The Pope’s schedule for December and January

On January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, the Pope will again preside at Mass in the Vatican basilica. But there are no plans to resume the tradition of having the Pontiff consecrate new bishops on that date.

However, on January 8, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Benedict XVI will celebrate Mass in the Sistine Chapel, and will baptize several babies. This, too, is a Vatican tradition, which Pope John Paul II followed regularly until 2003.

Meeting with an Orthodox-Roman Catholic group today:

Fifteen autonomous Orthodox churches, meeting at the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Turkey, agreed in September that the dialogue should be restarted.

The decision, the pope told Orthodox and Catholic members of the preparatory committee, "constitutes a great responsibility. It is indeed a question of achieving the will of the Lord who wants his disciples to form a harmonious community and to witness together to the brotherly love that comes from the Lord."

Pope Benedict said, "in this new phase of dialogue," Catholics and Orthodox must work to eliminate the differences remaining between them and resolve "to do everything to re-establish full communion, which is an essential good for the community of Christ’s disciples, as is underlined in the preparatory document you are working on."

And finally, of interest to us book types, publishers of the Pope’s writings have been meeting in Rome this week to discuss various issues of copyright, translation, and so on.