The Bolletino slips on a Banana

Posted on 19 October 2010 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

His Hermeneuticalness posted about an amusing little something picked up by the gentlemanly Sandro Magister.

Apparently during the Synod on the Middle East, a Chaldean bishop from Iran cited a work by the late Annibale Bugnini, who name shall live in infamy among those who love the Church’s traditional worship.  But in reporting the bishop’s intervention, the Bolletino got Bugnini’s name wrong:

Banana

With tongue in cheek Magister and Fr. Finigan opine about this being a kind of damnatio memoriae.

BTW… an amusing story about Archbp. Bugnini told me some years back.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini took control in Iran, he summoned the diplomatic corps into his presence and made them kneel down to him.  Bugnini, then the papal nuncio to Iran, did it.  He knelt.

When news of this reached Rome, some wag in the Curia quipped that Bugnini was doing in Iran all the genuflections he had removed from the Mass.

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13 Comments

  1. RomeontheRange says:
    19 October 2010 at 1:31 PM

    Is it possible that this was a sort of Freudian-slip reference to the late Rev. Canaan Banana, Methodist minister and former President of Zimbabwe? Cursory Googling brought up the following, from the Manchester Guardian’s 2003 obituary of Rev. Banana:

    “Though soft-spoken, he made his mark in liberation theology with a book entitled The Gospel According To The Ghetto, and his version of the Lord’s Prayer, which included the lines “Teach us to demand our share of the gold/ And forgive us our docility.””

  2. RomeontheRange says:
    19 October 2010 at 1:32 PM

    Sometimes real life really is stranger than fiction.

  3. TJerome says:
    19 October 2010 at 1:38 PM

    wow, kneeling to the Ayatollah?

  4. irishgirl says:
    19 October 2010 at 1:51 PM

    Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
    Yep, this is a ‘banana’, all right….

  5. Jeffrey Pinyan says:
    19 October 2010 at 3:01 PM

    Ceci n’est pas une banane.

  6. robtbrown says:
    19 October 2010 at 4:48 PM

    Maybe Bugnini was known in the Lodge as Banana.

    BTW, some years ago I knew a priest in the Vatican diplomatic corps who had been posted in Iran. He said that Bugnini had built a traditional chapel there–with the altar was against the wall.

  7. TJerome says:
    19 October 2010 at 5:21 PM

    robtbrown, it’s encouraging that Bugnini understood the rubrics of the Missale he created.

  8. Mike says:
    19 October 2010 at 6:04 PM

    Though it would have taken much grace, and courage, I would like to think I would have stood and not kneeled before such a maniac.

  9. Mitchell NY says:
    19 October 2010 at 7:07 PM

    The “B” word evokes such feelings it can truly ruin one’s day…

  10. GirlCanChant says:
    19 October 2010 at 9:07 PM

    Kneeling to the Ayatollah? That is just so….what would the martyrs think?

  11. AnAmericanMother says:
    19 October 2010 at 10:36 PM

    Oriana Fallaci had a lot more courage. She ditched the chador they gave her while interviewing the Ayatollah. I can’t imagine her ever kneeling to him. And she was a self-proclaimed atheist (although surely she must have just been confused. God is merciful.)

  13. Supertradmum says:
    20 October 2010 at 9:18 AM

    Can we all pray that we never bow to those who are not true representatives of Christ? The day may come when we are in Oriana Fallaci’s place. She was a great woman and I pray for her. As to Bugnini, who knows what he was thinking. Perhaps, let us give him the benefit of the doubt, he was protecting the Catholics in Iran, who are still persecuted and ignored by the media. As to his liturgical destruction, that is another story…

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