Rome, Day 3

Day 3 was Sunday, and we didn't do very much touristing. We went back to the Vatican for Mass, of course. We got there over half an hour before Mass started and were late anyway because the security line was so long. The line for the Vatican Museums was over a mile long--apparently it was free museum Sunday.

 So many cardinals at Mass! Let the record show that Mass was over at this point. I do not take photos during Mass and heartily disapprove of this practice. After Mass, we zipped out to the square to see Pope Francis and hear him say the Angelus. Whoever is in charge of reading the Latin responses for the crowd to say needs to sloooowwwww down! I consider myself reasonably good at saying the Hail Mary in Latin and I couldn't keep up. Apparently BXVI's reader was even faster.

 Sadly, since I don't speak Italian, I had to wait to get home to find out what he said.

 Why are these pictures so blurry? Because this is what it looked like without zoom:

 That also gives you an idea of the size of the crowds. Shoulder to shoulder in hot sun with strangers who are all yelling. I got rather stressed out by this, and decided I would rather not climb the cupola than go stand in more lines with more crowds. So we went to a park, and relaxed, napped, did a little bit of birdwatching, and bathed our feet in the cool water of the fountain.

Then we wandered back into the city and had pizza and gelato for dinner.

I am ridiculously pleased with how well we did Rome on a budget! The folder on my computer is optimistically called Rome 2013, so we will see if I ever get back again. I would certainly like to.

Rome, Day 2

To catch up, I'm going to have to post a little more frequently. Don't expect this to continue!

 I think the Rome metro looks like a tapeworm. I'm sorry. It does.

 Pope Leo, founder of CUA, hanging out in St. John Lateran. Is there a reason he always looks like he's playing with an invisible yo-yo? I would like to know.

 So much gold! Why exactly we went to Mass at St. John on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul is not clear to me, but apparently it's a Holy Day of Obligation in Rome, so it's a good thing we went, even if we picked a strange church to do it in.

 On our way to another church, we saw this trail through the straw that a bunch of ants had made.

 This is Santa Cruce, I believe. It's hard for me to tell because I have no pictures from inside it.

 Kevin, reading the map. A common occurrence.

 I forget which church this is, but it is covered in mosaics so I automatically love it.

 St. Sophie, virgin and martyr! My self-adopted patron saint. Her relics are in a little church in Rome near St. Mary major.

 See that underground basement part? That's where the relics were kept. We couldn't find them, so we had to ask a Benedictine (in Italian!) who unlocked it for us and let us go down. Don't be worried by the lit candles. We didn't interrupt Mass; they were setting up for a baptism.

 Cardinal Wuerl's church was unfortunately shut.

St. Paul outside the Walls is my favorite church ever. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

 The pictures fail to do it justice, really. It's so large, and so gold, and so overwhelming.

 The Forum.

The Colosseum! Photo credit goes to a kind fellow tourist.

Wow, I got all of day two into one post! Let me tell you, it was an exhausting day. We saw tons of churches I didn't take pictures of and walked miles and miles.

Next up: Sunday!

So far behind! Rome, Day 1

On blogging, that is. In terms of schoolwork, the library books I ordered come in tomorrow and I am going to print out my online articles today, so I'm in good shape there. I hope. Due to IES program requirements, I have to turn in my paper five weeks early, so I can only hope that in two weeks I can get a paper up to the standards for a paper everyone else has seven weeks to write. But what can't be cured must be endured, and I am resigned to the (very real) possibility that I may well not get an A in this class.

I still haven't posted the Rome pictures, and I went to Berlin and those pictures aren't even sorted. So here, without further ado, is a substantial dump of Rome pictures. I think it will take several posts to get through them, so here is day 1.

We arrived on Friday at about 2, and went to go check into our hostel. I had been worried about it, because the internet reviews were not stellar, but let me tell you, it was great. For 20E/night, I have zero complaints.

 This is Kevin's favorite bridge in Rome. Perhaps he will be so kind as to remind me in the comments of what it is called.

 First view of the Vatican! We followed the advice of a CUA philosophy professor--if you come at St. Peter's from one stop farther than the tourists go, you get this amazing view as your first view.

 Roman pigeons love to do this. I don't know why.

 The day was so good from a weather perspective it was hard to get photos! The sky kept getting blown out.

 Us at the Vatican. For a tourist selfie, this turned out pretty well!

 It was St. Peter and Paul on the Saturday, so St. Peter got a lovely robe, and if you donated some money to Peter's Pence, they gave you a holy card! So I did, at basically every church we went into.

 Isn't it every Catholic girl's dream for her boyfriend to take her to Rome and then find a photo op with a Swiss guard?

 Because our minds cannot always be set on the eternal, I offer you this photo of a seagull eating a dead something. This is probably on of my top five favorite photos from this weekend. Analyze away, armchair psychiatrists! (I spelled that correctly on the first try. Exhibit A of why everyone should study ancient Greek.)

