A 92-year-old Irish Jesuit priest, Father Henry Nolan, is to be conferred with honorary citizenship of the city of Florence next Wednesday.
Father Nolan, a former rector of Belvedere College in Dublin who also worked at Vatican Radio for 15 years, has been in Florence since 1969, where he has been priest to the English community as well as serving at the Duomo and the Jesuit Church of Via Savant.
Born in Hong Kong in 1910, where his father was chief interpreter of the Supreme Court, his family (of eight children) returned to Ireland in 1920, when Mr Nolan died. Father Nolan attended Belvedere College. He joined the Jesuits in 1929, the year his mother died.
Ordained in 1943, he was appointed to take charge of the English section at Vatican Radio in 1946, where he was to remain until 1961.
He has recalled that, when Pope Pius XII pronounced as dogma in 1950 the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, "the Holy Father defined that dogma in Latin and I was beside him saying the same words in English".
In 1961 he became ill and returned to Ireland, where he recovered and eventually became rector at Belvedere. He was invited to Florence by Cardinal Florit and arrived there in September 1969.
The decision to grant Father Nolan honorary citizenship was made unanimously by Florence's commission at a meeting last June, and followed a petition by the British consul, Ms Moira Macfarlane, by former British consul Mr Ralph Griffith and by the president of the European University, Dr Patrick Masterson.
The ceremony will take place at the Palazzo Vecchio.
Meanwhile, the former primate of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Cahal Daly, yesterday received the freedom of a small Italian town.
