I love this last photo. The little train-bearer is just having so much fun.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Amleto Giovanni Cardinal Cicognani
He was the Apostolic Delegate to the USA from 1933 to 1959. He was born in 1883. He had an older brother, Gaetano, who was born in 1881. Not only did both men enter the priesthood, but they both became cardinals. Gaetano Cicognani was elevated to the cardinalate in 1953, his younger brother five years later in 1958, an exception to canon law, which forbids brothers of living cardinals to become cardinals was well. This law might be a bit obsolete, because it sounds like it is from the time when nepotism and simony were practiced a bit too diligently at the curia. I don't see why nowadays two brothers couldn't be cardinals at the same time, if they are the right men for the job.
I love this last photo. The little train-bearer is just having so much fun.
I love this last photo. The little train-bearer is just having so much fun.
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4 comments:
Thanks for that! I have to admit that I had somehow always only read "Card. Cicognani" and never really noticed that these are actually two different persons - although the different Christian (if Hamlet is actually a Christian name - what's with those Italians? Annibale? Achille?) names could have given that away...
Anyway, not bad for the brothers - one Secretary of State, the other Prefect of the SRC.
Hamlet, however, especially in the second picture, seems to have invented the mile-high biretta, for which extra credit is due to him.
These photos are wonderful, too, because they show something really not seen anymore. All of these photos are of the cardinal when he was still an archbishop (you can tell by the tuft on the biretta because cardinals' birettas have no tuft). But, his vesture is made out of watered silk because he was an Apostolic Delegate. Any legate of the Pope (Nuncio, Pro-Nuncio, Inter-Nuncio, Apostolic Delegate) was/is permitted the use of watered silk unlike metropolitan or titular archbishops who use plain silk. Wearing vesture entirely made of watered silk, however, is pretty much a thing of the past. These days most of the papal diplomatic corps use watered silk for the zuchetto, the biretta and the fascia only.
But Fr. Selvester,
what else should they wear in watered silk? They don't use the cappa anymore anyway (sadly), and watered silk choir cassocks are not permitted anymore (also sadly). As far as I can see then only thing they could wear of watered silk would be the ferraiolone, and - admittedly rarely - one does see it, here for example: http://www.hofburg.at/modules/bildgalerie/upload/182_848_kq3h2574.jpg (Mgr. Edmond Farhat, nuncio to Austria).
Well, then you seem to have answered your own "question"...haven't you?
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