Children bring their toys to be blessed - I don't know why. People also bring their tractors. Until the moment I actually saw them I thought I had perhaps misunderstood, for I had been advised of this also, but no, there were proper agricultural tractors parked up by the piazza for the holy water treatment. Again, no photos - silly me. Because this is Italy, while a hardcore group of people tried to listen to the blessing and the prayers and work out when they were meant to cross themselves, the rest got down to the serious business of having a chat.

Later on in the same day was a little, um, event, in the youth club. There was more than one apprently. We went to the one that was not marked out as being for youth. There were many older Italian ladies there. I was certainly bucking the trend. There were some drinks and slices of pizza and cake and stuff, and a man performing Italian folk music for people to dance to. He had a squeezebox. From what I hear of Italian folk music, it's mostly more cheery and cheesy than ours, and I daresay it's identical to the kind of thing they play in the tourist traps.

And that's the way we roll around here.

e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti

2009-01-13T14:54:00.005Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti

e

'e' means 'and'

rimetti

'rimettere' is a verb that means lots of things. One of the things it means is relatively similar to the English, 'remit' This clearly isn't the most quotidian verb in this sense, but the verb it's formed from, 'mettere' is, and apparently it's regular, so I'll give you the conjugation.

Now, there's something I ommitted to mention previously, when I said that 'santificare' was a regular verb. The thing is that there is more than one regular verb form. There are 3 (or 4, or even more depending on how you look at it). For the sake of clarity I'll put three examples side by side:

santificare	(ri)mettere	dormire
santifico	(ri)metto	dormo
santifichi	(ri)metti	dormi
santifica	(ri)mette	dorme
santifichiamo	(ri)mettiamo	dormiamo
santificate	(ri)mettete	dormite
santificano	(ri)mettono	dormono

You can see that in the 'I', 'you' and 'we' form, regular verbs conjugate in the same way, but in the other forms there are variations depending on whether the infinitive form ends in '-are', '-ere' or '-ire'.

This 'rimetti' is, again, the imperative form.

a noi

Do you remember when I said that you didn't have to worry about the 'Unstressed' in "Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns"? Well you don't really have to worry about the 'Stressed' in "Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns" either. I'll just add something to the table I gave earlier:

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns	Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi	a me
tu	ti	a te
lui	gli	a lui
lei	le	a lei
Lei	Le	a Lei
noi	ci	a noi
voi	vi	a voi
loro	gli	a loro

All you have to know, for practical purposes, is that 'a noi' means the same thing as the 'ci' to its left: that is '(to) us'.

iBreviary & Praybook

2009-01-08T10:23:00.007Z

Mark: Apropos of nothing, I just found this rather elaborate comment by a priest with an Italian-looking name wishing to publicise a prayer application he made.

I'm down with that, so I cleaned up the English a bit and gave it its own entry.
-

Dear Sirs,
Editing and Friends of iBreviary,

iBreviary, as you know, is a new application for the iPhone, available immediately in Spanish, French, English, Latin and Italian. iBreviary offers the possibility, simply and in perfect "Apple style", to pray on the go with the prayers of the Breviary.

It also offers the readings of the Mass of the day, as well as the principal Catholic prayers. The application, created by me together with the technician and developer Dimitri Giani, has received the praise and the encouragement of the Vatican.

iBreviary has now reached its third update. This update brings important changes:
- application available in Italian and English versions
- available readings in English, French, Spanish, Latin and in the Ambrosian Rite
- possibility to pray the Compieta of the previous day

The application is available from the app store for the price of 79 cents (Euro) which will go to charity. (www.dimix.it/ibreviary)

Also, Facebook will have its own "digital Breviary". Its name is "Praybook" and it's available as an application on the most important social networking site in the world. The application allows online prayer with the same prayers as iBreviary.

Thanks for everything.
father Paolo Padrini
www.dimix.it/ibreviary

Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,

2009-01-06T14:44:00.009Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,

Dacci

'Dacci' is actually two words contracted. The first comes from 'dare', yet another common irregular verb:

dare	(to) give, giving
(io) do	I give
(tu) dai	you give
(lui/lei/Lei) dà	he/she/it gives (you give)
(noi) diamo	we give
(voi) date	you give (plural)
(loro) danno	they give

'da'!' or 'dai!' is the imperative form for 'dare' in 'tu' (the familiar you). That is to say, it's how you tell, or ask, someone you're on familiar terms with to give something. 'dai' is pronounced fairly similarly to 'die' in English, and can be used to mean 'come on!', so during the world cup, when it sounded like Monica was urging death upon the Italian team, she was really egging them on.

You may have noticed I put the personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, it) back on the Italian side above. There's a reason for that:

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi
tu	ti
lui	gli
lei	le
Lei	Le
noi	ci
voi	vi
loro	gli

"Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns" just spells "fun", right? I'm honestly trying to make this as painless as possible. Don't worry about the "Unstressed" part anyway. And for what it's worth, German, Koine Greek and (if I'm not mistaken) Latin are far worse when it comes to this part of grammar.

It's called case. Italian here is a bit like English in that you don't usually have to worry about case, but you do when it comes to pronouns. Have another table:

I	me
you	you
he	him
she	her
it	it
we	us
they	them

That's essentially the English equivalent of the above. With any luck it'll make what I'm about to say make a little more sense. Take a look at this:

'He threw it to us.'

Who's doing the throwing? - He is.
What's being thrown? - It is.
Who's it being thrown to? - To us.

The first is called the subject - it's the thing or person that performs the action of the verb.

The second is a direct object - it's the thing that the verb is acting on.

The third is an indirect object - there isn't a direct connection to the action of the verb itself.

Each takes into account the function of the word within the sentence, and if you get it wrong you sound like a caveman:

'Him threw it to we.'

It's the same deal with Italian. 'we' would be translated 'noi', and 'to us' would be translated 'ci'

So, you put 'da'!' and 'ci' together, and you (finally) get 'dacci' - 'give us'

oggi

'oggi' means 'today'.

quotidiano

'quotidiano' means 'quotidian'.

The Befana

2009-01-05T10:31:00.003Z

Well, it's nearly Epiphany, which means the Befana will be setting out shortly:

The Befana comes by night
With her shoes all tattered and torn
She comes dressed in the Roman way
Long life to the Befana!

Here comes, here comes the Befana
she comes from the mountains in the deep of the night
snow and frost surround her
snow and frost and the West wind
here comes, here comes the Befana!

"And just who the hell is the Befana?" you might well ask. Well, wikipedia exists so that I don't have to exert myself too much: La Befana.

Now that's what I call the interpenetration of pagan worship with the cult of the Great Whore of Babylon^TM - woohah!

When I was talking about her with Monica and said that the Befana was a witch, she strenuously denied this, saying that she didn't do magic. When I pointed out that she flies on a broomstick she retorted that Santa Claus has a flying sleigh - which is a fair point.

come in cielo così in terra.

2009-01-04T12:44:00.002Z

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.

come

'come' means 'like' or 'as'.

così

'così' is a very handy word which means 'like this', 'like that', 'thus', 'so' or 'like so'.

in terra

As I've said before, prepositions are rather unpredictable. Whereas it looks as though this means 'in earth', obviously it means 'on earth'. Best not to worry about it too much.

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