The limestone sticks up a few inches above the surrounding floor.”This was the centre of veneration,” Patriarch Diodoros explained. “Our ancestors transmitted to us from mouth to mouth down the centuries that this was the place of the Kathisma.”The tradition has persisted to the present day, though the precise location was not known. Every year, the Greek patriarch pauses here, in an ancient olive grove north of the Mar Elias monastery, to honour the Virgin during his Christmas procession from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.The church, one of the biggest, earliest and most magnificent shrines dedicated to Mary in the Holy Land, was built in the mid-5th Century with money donated by a rich widow called Iqilia. What Rina Avner and her excavating team had rediscovered was a rock revered from 1st to 11th centuries as the spot where the weary Virgin Mary rested on her five-mile trek from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, a few hours before giving birth to Jesus. It is known in Greek as Kathisma, the Seat.”This is the rock,” the patriarch asserted with the confidence of his faith, and led priests in a hymn to the mother of Christ.

Archaeologists claim to have uncovered the rock that was venerated throughout the first Christian millennium as the place where Mary, pregnant with Jesus, rested on her journey to Bethlehem. Eric Silver in Jerusalem visits a likely place of pilgrimage for the start of the third. The Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Diodoros, scratched the sign of the cross on a nobbly outcrop of limestone just east of the Jerusalem-Bethlehem road yesterday, and blessed the Israeli archaeologists who had unearthed it.
The stout, white-bearded cleric was setting his seal of approval on a new pilgrim focus for the millennium. Two earthquakes shook central Italy yesterday, causing further damage to churches and bell towers, including the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, which is undergoing restoration after being badly damaged by an earthquake in September which left some 40,000 people homeless. In the mountainous Umbria region, victims of the September earthquake yesterday fled their tents and prefabricated homes following the quakes, which measured 3.7 and 4.4 on the Richter scale.
A medieval bell-tower in Sellano, about 20 miles southeast of Assisi, that was partially destroyed by the September quake collapsed..- AP, Perugia. “Your wisdom has woven a tapestry, Much more lovely than any artist’s hand, With vibrancy that only we can understand, We who are Africa’s people, And feel the heartbeat of this land.”With this kind of schmoozing and behind-the-scenes atonement, this week’s public hearings will probably amount to little..

Thus schools, clinics and community facilities have sprung up in townships all over South Africa as businessmen “buy forgiveness” from the the self-styled “father confessor” to the private sector.And so grubby corporations are miraculously born again with brand-new, shiny, non-racist credentials Some people are appalled. When Bill Venter, head of the hi-tech company Altron, sponsored a library to commemorate the life of ANC hero Bram Fischer, Fischer’s daughter Ruth Rice was dismayed. Mr Venter, always seen as a friend of the old regime, used the occasion to claim he had always been a champion of human rights. Many wondered exactly where he had been fighting.Mr Venter later wrote a poem for the President on his birthday.

There is a familiar clearing of the throat before Mr Mandela tells tonight’s lucky captain of industry which special project needs funding. But all the while he has been milking them through a quiet campaign which South African writer Mark Gevisser describes in quasi-religious terms.The country’s top businessmen, it transpires, often receive a call from the President just before bedtime. The only body so far to come up with a compensation suggestion is the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, a former pillar of the old regime, which is suggesting that an insurance fund set up by Afrikaner business at the height of political violence in the 1980s, and which now stands at 9 billion rand, be used to benefit those who suffered.But next week’s hearings will be shaped by one inescapable truth; the same companies which did business with the old regime are operating quite nicely with the new, and their presence in South Africa is as crucial to the ANC as it was to the old, beleaguered NP.This perhaps explains why President Nelson Mandela has chosen to forge a pragmatic path in his dealings with business.He has made friends of old enemies like Mr Oppenheimer and Mr Rupert, drawing on their economic expertise. But some observers are already disappointed that companies like Shell – which allegedly ensured oil reached the pariah apartheid state – and Mercedes-Benz – criticised for supplying engines to the South African Defence Force – are not making personal submissions.Sanlam, the huge Afrikaner insurance company, is so far alone in acknowledging that it prospered at the cost of black workers. The farmers’ unions claimed it could not speak for a diverse membership of 60,000 while the white mine workers simply said the TRC was biased.The South African Chamber of Business will make a 40-page submission on behalf of its large membership.

It will claim that racism was the fault, not of business, but the state.This week, the TRC commissioner, Dr Fazel Randera, said the farmers’ unions – representing some of the most right-wing whites in the country – and the white mine workers’ union were alone in refusing to make a submission to the Commission, charged with exposing the atrocities from the past. But it is believed that few will offer new revelations about the past and even fewer will make an apology.It is reported that the Chamber of Mines, representing a number of controversial companies which made a killing in the old days, will concentrate more on the economic contribution of its members than on the social misery many would lay at their door. But Mr Asmal and Mr Shilowa will be disappointed if they expect a radical outcome from the hearings.Last week, few of industry’s big boys were willing to reveal the contents of their submissions to the TRC in advance of the hearings. And he points out that the country’s two business giants, Anton Rupert, founder of the Afrikaner Rembrandt group, and Harry Oppenheimer, former head of English business rival Anglo American, long opposed blacks getting the vote.At this week’s hearings, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) will also go for the business sector’s throat arguing it must compensate workers for apartheid.