A day at Evangelium

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Yesterday in the parish, the first Saturday of the month, I celebrated a Missa Cantata in honour of St Cajetan. The schola sang Mass IV so I was able to sing the Ite fairly easily, having listened many times to the Kyrie Cunctipotens. After Benediction, I negotiated my way through the tube system in London which is always disrupted at weekends by "scheduled engineering works", and then on to Reading, to the school which John Henry Newman founded, for the 2010 Evangelium Conference.

My lecture was on "The Hermeneutic of Continuity" (the concept rather than the blog.) It was recorded so I presume it will be available in due course. Those who do public speaking will know that sometimes a figure in the audience makes things a little more daunting. Yesterday in my line of sight there was the highly respected patristic scholar Fr Joseph Carola SJ. It was great to meet him again after hearing his superb lecture at the conference of the Confraternity of Catholic clergy at Rome in January. (You can read his March 2010 edition of The Priest.)

There were 170 participants at the conference which had a packed timetable of lectures, liturgy and other activities. I was able to have a chat with Jack Valero of Catholic Voices, Neil Addison of Religion Law UK, Fr Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory and several others, including of course Frs Marcus Holden and Andrew Pinsent, co-authors of the catechetical resource Evangelium. The photo above shows Benediction in the well-appointed chapel, celebrated by Fr Bruno Witchalls. My lecture was introduced by Rev Neil Brett, a deacon from the English College, Rome, who is soon to be ordained priest for the Diocese of Brentwood.

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