There have been several times over the past few days when I haved wished I could be in St. Peter’s Square to pray with the tens of thousands of people gathered there and to pay my respects to the Holy Father in person. That’s impossible for me now, but the next best thing has been listening to the podcasts of an English-speaking Dutch priest, Fr. Roderick Vonhogen at the Catholic Insider. Podcasting, as I’ve mentioned before, is a sort of audio blog, just MP3 files that you can listen to in your web browser or set up to download automatically into your MP3 player, such as an iPod, as they become available.
I’ve been listening to Father’s podcasts for several weeks now, and they are very professionally done and always interesting. He goes beyond simply opining in his living room, to taking you on “soundseeing” tours of various places, in Holland and in Rome, and talking about the Church, about history, and more. On Friday, he rushed to Rome and has been giving a first-person account of what it is like to be in Rome during this time. It’s as close to being there as you can be without getting on a plane.
What an amazing world we live in.
