During a recent holiday to Lake Como - our first overseas visit since the pandemic - Zero and I visited three places of Catholic interest.
The first was the Cistercian abbey of Piona, towards the northern end of the Lake. The road to the abbey is somewhat involved, and the last kilometre or so is a pebbled road. This site gives a better account of the Abbey in English than wikipedia; the abbey's own website is in Italian: Abbazia di Piona. A page of the abbey's site contains a range of photographs which give an idea of the environment at the Abbey. Two of these photographs show the tabernacle positioned on the altar of the church, an arrangement which on previous visits to the Abbey had struck me as being particularly suitable for the praying of the Divine Office. Both the monks sitting in the sanctuary "behind" the altar and the lay faithful in the nave would have an orientation towards the Lord in their prayer.
However, at the time of this visit the tabernacle has been moved from the altar and is now situated at the side of the sanctuary - roughly in the place of the lectern shown at the right hand side of the first picture above. The effect is to reduce the sense of the centrality of the Eucharistic presence in the Church.
On the eve of the solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord (though in Italy the solemnity was celebrated on the following Sunday), we attended Mass in the small village of Perledo above Varenna. We have stayed in Perledo on previous visits to Lake Como, and it has spectacular views across the lake. Weekday Mass was celebrated in the small chapel of St Lucia, with Zero and I making the congregation up from three to five. Mass was nicely celebrated, and the thought that weekday Mass was celebrated here three times during the week for such a small congregation was moving.
During this visit we stayed in a locality called Pino, south of Varenna and above Fiumelatte. A five minute walk along the via di Pino from where we were staying there was a roadside shrine to Our Lady. Nearby was a restaurant where we ate on two evenings, and it was from the restaurant that we first heard the Rosary being recited by the shrine. It was rather lovely on our last evening to join the twenty or so people who had gathered each evening in May for the Rosary, and to see a road side shrine being decorated with flowers as the focus of this devotion.
Both our experience in Perledo and on the via di Pino reminded me of Pope Francis' observation, made at an early point in his pontificate, that popular devotion represents the inculturation of the Gospel.
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