Welcoming Pope Leo XIV: Members flock to St. Augustine's Parish for special service
ANDOVER — The Rev. Peter Gori was performing a funeral Mass at St. Augustine's Parish about noon last Thursday when the news broke that a new pope had been chosen.
He said after the funeral, people kept asking him one question over and over: If he knew Pope Leo XIV.
'I said, 'Yes, every Augustinian in the world knows him,'' Gori said with a laugh.
The Andover parish is an Augustine Catholic community. Augustinians follow the Rule of St. Augustine and his intentions to pursue the love of God through the unity of minds and hearts. There is a commitment to serve the church wherever the church needs its followers to go or service.
About noon local time, and 6 p.m. at the Vatican, white smoke billowed out of the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel to alert the world that a new pope was selected.
The cardinal conclave met for about two days, coming to at least a two-thirds vote to select Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, as the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.
Prevost chose Leo XIV as his papacy namesake and addressed the crowd at the Vatican with an emotion-filled speech and prayer from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. The moment was a historic one, as he became the first American pope.
'Naturally as an Augustinian, I'm very proud of him,' Gori said. He described the new pope as young and 'a very nice fellow, quiet and known for being calm.'
Leo XIV was the Order of St. Augustine's superior general more than a decade ago. There are about 2,000 Augustinians globally.
His chosen name of Leo XIV may have given some indication to his papacy and called it a beautiful choice, Gori added.
'I suspect he is a good admirer of Pope Leo XIII,' he said. Leo XIII was the last to select the name Leo in 1878. Leo XIII was an advocate for workers rights. The Andover priest added that Catholics may see a 'gentle continuation' of Francis' ideals, values and teachings based on the namesake.
Gori said the fact that an American was chosen was a surprise to many, including himself. For Gori, the news was a shock to hear an American had been selected because of the amount of turbulence in the United States, and caused by the United States, over the last several months.
'I'm sure Catholics in America will pay close attention and maybe sometimes find themselves trying to defend what he says because he is a fellow countryman,' Gori said. 'But he will hopefully see a great outpouring of love and affection from Catholics here in the United States.'
It wasn't a 'safe bet,' Gori said, for an American to be chosen, but noted how the conclave has recently chosen non-Italians to lead the church.
'In some ways, the world is getting smaller, but the pope importantly belongs to everyone,' Gori said. 'He will be carrying a Vatican passport now and not an American one.'
Others in the community responded to the new pontiff and their hopes for the Catholic Church.
Pastor John Delaney of Sacred Hearts Parish in Haverhill said he was surprised to hear that an American was selected.
'But, what I've heard is that he's going to be great,' he said. 'He seems to be very gentle, personable, approachable, and a fine successor to Pope Francis.'
Boston Archbishop Richard Henning joined Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston and around the globe in celebrating the pope's election.
'We pray for him as he begins this ministry as the Vicar of Christ and the Bishop of Rome,' Henning said. 'May he be for us a visible source and foundation of communion in faith.'
'I have been representing clergy sexual abuse victims or survivors worldwide for decades,' the Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian said in a press release.
Garabedian is best known as an attorney who represents victims of sexual abuse by clergy.
'Hopefully, Pope Leo XIV will actually create effective programs to help clergy sexual abuse victims try to heal, screen and supervise priests and prevent clergy sexual abuse. The Catholic Church has to understand that the safety of innocent children cannot be sacrificed for an outdated and inexcusable need to protect the reputation of the Catholic Church.'
