With the upcoming Orientale Lumen XIII Conference starting on Monday, things have been pretty hectic taking care of last minute details, and getting everything ready. Plus, ongoing book publishing, Sunday bulletin production, video editing and duplicating, and my “day job” doing computer consulting continues as usual. On top of all that, three seminarians from the Blessed Theodore Romzha Theological Academy in Uzhorod, Ukraine arrived 10 days ago to work for two months this summer learning English and helping with various projects, including the OL conference. So life is busier than usual.
Everything is in place for the OL conference. We have nearly 100 people registered to attend with a few more even at the last minute. For daily attendance, or as long as you don’t need a room to sleep, we’ll even accept people “walking in the door.” Registration takes place from 2-6 pm next Monday with our first events that evening.
Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, will serve an Hierarchical Divine Liturgy in Saint Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral on Tuesday morning at 8:30 am. That afternoon at 5 pm, we will have Daily Vespers in Church Slavonic in the Rotunda entrance at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center with the responses led by the seminarians from Ukraine. Metropolitan Jonah will then give his plenary talk at 7 pm that same evening in the auditorium of the Cultural Center. All three events are free and open to the public.
Bishop Hlib Lonchyna, recently appointed Apostolic Administrator of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Exarchate of Great Britan will give his plenary talk at 11 am Tuesday morning, and will serve a Divine Liturgy at the Ukrainian National Shrine on Wednesday morning. Metropolitan Jonah will attend this liturgy, while Bishop Hlib will attend the Orthodox Liturgy on Tuesday.
On Wednesday evening, chartered buses will take the group to Saint Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax, VA for Vespers in their native language, and a dinner of Egyptian foods.
I’ll be making nametags this week, preparing books and media for our sales display. and preparing the icon gifts for all the speakers — our thematic icon of the Transfiguration. A limited quantity of the same icon will also be available to purchase by attendees during the conference. We will also have several new books available including Finding A Hidden Church by Father Chris Zugger and Good News from the East, Volumes III and IV by Father John Zeyack. Both authors will be attending the conference and be available for book signing.
Audio and video recordings of all the plenary sessions and liturgical services will be made and copies can be purchased from the OL Conference website online catalog after the conference. So if you can’t make the conference in person, you can still enjoy the events that will take place next week.
With just three weeks to go, more details about the OL XIII Conference on June 15-18 in Washington, DC are being finalized.
First, we have over 75 registrations already, more than the total attendance at last year’s OL XII East conference!There is still room for more, but time is running short for our limited sleeping accommodations.So I encourage anyone who is considering coming to hurry and register at our website as soon as possible:OL XIII Conference
Second, a great article about the conferences has appeared on the Catholic Exchange website by Tom Colyandro, and can be seen at Catholic Exchange.
Third, Father Tom Loya interviewed me on his “Light of the East” radio program which was broadcast today, May 24, and is now available to listen to on various websites that carry his program, including his own parish at Light of the East Radio.
Fourth, we have finalized arrangements to visit Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax, Virginia as part of the conference agenda.All the conference participants will be transported by charter bus from Washington to Fairfax where we will attend Vespers according to the Coptic Church Tradition, and the parish will provide a marvelous meal of ethnic food.The OL Conference visited Saint Mark’s about 8-10 years and had an extremely exciting visit to the parish.Vespers will be celebrated in mostly the Coptic language of Egypt, but with English parallel texts.The singing will be led by a group of 40+ subdeacons with finger cymbal background.The food will be delicious and plentiful.It was one of the best parish visits we have made over the years, and I’m thrilled to be returning.
Finally, the detailed agenda of speakers, times and dates is now available to view or download from the website too.
Although the talks and liturgical services will be recorded and made available through OLTV and our OL Conference website, there is nothing like experiencing them first hand.This is a very unique opportunity to meet the distinguished speakers who will be giving presentations on the conference theme “Monastic Spirituality for Everyday Life” and a special opportunity to pray with others and learn about their Church tradition.
I look forward to seeing many old friends, and to making new friends at this year’s conference.Come join us!