 There is a specific spot in the square, and if you stand there, all the columns line up. For those of you who are thinking, "Wait, did they not before?", I offer you the next shot:

 This is what I saw when I turned around to look at the other side. Apparently they don't usually appear to line up. I would make a terrible detective--I'm so unobservant!

 The bridge, again, from the other side. Or maybe it was a different bridge. Kevin?

 The Pantheon.

Apparently every other tourist in the world wound up at the Trevi fountain at night. I don't like crowds, so I took a picture from the side, and I think it turned out pretty well.

Next installement will be either the pictures from Saturday or half of the pictures from Saturday. We did a lot of stuff. (Note: I have asked Kevin to comment and fill in my blanks, but obviously other readers are free to do the same, or to straight up correct me if I got something wrong.)

Prepping and packing

...because I can't think of anything better to do the week after three days in the hospital than take a 5am train to a city full of food you can't eat, can you? Seriously, though, I am so excited. I am going to get to see the pope, and get him to bless my rosary! (And some other stuff, but those are presents, so shhhh.) I'm solving the food problem by bringing nuts and hard-boiled eggs with me, and on Sunday night I'll probably scrap the gluten-free diet for the evening so I can eat pasta carbonara.

The last few days have been a whirlwind of activity, since all my friends are leaving. We went out to dinner several times, which left rather more of a hole in my pocket than I thought it would, and we spent an evening at a carnival. As my friend Alex said, "On a scale of one to Mexico, how safe do you think this is?"

There were several typical carnival rides, but there were no rules about how to behave on them. So people were standing up on the swing boats. On the swing merry-go-round, you will notice that my friends are facing me in several pictures. This is because they twisted up their chains before the ride started, and then shoved and pushed each other to make sure they kept spinning for the whole ride.

It was a good evening, or rather set of evenings, and a fun week. After I get back from Rome, though, it will be nice to relax a little bit.

Orthodoxy and heterodoxy: 7 quick takes, vol 8

1. For some reason, questions about heresy keep popping up all over the place recently. And they all seem to lead me to the same thoughts.

2. It all started with reading the book, The Name of the Rose, which a good friend recommended and lent to me. The book is set during the Franciscan controversy, about whether Jesus had things, and whether Christians should have things, or whether they were required to live in poverty, and what that all meant anyway. One of the characters in the book made the point that the majority of people who get caught up in heretical movements are not trying to be heretics. An inspiring preacher comes along who talks about dedicating your life to Christ, so you follow him. And then it turns out his theology is all flawed and so he and you are both heretics, but you are just a medieval farmer, so you had no idea about theology anyway! You're a Cathar, because that's who came by, not because you're actually deeply committed to Catharism. I thought this idea was super interesting, and probably true.

3. Then, in my Medieval Mindset class, we talked about the same time period. My teacher advanced the theory that St. Francis was canonized so quickly because the Pope was worried that people would follow St. Francis rather than him, and so he canonized him to tie the St. Francis followers into the Roman Catholic Church. Now, to me, this sounds a little crazy, especially if you think that canonizations are divinely inspired. But what was very interesting was how much some heresies overlap with other, orthodox, traditions. The line between heresy and orthodoxy is so very thin in some places!

4. In my theater class, we discussed and saw the play Daniel Stein. It's based on a book which was originally in Russian, which is loosely based on a real person. Anyway, the story is of a Jewish man who works as a translator for the Gestapo in WWII. After he uses his inside knowledge to help a Jewish ghetto, he has to flee. He hides with Catholic nuns, becomes Catholic, and then a Catholic priest. He goes to Israel to try to found a community like the original church in the first century, before Judaism and Catholicism became so different from each other. However, he gets into all sorts of trouble with the church, because part of what he does is reject Church doctrines (like the Trinity) that were solidified in later centuries. These conflicts never get really straightened out because Daniel dies in a car accident. Nevertheless, it's interesting to me that what got Daniel into trouble was not so much his beliefs as his lack of beliefs.

5. A side note to a paper I am writing is the heresy of Joachim von Fiore. He wrote a book attacking Peter Lombard and his doctrine of the Trinity. Then he sent his book to the pope, to get an opinion on the orthodoxy of his opinions so he could know if they were in line with Church teaching. And, too bad for him, the Fourth Lateran Council condemned him and his book, and said that Peter Lombard was correct. It did praise Peter Lombard, though, for checking.

6. Yesterday, a friend of mine and I were discussing religion and the Church. (This is the same friend who recommended The Name of the Rose. He and Kevin and I have some awesome deep discussions. He also might be reading this, so hi!) Anyway, he started to ask a question, prefacing it with the two caveats that one, he hoped this wasn't offensive and he didn't mean it offensively, and two, he knew it might be hard for me to answer this question objectively, so I was prepared for some tricky theology question or something. But the question was, aren't there some popes and bishops throughout history who have done some really evil things? To which, of course, the answer is yes by any moral standard. My father likes to say that given the people who have led the Church in the past, the fact that she still exists is a testament to her divine guidance!

