Bless

Adorned with a reproduction of the lovely fresco of the Annunciation taken from our house  in the  settecento  (grrrr, the ancestors handed over a large part of the garden too, on which the 'new' church now stands;  before that the village church was further down the hill and the room from which the fresco was moved was a dear little chapel, part of this building) the parish priest has sent out his leaflet on the dates and times when we should be at home to be blessed.  The parish priest barely clears the bar for blessing, in my book.

Where I grew up, Hatfield, our parish priest had a DD from Rome plus various other minor Oxford-conferred degrees, and movable teeth.  These last were watched by an enthralled congregation as, the tenor of his sermons being well above our heads, their positioning indicated how close we were to the resumption of Mass and,  mutatis mutandis, Sunday dinner.  We would reel home, our senses blurred by clouds of incense both intellectual and from the vigorously wielded thurible, eyes with dancing patterns of lace feet-deep on cottas and altar, and candles ranked like angels in burning rows.

Here they play guitars and have ragged singing in local dialect.  Confession here would be an act of desecration to all the subtleties of sin learned (though not necessarily practised - a considerable lack of opportunity reigned in Hatfield to sin in the ways our parish priest was able to envisage) as an interested frequenter of Sunday School. Nope, this parish priest opens the Easter blessing batting with this:

"Every year, in preparation for Easter, we undertake Lent and think of the poverty of the human spirit, not always adequate to the demands of our life's journey [il cammino della vita is an obligatory hat tip to 'our cultural heritage, we all know our Dante', which we don't but who's checking?  ed.]
We feel reassured, thinking our times of poverty long gone, never to return [this village has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, ed.] as we enjoy our place among the world's richest countries (at least from  published classifications) [a point must be given for suspicion of statistical data presentation there, ed.] and view from our plenty the miseries of the so-called Third World.

BUT THERE WILL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL!  [all right, he didn't write exactly that, but he would have done if his literary excursions had extended beyond Dante to Joyce, ed.  What he actually wrote was]:
"But we have woken up one of these mornings and found ourselves impoverished and alone!
Today being alone is a great burden for many; and when it is taken with economic uncertainty, which only yesterday was so reassuringly absent, it makes us feel really poor, as human beings. [mmmm, that's not quite the Christian message from the Hatfield perspective; being alone but compensated by being rich was not an objective as I recall. After all do we admire Cardinal Siri of Bologna with his ringing endorsement of the local view:

Homo sine pecunia, imago mortis. ed. ?]

"So, this time of the year  is particularly suitable for rediscovering the measure of our real wealth, which no-one can take from us. Our dignity as children of God who partake in the resurrection of Christ. [now what kind of rallying cry is that to the multiculti hordes? And he presses on! ed.]

"We cannot walk alone and, though nothing can stop us illuminated by the light of  God's word, the  difficulties could provide paths other than those  paths designed by human kind  [does he mean the paths of Angels? ed.] to return to  vigour, strength and hope for tireder and weaker members [or a hint at viagra? ed.]

With God's help we shall rise again!"

Gosh.  Should we be at home on 12 March?