Breakfast With the Pope

Word of the Post: Colazione (Breakfast)

Every year my brother and I go to Christmas mass with my family and my grandparents. Every year we sit there and observe everything that goes on. There is always the bass singer standing right behind us who is singing louder yet deeper than everyone else on Silent Night, and there is always the Priest that has a hard accent so it is hard to understand the Hail Mary.

There is always the choir of singers up in the left hand corner of the alter with young children who haven't had voice lessons yet, and there are always the people you haven't seen since the last Christmas mass. The observations are always relatively similar.

For the first time in several years my observations at a mass were completely different.

On Sunday morning, I woke up for breakfast with the Pope--and 50,000 others. When you live four blocks from the Vatican, it's easy to have to share your neighbor (the Pope) with many other people. So it wasn't really breakfast--it was really a canonization of four saints. I have never been in one spot where there were so many people from so many different cultures. There were Italians of course, but there were also people from France, London, India, Germany, and hundreds of other places.

The booklet for mass was almost 60 pages long. And it was filled with languages ranging from Latin, to Indian, to English, and of course to Italian.

Our group of people sat down about one fourth of a mile from the Pope. Just like at concerts, I had a huge problem seeing so I watched most of it up on the big screen hanging down in front of the Vatican. I tried to follow the booklet, but all I could do was tell where we were in Mass, until we got to the English part--then I understood every word.

Like Christmas mass, I had the louder than the normal singer standing behind me, each Priest had hard accents, and there were choirs of people--only this time they sounded astonishing compared to the glee club chorus at Christmas mass.

My friend went to say something to me, and I didn't even realize it. I was too busy being astounded by everything that was surrounding me. Mass was coming to an end and soon enough the peace offerings were coming. I realized that I would probably shake hands with people from 7 different countries, and I wouldn't know what to say to them except the good old English way of putting it, "Peace be with you."

Following our peace givings, we watched several Priests come out into the square. That is when we hopped into line to receive Communion. 50,000 people standing in Saint Peter's Square, and over half were looking to receive Communion. That's a lot of Jesus's body to be given!

We received our Communion and there was such a crowd that it was too difficult to head back to our seats. Three of us headed out and were just in disbelief of what had just occurred. We went to mass with the Pope, and received Communion in Saint Peter's Square--that is something to tell the grandkids one day.