Auntie will be in Rome...

...for the canonisation of John Paul the Great and the good John XXIII  at the end of April. 

Just been re-reading the book of an interview with Cardinal  Tarcisio Bertone about his meetings with Sister Lucia and the  Fatima visions. A fascinating read. To ponder the visions and message of Fatima and the life of Bl John Paul in 2014 is to ponder a deep thing. The canonisation of John Paul will place the whole matter ever more deeply into the tradition of the Church. This is also a relevant read...

Looking back, the 20th century was for so many people a terrible one. The Fatima visions spoke of war and tragedy and horrors to come, and these certainly came.  It was as if there was one great chastisement after another, with always the innocent suffering: the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews, the famine forced on the Ukraine under Communism in which millions  starved to death, the 1960s similar Communist-created famine in China (people were reduced to  trying to eat leaves and tree-bark, and the trees in some cities were stripped bare until there was literally nothing at all), the Baltic deportations to slave labour under Stalin...all centuries have had their horrors, but the sheer numerical scale of the horrors of the 20th century places them in a category of their own.

John Paul saw the start of a new millennium as a time to repent, pray, and make, in a very profound and Christ-centred way, a fresh and humble beginning. I suppose we all instinctively want to "make a fresh start" with each New Year:  God puts that longing into our hearts. As a saintly (and heroic!) successor of St Peter, he led the Church across the gateway into the new millennium. The Church, at least, takes seriously the idea of peace, forgiveness, trust, and mercy (especially that last)  - all so necessary for attempting to live together. JPII  gave voice to this, and with his great sense of how God works in human history, he drew us into some understanding of the need to take things like the Fatima message very seriously...