MONDAY
We were debating the recall of MPs. I believe that Parliament is the best guarantor of liberty. All populist insurgencies start by bewailing the state of society, a corrupt elite, blaming a minority – Poles or Muslims today, Jews in the last century. Catholics or Protestants before that depending on where you were in Europe. I mentioned Titus Oates, his victims, the victims of popular clamour.
TUESDAY
We flew to Rome. The first meetings were with Sant’Egidio. I rate them because all of them work for nothing. There is no suffocating bureaucracy of well-paid charity executives. They were formed by young people thirty years ago who wanted to help the poor of Rome. They are still there. Afterwards we went to the Jesuit Refugee Service. We were staying in a room in the wall connecting the Castel Sant’Angelo with the Vatican. I have never slept inside an 800-year-old wall before.
WEDNESDAY
We went to a papal audience. I am not sure I like these occasions. Too much hero worship of the man in white for me, but it’s fun. I wish my Italian were better to understand the address. I can follow the Italian, obviously I have an English text. The evening before, in a lovely church next to the Refugee Centre, I couldn’t make out why I didn’t take in a word. I had by mistake been reading Tuesday of Week 30 instead of Sts Simon & Jude. Indeed, we know nothing about these apostles. What humility to be in at the beginning of this movement, to shape the world and leave no trace of one’s own life.
THURSDAY
A great delight. We had Mass at the crypt of St Peter’s. Amazing to stand here in the very heart of Christendom to see past the priest’s shoulders the sign – in Latin – ‘The Tomb of Peter’, and beyond that through the glass where he is buried.
FRIDAY
I went to the Rembrandt exhibition in the National Gallery. Stunning. “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Deyman” (1656) struck me particularly forcibly in its horror. A dead, executed criminal is having his brain cut open. It could be the Christ laying there, taken down from the Cross, but most beautiful of all is the very last picture painted: “Simeon with the Infant Christ in the Temple”. I almost wept at the poignancy of the scene as dying Simeon/Rembrandt encounters his Saviour and finds peace.
What is not here is one of the greatest pictures of all time. I have stood in awe in front of it in the State Hermitage Museum – “The Return of the Prodigal Son”. A copy of it used to be on the wall next to the confessional in Holy Rood Market Rasen. Every Sunday Mass I could look at it and marvel.
SATURDAY
I walked the six miles from Market Rasen station through Willingham Woods – sun seeping through the towering trees up and over the wolds into our sun-setting valley, pausing not hurrying over three hours and arrived home to yellowing light, wood fire, and tea. What more restful or greater delight?