Murphy O'Connor

A season to relish language deeper than words

From our UK edition

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor says that the heart of the Christian story is the word made flesh. Christ’s language is sacrificial love which took him to the cross One of my favourite accounts of a happy childhood is told by Laurie Lee in his delightful book Cider with Rosie. Early on, he describes his first day at school. As a new boy in the playground for the first time, he was nervous and frightened of the noise, the size and the numbers of his fellow pupils. Going into the classroom, the teacher was busy with the other pupils. She told him to ‘sit down there for the present’. The young Laurie duly obeyed and sat down quietly in his place. When he got home he was obviously upset and disappointed. His mother asked him whether he liked the school.

In Umbria the truth of the Nativity was revealed to me

From our UK edition

One of the perks of studying for the priesthood in Rome was the gita, an Italian word meaning ‘holiday’ or ‘trip’. We students rarely returned home in our seven-year stint out there, so we were given a list of places to visit during holidays, like Subiaco, the birthplace of Benedictine monasticism, Fiesole near Florence, where we would stay with the ‘Blue Nuns’, and many other places with religious resonance. But the most popular places for gitas were the Umbrian towns and villages like Perugia and, above all, Assisi — home of Sts Francis and Clare.