The Roamin' Roman

Benvenuto! You have happened upon the blog of a wandering Catholic American college student studying for a year in Rome, the Eternal City. You will find here my pontifications, ruminations, reflections, images, and ponderings on my life in Rome. Ciao!

Thursday, April 20


Here is a shot of the papal procession from the rear... I would have better photos here, considering my prime photo location - but I was too busy trying to give the Holy Father his birthday card, on this, his 79th birthday!! We spent most of our waiting time before Mass designing the "perfect" card (well, perfect considering we had only sketch paper and 8 colored pens to work with). The collective "we" of the Bernardi house had already given him a birthday card the night before, at the Vigil, where he actually took the card himself out of Susan's hand during the exit procession!! So, others of us therefore got the idea to make another to give him today, even though we knew he likely wouldn't take a card on the way into Mass (nope), but I knew what Msgr. Ganswein looks like - it was really funny actually, I held the card out as the Holy Father went by, he smiled at us real big and blessed us, but obviously wasn't going to come over - then I look behind him and I see Msgr. Ganswein grinning at us too, and motioning with his head for us to give the card to one of the "black suits" along side the procession, one of them came right up to me and took the card, and then passed the card in to Msgr. Ganswein who put it into the Pope's folder. OK, so yeah, probably wasn't the most reverent thing to do right before Mass... but we knew he wasn't going to process out after Mass, and we wanted to make some kind of personal contact! Hopefully the pope and God will forgive us this small indulgence!

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