As many know, we started Orientale Lumen TeleVision with the following goals in mind:
*Present the tradition of the Byzantine Churches to our faithful coming from the homelands in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
*Help the faithful of the Byzantine Churches to be more aware of their tradition, to know it, to deepen it, and preserve it in a pure conscience.
*Help our brothers and sisters of Latin traditions to have a real, clear and inspiring insight of our Eastern traditions, as belonging to OneChurch with an Eastern flavor.
*Share with all citizens of these countries the richness of the Eastern tradition,
*Help the One Holy, Catholic and ApostolicChurch breathe with two lungs, as Saint Irenaeus said and after him, the late Pope John Paul II.
I have done some research into various options, technologies and the costs for taking our existing OLTV programs into some form of broadcast distribution so people can watch them on their TVs in addition to their computers. In order to gather market data for making decisions and planning our future, I have created a web-accessible survey at the following link:
I would very much appreciate if you could complete the survey (it’s only about 7-8 questions) so we can more accurately plan our future for OLTV based on your input.THANKS!
As we all celebrate the resurrection of Our Lord, I thought it would be helpful to update you on several items you might find interesting.
Orientale Lumen XIII This year’s conference will be held June 15-18 at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC on the theme of “Monastic Spirituality for Everyday Life.” We have a very exciting agenda of plenary speakers planned. You can view or download the brochure, flier and registration form from the website: www.olconference.com.
We also have reduced the conference fee to encourage people to attend despite our national economic situation. Although we would like to hold the conference in more regional locations, for economic reasons we just cannot afford the overhead expense of multiple sites this year – perhaps in the future. We also hope that a single conference will bring everyone together in one place for this “grass roots” ecumenical dialogue.
Orientale Lumen EuroEast III
The next OL Conference planned for Constantinople (Istanbul) will be on July 5-8, 2010 (next summer!) with the full support and blessings of His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The theme will be “Church Councils of the East” and we already have Metropolitan Kallistos, Archimandrite Robert Taft, Sister Vassa Larin, and Professor Richard Schneider lined up as plenary speakers. We are also planning a post-conference weekend pilgrimage to Ephesus and the Monastery of St. John on Patmos where Metropolitan Kallistos is a professed monk. We are also going to organize a tour package including airfare, hotels, most meals, conference fee, and other local transportation from Washington, DC as a departure city. More details will be announced in the future. So, set aside the dates, and start planning now for the event. It will be a “trip of a lifetime”!
Orientale Lumen TeleVision
In case you have not seen it yet, we have started a website providing streaming videos you can watch online. These are from past Orientale Lumen Conferences and other Eastern Church events around the world. There is no cost and all you need to do is register to watch. There are several Introduction videos and Samplers that you can view even without registering.
We intend to produce more and more shows and make them available through this media, including un-published lectures of Metropolitan Kallistos, Archimandrite Robert Taft, and other renowned theologians. We also hope to have some OLTV programs available in sample form on YouTube. I hope these interest you. Please take a look, and let me know what we can do to make them more widely available and more appealing.
If you would like to own these programs, or show them to your fellow parishoners, many of these programs are also available in audio CD and video DVD format for purchase from the OL Conference website’s online catalog.
For OLTV visit: www.oltvweb.com
For OL Conferences visit: www.olconference.com
Eastern Christian Publications Our online catalog of printed material, www.ecpubs.com, continues to grow with new titles in many categories. A few new titles include:
* Image, Symbol and Mystery – the Eastern Church Sacraments
* Good News from the East – Volume III – homilies for the Liturgical Year
* I Am With You Always – pastoral letters of Patriarch Gregorios III
* Five Years Behind Barbed Wire – diary of a Hungarian Greek-Catholic priest
* The Holy Encounter – catechesis on the feast of the Presentation in the Temple
* Primer on Church and Eucharist – catechesis on the Divine Liturgy
Eastern Churches Journal In an effort to “catch up” on our production schedule so that news in the Chronicle section is more relevant, we are combining our normal three separate books for Volume 13 and for Volume 14 into a single book for each year. Volume 13 is at the printer and will be published in the next few weeks with Volume 14 shortly thereafter. We also plan to produce the three books for Volume 15 by the end of the summer. ECJ is published three times a year with articles about the Christian East – history, liturgy, theology, scripture, etc. – and also contains book reviews, a Q&A column, and an extensive Chronicle of the major events in all the Eastern Churches – Catholic and Orthodox – around the world. If you do not subscribe, you can find more information and subscribe online at the ECJ button of the online catalog at www.ecpubs.com. I’m sure you will find the ECJ helpful to you and your parish.