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Boston Globe
6 hours ago
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Rosebushes at the gates of hell
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up My grandfather had a camera, and he took photographs at Dachau. They ended up in his wartime scrapbook along with photos of Camp Old Gold, the Rhine, dusty German roads, bomber planes in the sky, and the Austrian Alps. I saw the scrapbook for the first time in 2015, when my grandmother brought it out at my grandfather's funeral. I knew my grandfather had been at Dachau. He had even shown me some of his war 'souvenirs,' as he called them, from Berchtesgaden. I had heard about the scrapbook over the years from my aunts and uncles, who mentioned it in low tones when the subject of my grandfather's wartime experience came up. But it had mostly remained stowed away in the dark, out of sight and out of mind. The author's grandfather's wartime scrapbook. Clark Family Collection As I turned its brittle pages, I understood why. 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'We went around the back of it. And that's when it was bad, you know,' he said. My aunt attempted to draw him out, but his answers were vague. 'You change a little bit,' was all he said about his emotions then, and after. But I'd heard the story about how he once approached a couple of truck drivers who were talking about how the Holocaust had never happened. My grandfather told them to read their history, because he was there. He had seen it with his own eyes. The author's great-aunt Ann Clark, who made the scrapbook, with the author's grandfather Herbert J. Clark in front of their home on Columbus Ave. in Somerville during his second furlough from the war in 1944. Clark Family Collection In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Germany to research my novel, partially based on my grandfather's experience in Bavaria during the spring of 1945. I tried to retrace his wartime route. I went to Berchtesgaden and took Hitler's gaudy gilded elevator up to the Kehlsteinhaus — the 'Eagle's Nest,' an old Nazi chalet perched on the edge of a small mountain, with stunning views of the Alps. Now, improbably, the Eagle's Nest was a busy restaurant full of tourists and hikers who sat in the June sun with steins of golden beer. Apart from the historical photos that hung on some walls, it was hard to imagine Hitler relaxing there with the Nazi top brass. My grandfather had been here at the end of the war, he said, and had taken a swastika flag. American GIs had carved their names into the marble fireplace. I looked for his name but couldn't find it. The next day I walked through Dachau's museum, reconstructed barracks, gas chamber, and crematorium. I stood where I thought my grandfather had stood 78 years before, when he had taken his photographs. I still didn't know how to think about those photos. I worried, in my worst moments, that they were some kind of macabre war souvenir, like the flag he'd taken from Berchtesgaden. But in the crematorium at Dachau, I saw a photograph of local Germans forced by American soldiers to view the murdered victims' corpses. I thought I understood, then, why my grandfather had taken the photos. They were documentary evidence that this had really happened. Later, I learned that my grandfather had developed those photographs in Germany and sent them back home to Somerville, to get the word out about the horror he had witnessed at Dachau. 'You can't tell me the Germans didn't know,' he said in his interview with my aunt, referring to the townspeople of Dachau. He never forgot the sight of a German woman pruning her rosebushes not far from Dachau's 'gates of hell' — a comment that struck me anew when I watched Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest,' with its scenes of Hedwig Höss, wife of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lovingly tending her garden as smoke from the camp's chimneys rises upward in the distance. When I finished my research in Germany, I returned to New York and worked on my novel. I decided to incorporate a transcription of my grandfather's words from his interview about Dachau. I was writing fiction, but I couldn't bring myself to make up those details. I did not want his testimony to vanish. Still, I struggled to understand what he had been through at Dachau, and I worried about appropriating Jewish suffering. He was a liberator, not a survivor. I was wary about claiming any kind of trauma on his behalf — this was a man who would not even watch 'Saving Private Ryan' because he was uncomfortable with its themes of heroism. And yet, as I researched the stories of other GIs in the Blackhawk Division, I came to feel that what these young men went through at Dachau was its own kind of hell, one that many of them never forgot. The author's grandfather before his deployment during training at Camp Cook in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Clark Family Collection My family is not Jewish, but the Holocaust shadowed my grandfather's life. Dachau poisoned and twisted everything it touched, including the lives of those German townspeople looking away in the Dachau museum's photos — a larger metaphor for Germany in the immediate postwar years. As popular support for Germany's far right-wing AfD party and other fascist threats around the world grow, so does the need to revisit the lessons of Dachau. Soon, the last of World War II's survivors and veterans will be gone. But the photographs, diaries, letters, and scrapbooks will remain. As memories of the war fade, and as we face a growing and pernicious skepticism about the ravages of the Holocaust, I am grateful my grandfather took those photos. I think I now understand why he took them, and what they truly cost. He exposed a horror too much for words.
