Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Agenzia Fides) - With a concert yesterday evening, July 1, by the famous Italian Army Band, positioned in the apse of the Basilica, St Paul's outside the Walls said farewell to the Year of St Paul. The Band, conducted by maestro Lieutenant Colonel Fulvio Creux, executed music by Gustav Holst, Kees Vlak and Luigi Zaninelli, in the presence of numerous personalities of the religious, military and civil world, besides the Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of St Paul's outside the Walls, Abbot Edmund Power, and the archpriest of the Basilica, Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo.
Before the concert the guests admired a 9th century Carolingian Bible one of Christianity's most important medieval manuscripts. The exposition at the Abbey of St Paul's outside the Walls of the precious volume commissioned in 866 by Charles the Bald to Ingobert, will be prolonged until 27 September 2009. The great interest it has aroused, the high number of visitors and an agreement with the Vatican Museums, led to the prolongation of the exposition for another three months of this precious 9th century text, which will remain open on the page of St Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The exhibition - opened on 19 April by the Holy See secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone - was to have ended on 29 June when the Carolingian Bible was to return definitively within the walls of the Abbey which have preserved it carefully for over a thousand years. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 3/7/2009; righe 16, parole 227)