Thanks for reading this long update. I hope to see you in June at OL XIII!
Just to keep everyone in the “loop,” I’m taking these two weeks “off” from writing a post for the celebration of Holy Week and Pascha.
Keep an eye out for more announcements and stories about OLTV, the OL Conference, books from Eastern Christian Publications, and my travels around the country and the world.
Next up will be some reports of my visits to Europe in January for Christmas in the “Old Country”, and a wonderful “retreat” weekend in late February with Metropolitan Kallistos in Oxford!
The Orientale Lumen XIII Conference is now all set for June 15-18, 2009 at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC on the theme of “Monastic Spirituality for Everyday Life.” I am very hopeful that this ONE conference for 2009 (rather than the three locations we had last year) will bring everyone together in one place and foster more “face-to-face” ecumenical dialogue and exchange of understanding.
Our speakers will be:
Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America — a year ago, Archimandrite Jonah was a monastic on the West Coast and after being elected and consecrated bishop last summer, he gave a stunning speech at the OCA Sobor which then elected him their leader. We are very honored that he has agreed to be with us for most of the conference agenda, will serve a Divine Liturgy for the Orthodox participants, and will surely have some unique ideas about monasticism for the every day life of lay persons and clergy alike.
Bishop Hlib Lonchyna, Ukrainain Greek Catholic Church, Kyiv, Ukraine — I have known Bishop Hlib for almost ten years, meeting him in Rome several times when I accompanied Archbishop Vsevolod there. He has also attended both Orientale Lumen Conferences in Constantinople, accompanying Cardinal Husar there in May 2007. He is responsible for Monastic Matters of the Patriarchal Curia of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church along with other jobs and has family (his brother is Father Taras Lonchyna, pastor of Church of the Holy Trinity in Silver Spring, MD) in the Washington area and is American born. I am certain he will also provide a wonderful perspective on monastic life for lay persons.
Mother Lois Farag, Coptic Orthodox Church, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN — Mother Lois earned her doctorate in Early Christian Studies at the Catholic University of America and also holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School She attended several of the early OL conferences while a student in Washington. She teaches Early Church History at Luther Seminary and is doing research on a book project related to the conference theme of spirituality. She will have a special perspective for the conference working in Church history, teaching at a Lutheran-oriented college, and being from the Coptic Orthodox tradition.
Sister Barbara Jean Mihalchick, OSBM, Retreat Center Director, Mt. St. Macrina, Uniontown, PA — In addition to her current position of directing and giving retreats to a wide range of participants, Sister Barbara Jean was also the Vicar General (number two) of the Order of Saint Basil the Great at their world headquarters in Rome for some 12 years. She has traveled the world, visiting Basilian monasteries and other religious institutions in many places, and will bring a wealth of experience for our spiritual journey of “theosis,” becoming like God.
Professor Richard Schneider, Orthodox Church in America, Director of the Orthodox Eastern Studies Program at Trinity College, Toronto, Canada — Prof. Schneider has been a speaker at the last three OL conferences, 2007 on Icons and 2008 on Feastdays in the US, and at OL EuroEast II on Liturgy in Constantinople. He has a unique perspective of understanding and learning from icons that he refers to as “iconology,” and will apply that to personal spirituality and growth in our Christian journey.
