Having written so much about Sweden lately I feel I might as well give a short report about my recent visit to the British Isles.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Someone – it does not matter who – lately remarked to me that to the stray reader coming across this blog its intellectual content might not become immediately obvious if the top post is about shoes. So, dear stray reader: Though not about shoes, this is a shoesey post; please do scroll down a bit for far more substantial reading.
Back to my topic. A friend of mine who steadfastly refuses to choose a pseudonym and therefore, for the moment, shall remain Nameless, and myself first went to Edinburgh, in which beautiful city we stayed for a day and where most generously and most pleasantly entertained by no one less than Mr. Benedict Ambrose himself.
From there we travelled to Ullapool, where one not only can take refuge from the sheer unbearable heat and sunshine in a nice refreshing bath in the Atlantic (my nameless friend did not wish to join me in this for some reason), but also has much opportunity for hill-walking. Ullapool is a pleasant little ex-fishing and now ferry village with a satisfying number of pubs and restaurants and, who would believe it, a Catholic church! When we went to Mass there one day the congregation was formed by an elderly lady (also a holiday guest), my friend and me. The next day, as my friend reported (I was, less piously, hill walking at the time, at the place shown in the photograph), there were four people apart from her: the same lady, a local, and two Polish girls working in one of the restaurants over summer. When we spoke to the very kind priest who spends his retirement there (and who liberally supplied us with little articles he had written in defence of Humanae Vitae) I said that certainly his congregation was larger on Sundays. “O yes, sometimes”, he replied.
Our next stop was in Uig on the Isle of Skye. Much as I love this island – it was my third visit there – I must conclude that I probably would not move to a place where there are at least two Calvinist churches per agglomeration of fifty cottages. Not only did the pubs close at 10:30 pm (this, I know, is usual) and restaurants stopped serving food at 8 pm, no – even before we never actually saw anyone in there as we passed by in the evenings. Now I know this is a flippant and unjust charge; however, I think it must be the Calvinist heritage to which the newspaper article referred which praised the newly built Catholic church on Skye as a remarkable piece of integrating local tradition and culture. For, as much as its attempts at symmetry initially inclined me to like it (and it is, for a newly built church, a rather nice church), it quite obviously tried to refrain from looking terribly Catholic. Some tiny little Stations of the Cross nearly invisible on the walls constituted the whole of the figural decoration. The only cross was the cross-shaped window behind the alter, a statue of Our Lady (however much the church might be named St Mary’s) was nowhere to be found, and the tabernacle, though admittedly rather beautiful, was hidden in a side chapel. The newspaper article already mentioned, which I read afterwards during the “sacrament of tea and biscuits” (quote: Berenike), to three quarters of its length particularly praised that fact, as it helped keeping people from inappropriately paying adoration to God as present in the tabernacle instead of being fully part of the community celebrating Mass. My nameless friend had some business to prevent me from drawing the attention of everyone on us by my angry hissing and pointing.
Again, during this stay, I received ample proof for the adventurous nature of the British concept of a “footpath”. In England, it means: “You may walk here, if you dare” In Scotland you are allowed to walk wherever you like, hence, there are no paths (my friend, even more German in this respect than I, only learnt towards the end of our stay that, if you want to stick to footpaths, you will get nowhere in Scotland).
Of course the crowning end of my stay was the glorious Evangelium Conference. Everyone who could have been there but did not go: Regret! During the conference I experienced the so far most terrible occasion of being asked where I was from, since the interlocutor was Roy Schoeman, whose Jewish parents had both fled, his mother literally in the last moment, from Nazi Germany. Mr. Schoeman’s talk about his conversion to the Catholic Church, the substance of which can be read at his website, was undoubtedly one of the highlights. Great was my joy, too, to finally meet the famous Don Reto Nay, who fully lives up to all I heard before about him. Fr. Jerome Bertram gave us what has been to me the most enjoyable and amusing thrashing of modern Biblical Criticism so far. Of course, the Masses were celebrated most reverently and some of the homilies could vie with the talks for the impressions they left. Finally, who would I be if I could forget to mention, on just a little more secular note (for they were all, well, kinda pious questions after all), the bar quiz. To conclude: If you have not come this year, come next. And bring your friends.
Laodicea 