7. But what it all comes down to, I think, is authority. Does the Church have authority, or not? If the Church has authority and is inspired by the Holy Spirit, then you follow her. If not, you don't. The line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is fine, but the line is there. To a regular person, it's so hard to sort out. For God, it's easy. I would hate to be a Protestant and have to figure everything out by myself. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the Church to guide me in my theology, especially in my metaphysics.

7 quick and late takes, vol 7

1. Sneaking in just before the deadline here! I have been very busy, and when I haven't been busy I have been busy being unproductive relaxing.

2. On Thursday was Corpus Christi, which will get a post of its own because there are a lot of pictures. I went and had lunch at the Seepark after the procession, thereby checking another thing off the Summer Fun List.

3. On Friday, we had an all-day outing for the Medieval Mindset class. That is probably worth a post of its own too, so I won't say any more about that, except that I met a member of the German minor nobility--a count. And our entire class accidentally crashed a funeral. So that was an interesting day.

4. Saturday, we rode the Oldtimerlinie, which, again, will be in its own post. Then my drama class went to the opera. We were ridiculously high up--I wished I had brought my binoculars! There were no higher seats anywhere.

This is the Stuttgart opera house. It looked so nice. Unfortunately, I was way underdressed. Oh well.

5. Today, Sunday, there was the universal hour of Eucharistic Adoration with the pope. Apparently it was mostly being done in the cathedrals, but the cathedral here was being used for a concert, so it was in St. Martin's across the street. I prayed all four decades of the rosary. At one point, I felt like I was in a Tridentine Mass, because Pater Markus was praying something in Latin. Since I didn't understand it, I just kept praying my rosary!

6. Being gluten-free makes me feel so much better, but recently I have noticed another benefit: I can tolerate way more lactose than I used to be able to! Processed dairy products, like yogurt and cheese and ice cream don't bother me at all in small quantities. I hate not eating gluten products, but it does improve my life so much.

7. I have been practicing taking better photos using the manual setting on my camera. It's surprisingly easy to get better photos than the auto setting will get me, especially in poor or bright light.

7 quick takes

1. I finally got my picture to upload, by using Chrome. Have a heart, Firefox. I want to like you better, if only because you have my usernames and some of my passwords stored, but if you don't even work, that's not good for your continued usage. Anyway, here is the photo I was trying to upload:

2. I am not familiar with the products of this clothing store, but someone should have rethought this advertising campaign. When I walk past this store IN MAY in a coat, with an umbrella, wishing I had a scarf on, seeing this window just makes me want to break the window politely explain how this advertisement is insensitive to those of us in climately-challenged regions of Europe. Like, you know, all of Germany.

3. However, we are now past the feastday of "cold Sophie," so now it's safe to plant your crops because the ground is unlikely to freeze. Hear that? The ground probably won't freeze any more. IN MAY. Joy of joys, people.

4. Don't get me wrong, I like cold weather, but I like cold weather that comes in the form of snow and ice, not in the form of constant damp dripping. So, of course, the part of me that wants whatever weather I haven't got is planning a warmer vacation, namely...

5. Rome! I can buy a 5 day, three country Eurail pass for 234E. This will take me to Rome, back from Rome, to Berlin to visit my cousin, back from Berlin, and then to Duesseldorf at the end of the semester to fly home. Sounds pretty good to me! The catch (you knew there was one) is that all three trips have to be done inside of a month.

6. With that said, I think it's doable. I need to talk to my cousin in Berlin about coming to visit her, and talk to the friends who may well be traveling with me, but I think this is a plan worth pursuing, and I'm super excited! I've never been to Rome. I have a rosary JPII blessed that my grandparents gave me, and a rosary BXVI blessed that Kevin gave me, so now I need a rosary that Francis blessed too.

7. And last but not least, oh, how I wish Pope Francis had an abbreviation! Talking about JPII and BVXI makes me feel like I belong to some group of insiders who know the Vatican slang and sit around debating the relative merits of the OF and the EF, with references to VII and the GIRM, or NFP with references to TOB and HV. When talking about Pope Francis, I get no such sense. #catholicproblems?

Head over to Conversion Diary for the rest of the takes!

Papal predictions

So yesterday, Kevin and I decided to make some predictions about the new pope.

You have to sort of read from right to left. Sorry!

I posted the picture on facebook, and all my friends started joining in. I thought it was interesting that there was very little agreement among them. Here are the predictions we made:

Vote Number: 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 4
Country/Continent: Africa, Italy, North America, Latin America, Italy, European
Papal Name: An African Saint's name, Leo, Benedict XVII, Leo, Boniface, Pius VIII
Decade of Age: 60s, 70s, 60s, 60s, 60s, 60s

No clearly favored front runner here, that seems to be clear! All I can say is that I really hope we don't get a new pope while I am sitting in German class today!