Mr. Elias Damianakis, Greek Orthodox Church, Iconographer and Lecturer — Mr. Damianakis has been studying and living the spirituality of an iconographer for many years, and has developed a well-respected studio of iconography which not only has decorated many churches around the world, but also produced icons for the Vatican and Ecumenical Patriarchate. His talk will bring iconography and spirituality together, and he will also display an exhibit of icons and the process of painting an icon at the conference.
Father John Crossin, OSFS, Executive Director of the Washington Theological Consortium and President of the North American Academy of Ecumenists — Father Crossin has written several books on spirituality, teaches courses on ecumenism, and served as the moderator of OL XII East in Washington last year. We welcome him back as moderator this year, and as an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales, he brings a unique perspective to spirituality.
This year’s agenda for OL XIII will be a little like Noah’s ark — two by two! We have two bishops, two nuns, and two lay men! It will be fun, exciting, and spiritually rewarding. Come and join us!
Although the OLTV streaming website (www.oltvweb.com) has not been updated in several months (I hope to fix that soon!), we have been filming and editing a large number of new programs over the last several months. Most if not all of these new programs are currently available for purchase in either DVD (video) or CD (audio only) format from the online catalog of the OL Conference website: www.olconference.com
The new programs include the following:
Paschal Pilgrimage to Europe
– Sunday Divine Liturgy, Cathedral of the Holy Cross Bratislava, Slovakia
– Tuesday Presanctified Liturgy, Blessed Theodore Romzha Academy Chapel
– Wednesday Presanctified Liturgy, Blessed Theodore Romzha Academy Chapel
– Holy Thursday Divine Liturgy, Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Uzhorod, Ukraine
– Good Friday Matins, Blessed Theodore Romzha Academy Chapel
– Resurrection Matins and Paschal Divine Liturgy, Blessed Theodore Romzha Academy Chapel
Christmas Pilgrimage to Europe
– Vespers and Liturgy of St Basil, Romzha Theological Academy Chapel
– Compline of Christmas, Romzha Theological Academy Chapel
– Matins of Christmas, Romzha Theological Academy Chapel
– Hierarchical Christmas Divine Liturgy, Holy Cross Cathedral, Uzhorod
– Christmas Divine Liturgy, Outdoors in the Village of Velyky Lazy
– Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, Holy Cross Pro-Cathedral, Mukachevo
– Divine Liturgy, Outdoors in the Village of Benedikivtsi
– Hierarchical Divine Liturgy, Holy Cross Cathedral, Bratislava
History of Liturgy by Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ
– Byzantine Synthesis of the Divine Liturgy
– St John Chrysostom’s Role in the Formation of the Liturgy
– Eucharistic Anaphora Aloud?
– Liturgy and the Medieval East
– Worship in the Sinai Pennisula in the First Millennium
– Stages of Byzantine Liturgical Evolution
– Women at Liturgy in Byzantium
Theology of Liturgy by Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ
– Theological Developments in the Byzantine Anaphora
– Contribution of Eastern Liturgy to Understanding Christian Worship
– Eastern Catholic Theology? Is There Such a Thing?
– Theology of the Divine Office — Part 1
– Theology of the Divine Office — Part 2
– Missionary Effort of the Eastern Churches as Inculturation
Spirituality of Liturgy by Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ
– Christ in the Byzantine Office
– Devotion to the Eucharist in the Christian East
– Liturgical Prayer as Icon of Our Life in Christ
– Liturgy in the Life of the Church
– Lord, Teach Us to Pray
– Putting Mary Back into Christmas
Light and Life Seminars on Eastern Christianity
– Icons: Seeing the Light — Part 1 and Part 2
– Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom — Part 1 through Part 6
– Byzantine Catholic Church History — Part 1 and Part 2
Melkite Patriarchal Divine Liturgy for the Year of Saint Paul, Rome, May 2008
Hierarchical Divine Liturgy at the Closing of the Ukrainian Catholic Church Synod, Washington, September 2007
More recordings are in the works include 10 lectures by Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia entitled “Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church Fathers.” Watch this space for more details as they are released, or keep checking the website online catalog at www.olconference.com.
