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".

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Electing a New Pope

                          Eligo in summum pontificem        (Washington Post)

Morning Mass in St Peter's, Wed. 7th May, Election Day

Listening to the sermon, weighing things up

Requiescat in pace, Papa Franciscus (1936-2025)

Final procession up the nave of St Peter's after the funeral Mass

Imperial Rome, Pontifical Rome

Towards the final resting place in Santa Maria Maggiore

For his life, see here. For photos of his visit to Ireland in August 2018 for the World Meeting of Families, see here (i.e. this parish site). In this last, note the photo of Cardinal Kevin Farrell alongside Archbishop Diarmuid Martin at the Mass for the Pastoral Congress in the RDS (Wednesday 22nd). Now, seven years later, he is the "camerlengo" organising the conclave that will meet on Wednesday May 7th to elect a new Pope (more here).