To Loreto after all
rrHANKS LARGELY to the generosity of CATHOLIC 11 HERALD readers, the Holy Name Singers from Birmingham set sail on Monday to Loreto, Italy, for the International Festival of Sacred Music. Mr. Peter Grant, their director, told us this week that donations sent through the CATHOLIC HERALD plus some given directly came to £242.
The Edinburgh Cathedral Choir, which sang in Loreto last year, sent them £22. Altogether, he said, the contributions
"will just about cover" the boys' travelling and .hotel expenses not paid for by the festival committee. So the Holy Name Singers plan to travel on to Rome and sing before the Pope next week,
Mr. Grant told us he felt especially pleased "that the boys who have put themselves out so much and so often to sing Holy Mass and for the pleasure of others. usually at their own expense, should find themselves ultimately so generously helped and rewarded".
Next week we hope to hear news of the singers from Fr, Wilfrid Purney, director of the Church Music Association, who will be attending the festival in Loreto.
Tribute to Pope John
DOPE JOHN'S diaries—the eighth instalment of which is on page 6 of this week's CATHOLIC HeRaso—reesived a surprisingly gentle nudge into the puhlic eye at a Foyle's Dorchester lunch last week to mark its publication.
The lunch had all the ingredients to attract the Press en masse, Mingling with the guests were Archbishop Roberts, S.J., Count Michael de la Bedoyere, and the Bishop of Woolwich, men who have often been crudely daubed with the brush signifying "rebel", and who made headlines last January when Foyle's marked the publication of Objections to Roman Catholicism. But there were no ecclesiastical fireworks last week, no drama, and no headlines.
Cardinal Heenan was the principal speaker. Paying what he called a "simple tribute to a simple man", he told how at the funeral of Pius Xll his eye had roved over a "most unlikely band of Cardinals" and had not delayed long on Cardinal Roncalli. "I didn't think then that the Church was so hard up as to choose him".
But, said the Cardinal, "this man of modest ambition turned out to be the greatest .Pope of modern times". He was not the great revolutionary that people say; nor was he startlingly eloquent—he was simple and loved all humanity. His secret lay not in doing great things but in performing everyday tasks such as saying the Rosary ("described now
as out-of-date but apparently not so to Pope John"). He did not grow less in simplicity as he grew -older and his responsibilities increased.
Cardinal Heenan admitted that the amount of apparent triviality in the first 200 pages of "Journal of a Soul" made them the most monotonous that he had ever "had the misfortune" to read. "But there were gems concealed there", he added. "It is an exciting book and a true picture of Pope John."