Over the past 2-3 years, I have had the opportunity to visit the TransCarpathian Region of Ukraine, the location of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo which is the original Church of all the Churches re-united with the Bishop of Rome through the Union of Uzhorod in 1646. In this Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, the majority of clergy are married with families, Church Slavonic is the normal language of all liturgical services, and they follow the Julian Calendar for both fixed feasts (such as Christmas on January 7) and Pascha (calculating the date of Easter as do the Orthodox Churches).
In my travels, I found the spirituality of the people and clergy, and the faith, especially of the seminarians who are studying for the priesthood, to be very positive and strong. This Church and its people were severely persecuted by the Communists; even the bishop of the diocese in the 1940’s, Blessed Theodore Romzha, was martyred for his faith and allegiance to Rome. They have come out of the underground and are a vibrant, growing Church with enthusiasm abounding. The seminary has a waiting list with over 125 men already enrolled.
It seemed that the spirituality that they have in TransCarpathia is lacking in our American parishes, and the financial resources that we have in abundance in America are lacking in Ukraine. I wanted to find a way for more Americans to experience the vibrancy of the Church in Europe. So I came up with an idea last spring that could allow for an exchange to benefit both Churches — a fund-raising concert tour of the seminary choir to our parishes in America.
The tour was designed with three goals in mind:
– fund-raising to benefit the seminary by asking for donations from patrons and by selling recordings of the choir
– provide an education about the American church and culture to the seminarians, most of whom had never before been on an airplane, let along leave Ukraine and travel to the West
– spark enthusiasm among our parishes for the singing of the Carpathian Mountains, our liturgical heritage, and enouraging vocations to the priesthood and religious life by witnessing the “call of God” demonstrated by these young men studying for the priesthood
We traveled to 25 parishes, singing concerts and some Divine Liturgies, with 17 seminarians over 28 days throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Every parish welcomed us with great support, provided meals and accommodations, and had “standing-room-only” in many places for the Concerts of Sacred Music. In total, over 4,000 persons attended the concerts with hundreds more coming for the liturgies sung in Church Slavonic. After paying all the travel expenses and other costs for the tour, the tour generated over $50,000 in financial support to the seminary to help with their ongoing operational costs. That is enough to run the entire seminary — meals, utilities, staff, faculty, etc. — for over a month.
More details of the tour locations and a photo album of scenes from the tour can be found at: www.seminaryconcerttour.com. Also, CD and DVD recordings of over 100 songs in a collection of 6 programs are available for purchase at: www.olconference.com.
Most of the parishes invited another us to bring another tour in the future, and so one is being discussed to take place next year, September through October 2010, with the seminary choir from the Preshov Archeparchy in Slovakia. This is the second historical center of Greek Catholics and has the same singing tradition and overflowing seminary as in TransCarpathia.
With the success of last year’s tour — financial, spiritual and educational — more details will be distributed as plans are finalized.
As fuel prices began to rise in late 2007 and early 2008, it seemed important to make the experience of the OL conferences available to as many people as possible and reduce travel costs for attendees. So we embarked on a strategy of having more locations for the conference, with the same theme and mostly the same speakers, thus making it one conference in three locations — sort of Trinitarian!
In 2008 the single theme was “Feastdays” and we had wonderful speakers talk about their liturgical, scriptural, and calendar traditions associated with the various feast days of the Church year. Four of the speakers spoke at all three locations, in Washington, DC for OL XII East, in San Diego, CA for OL XII West, and in Detroit, MI for OL XII North. The speakers who traveled from place to place included:
Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ, Professor Emeritus of the Pontifical Orientale Institute in Rome and the world’s foremost theologian on the Byzantine Liturgy.
Father Thomas Loya, pastor of Annunciation Byzantine Catholic Church outside of Chicago, IL and host of the syndicated radio program “Light of the East”.
Sister Vassa Larin, religious of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and professor at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Professor Richard Schneider of the Orthodox Church in America, who teaches at York University in Toronto and St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary in New York in the field of “iconology”.
