At Brompton Oratory...

...for a Board Meeting of the British section of Aid to the Church in Need.

On all train and Tube journeys at the moment, I'm busy revising for exams. Been re-reading Paul VI's Humanae Vitae as part of Moral Theology. He came under such terrible attack for this Encyclical, but how wise and truthful it was, and how prophetic it turned out to be! This evening I googled his name - and, alas, the first several references to him on the Internet were all horrible, nasty, snide attacks on him. Even all these many years later, his enemies absolutely loathe him...so I have been reconnecting with my own knowledge of him to get a real picture. There is so much that I had not known about at all - how he worked with Pius XII to give Jews and other refugees a safe haven at Castel Gandolfo in WWII,how he pioneered new forms of evangelisation while working in Milan...

Pope John Paul abandoned, and rightly, the Ostpolitik which had marked Paul VI's papacy - but he opened the diocesan process of his beatification in 1993, and declared him a Servant of God.