Butterflies on mid-summer's eve

 

Driving through Newcastle yesterday, at the lights after the petrol station I saw someone painting on what I now know as a 'junction box' (for more on this, see here, for such 'street art' in our South Dublin Council area, see here, and you might also like to visit the Irish Butterfly Website here ). As we all have noticed over the past number of years, these boxes as well as electrical ones display some very eye-catching scenes. Isn't it lovely to see colour used creatively at the heart of ordinary life, as we walk or drive hurriedly by, our mind focused on the task in hand?  I parked my car further up and came back to have a word with the artist.  Young Tamara has been living in Newcastle now for four years with her family and is doing the art work she loves for Newcastle Tidy Towns. I took the first photo while she worked, and the second when, returning to Saggart in the evening, I saw the finished product. The butterfly looks like it's taking flight for the lovely flowers in the wildlife garden behind!

It's a red admiral and, coincidence, another has alighted on the front page of the current issue of the Far East, the magazine brought out by the Columban Missionaries we all used read long ago in the 50s / 60s!  

Ave atque (heu!) vale, Veritas. Hello and (alas!) Goodbye, Veritas

A reflection on how seldom I go to town now obviously, but I was taken completely aback when, getting off the Luas from Saggart recently in Lower Abbey Street, I saw no familiar Veritas sign winking at me, as it were, on my arrival in the city. Yes, I knew about the closure of their branch in Tallaght Square Shopping Centre on the 17th May last year (see here) and now here I was seeing (and believing as best I could) their HQ in Dublin gone for ever. In fact, it has been closed a good while, since Friday, 10th January. It opened in 1928 (read its history here). How many times over how many years was I inside, browsing away and buying too, of course! A lectionary was my last big purchase (for a certain church). So what a shock!  

Round the corner, as you know, brings you up Marlborough Street to the Pro-Cathedral. Dublin's seminary, Clonliffe College, closed in 1999.  Last Sunday a 'Lay Ministry Appeal' was publicized by the diocese. Signs of the times -- times changing so fast.  But, in this Jubilee Year of Hope, we try to remain hopeful that change, finally, is for the better.  After all, "To live is to change," said St John Henry Newman -- who knew Dublin well from living here in the 1850s. 

Habemus Papam Pope Leo XIV

For more photos, see here, while here we can follow his address given from the balcony above. Today, with a congregation made up of the cardinals who elected him yesterday, he said his first Mass as Pope in the Sistine Chapel.  The Mass was said in Latin and Italian, but the first reading, we note in the Mass booklet, was in English, while the second was in Spanish. A truly memorable moment was when the Pope, the first Pope to be a native speaker of English, opened his sermon with the words: "I begin with a word in English, the rest is in Italian," (37  minutes into the Mass). That was surely a truly historic moment, leaving us with a wonderful world-wide sampling of languages ‒ linguistic unity-in-diversity.  To which, let us now add our own: "Go mbeannaí Dia é mar Phápa agus sinn go léir leis".

click to enlarge