In Washington, we also heard from Father Daniel Findikyan, rector of St. Nerses Armenian Seminary in New York and Professor Shawqi Talia, Chaldean Catholic layman from The Catholic University of America. In San Diego, Father Maximos Davies from Holy Resurrection Monastery, Romanian Greek Catholic Church, was an additional speaker (we also showed Father Findikyan’s talk by video because he could not travel to California at the time). In Detroit, we were blessed to hear from Archbishop Nathaniel, of the Romanian Episcopate of the Orthodox Church in America and Bishop Ibrahim of the Chaldean Catholic Church, both local to Detroit.
Father Loya and Professor Schneider gave wonderful talks using icons and slides to demonstrate their points, and all the other speakers presented fascinating information about the liturgical calendar and traditions from their specific Church. We had a marvelous video recorded talk by Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia entitled “Sacred Time” that was the opening session. His educational approach is marvelous from which to learn, and his anecdotal stories are always fun to hear. Even his video presentation received some higher evaluation scores than the live speakers!
Audio CDs and video DVDs of all plenary sessions and liturgical services at each conference are available for purchase from the online catalog at www.olconference.com or by calling the conference office at 703-691-8862. The hope to make the OL conferences more accessible to more people worked to some extent — we had approximately 60-70 attendees at each location totaling a little over 200, which is more than any single conference in the past. However, the added cost of having three locations, travel expenses for the speakers, and other costs for three different sites caused a significant financial deficit at each location. The breakeven point for an OL conference is about 100 paying attendees.
So for 2009, we are going to “downsize” a bit and hold just one conference in Washington, DC at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center on June 15-18, 2009. We’re sorry that this will not be as convenient for those on the west coast or in the midwest, but for now, we have no other financially viable alternative. Some have also commented to me that it is better to have just ONE conference that is THE conference for the year so that all attendees can gather together and meet each other rather than be spread around the country in different locations. Maybe the future will provide a way to do both — we are in discussions with other possible co-sponsors for 2010 to have more venues again.
We are also significantly lowering the price of the basic conference fee to UNDER $200 per person for three days of meetings, including lunch and dinner. In today’s economic crisis, we are trying to keep the travel costs for speakers to a bare minimum and hope that the lower conference fee will attract more attendees.
We also hope the theme of “Monastic Spirituality for Every Day Life” and the speakers we are planning will bring back our old friends and attract new persons as well, so please spread the word. More information and online registration can be found at:
My apologies to all who have been looking for “the rest of the story” of my Paschal Pilgrimage last spring to Europe.
After returning home, I hosted and managed THREE Orientale Lumen Conferences (more about them in the future) in June and July, and then was consumed by planning and running a 25-city, 28-day Concert Tour with seminary choir from Uzhorod, Ukraine.
Then came Christmas here at home and I went to Uzhorod again for Christmas on the Old Calendar (more about that trip in the future too!), and have just returned from a marvelous weekend with Metropolitan Kallistos in Oxford (more about that in a future report too!).
But here’s the end of the story from last spring …
Rome to Home.
The flight from Beirut to Rome was uneventful, and on arrival we were met at the airport and driven to our hotel. I was with a few other lay persons who made the trip, the housekeeper and cousin of Patriarch Gregorios and the architect who is designing and managing many of the building projects that the Patriarchate has underway throughout Lebanon. They both spoke English and knew more about our program schedule of activities than I, and so it was helpful to keep in contact with them.
We stayed at a wonderful guest house operated by the Diocese of Rome that had very comfortable rooms, private bath, and a fixed menu dining room for the guests. It is located on the hill just behind Vatican City and so very convenient to Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Square – about a 30 minute walk or 5 minutes by taxi.
We arrived on Wednesday morning and had to wait a few minutes for our rooms to be ready, and so we had a nice lunch in the dining room. The rest of the day had nothing scheduled, and so we rested and had dinner together again in the evening. Thursday was the busy day.
The Patriarch, and twelve other Melkite bishops from around the world who came for the pilgrimage, stayed elsewhere in the city. They had a private, personal audience with Pope Benedict XVI early in the morning.
