"These Are Not Angles, But Angels"

And so, church, 1,413 years since Pope St Gregory the Great dispatched his onetime cellmate on a mission to evangelize England, this week sees the second pilgrimage of a successor of Peter to the British Isles... and an especially anticipated journey, at that.

Given the history -- and, indeed, the stakes -- leading up to B16's unprecedented long-weekend state visit to the United Kingdom, we'd be hard pressed to start the week any other way than with the rich patrimony of an oft-persecuted (and, in some quarters, still suspect), Brit fold....






All that said, lest anyone's still thinking this PopeTrip to be Benedict's most intense collision with the clergy sex-abuse crisis that's prominently shaken Anglophone Catholicism over recent years, think again -- that'll almost certainly come in summer 2012, when the pontiff is likely to visit the abuse-rocked Irish church as Dublin hosts the 50th International Eucharistic Congress.

Even so, gang, we've got more than a full week on our hands. Your narrator's gotta pace himself through the days... yet as things finally start kicking up, for all of it, as always, stay tuned.

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