The rest of the pilgrims – clergy and lay persons from Melkite around the world, about 300 in total – gathered at the Bronze Door entrance to the Vatican about 11:00 am. About 11:30 we entered and walked up the long staircases to main level of the ApostolicPalace. We were directed into the large Clementine audience hall where chairs had been arranged for the group, and for the bishops and pope in front.
We all waited with great expectation for the arrival of the hierarchs. About 12:30 the doors opened from the private residence of the pope and first the bishops, then the patriarch, and finally the pope entered the room to thunderous applause.
It was very exciting to see the Holy Father in person, even though I was toward the back of the room, and be present with so many other Greek Catholics from around the world.Patriarch Gregorios first gave an address in French to the Holy Father, and Pope Benedict responded in French to the group.
For most in the room, their second language after Arabic is French. Unfortunately, I would have to wait to read an English translation in the newspaper!
A number of gifts were given to the pope by Patriarch Gregorios and others, including two books which I had prepared – special white leather bound editions of Patriarch Gregorios’ book of pastoral letters entitled I Am With You Always, and the festschrift I edited and published in honor of Archbishop Vsevolod called We Are All Brothers/3. Because of the large group, I was not able to personally present them to the Holy Father, but was nevertheless honored that Patriarch Gregorios did.
When the audience ended, the pope posed for a group picture with the bishops in front and the crowd behind. The patriarch and bishops all then left and probably had lunch in the ApostolicPalace with the Holy Father.
Our large group dispersed all around Saint Peter’s Square for lunch and a break before the Divine Liturgy later that afternoon in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls.
The main purpose of this Melkite pilgrimage was to initiate the Year of Saint Paul, and so the patriarchal liturgy in that basilica seemed quite appropriate.I carried my three handycams to the church and set up to make video recordings of this historic liturgy. As a “one-man- band” video crew, I set up one camera fixed behind the altar and a second aimed at the small schola of singers from the Greek College who led the responses in mostly Arabic with some Greek. Then with the third camera, I followed the “action” of processions, main elements of the liturgy at the altar, and views of the 500 person congregation.
The Liturgy took place in the apse of the basilica which is filled with large, magnificent mosaics of Christ and other saints in Byzantine style iconography. The singing filled the church and one could imagine that this event was how liturgy might have been like in Hagia Sophia – the patriarch surrounded by a dozen bishops and priests, and hundreds of faithful singing with fervor! I hope the video recordings will provide some sense of the wonder of the live experience. A sample of it will be available soon on www.oltvweb.com and CD and DVD recordings will be available soon for purchase from the online catalog on www.olconference.com.
After the liturgy, we walked a few blocks to a sports complex where a light reception of food and beverages were served for all who attended to socialize and meet.On Friday, a private audience with Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, newly appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Catholic Churches, was arranged for me by Bishop Milan Shaskik of Mukachevo at about noon time.
As I waited in the anteroom for my appointment, Patriarch Gregorios and other bishops came out of Cardinal Sandri’s office – they had been meeting with him just before my own appointment and so we greeted each other.
My visit was very warm and cordial, and His Eminence thanked me for working with Bishop Milan on various publishing projects. I also took the opportunity to tell him about my other work – other book publishing, the Orientale Lumen Conferences, and OLTV. He was very interested and seemed glad to learn of all these activities.
On Sunday morning, I made my way across the city to the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiorrie and Saint Anthony’s Church to be at the Divine Liturgy for Pentecost with Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ. I again set up my three cameras and recorded that liturgy served almost exclusively in Church Slavonic according to the Russian Rite.
After liturgy, Father Taft invited me for lunch at the Oriental Institute and we had an extended discussion of some book publishing projects and discussed the upcoming Orientale Lumen Conferences at which he would be one of the plenary speakers.
By Monday, after having been on the road for three and a half weeks, and visited seven different countries, I was quite ready for the flight home. I was glad that United now has non-stop service from Rome to Washington, and so I was able to return without making connections elsewhere in Europe.
It had been a thrilling trip, and I accomplished much of what I planned, but was certainly glad to get home.
