April 2026 Letter from the Provost

Whenever a father of the London Oratory dies, each of the remaining fathers is obliged to offer three Masses, while those members of the community who are not priests are enjoined to pray nine coronas of the Holy Rosary (nine sets of five mysteries), for the repose of his immortal soul. We do the same whenever we receive news of the death of one of the fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, a custom which dates back to the origin of both houses as a joint foundation under St John Henry Newman.

At the funeral of one of our priests no sermon is ever preached. Instead the solemn liturgy of the Holy Mass is allowed to elevate our hearts and minds to God while we unite ourselves with the Holy Sacrifice being offered on the altar for the soul of our deceased brother. On such an occasion there are really no other words to compete with the sombre prayers, gradual, tract, sequence and antiphons of the Catholic Requiem. We know exactly for what purpose we are gathered in the sanctuary and need no distraction from our serious duty in charity of praying for the dead.

Sermons are generally preached at the funerals of the lay faithful, however, because they are an opportunity to give hope to the bereaved family and friends of the deceased, and to encourage all present to realise that however profound our grief we are never helpless in the face of the death of our loved ones. When someone who is dear to us dies, how often we are left with a sense of irresolution as we contemplate things we might only have said and done to express our affection, our gratitude and perhaps our contrition or forgiveness for wrongs or misunderstandings which remain unhealed. Praying for their soul means that the practical application of our charity extends beyond the grave.

Those Christian denominations which do not share our Catholic belief in Purgatory naturally take a different approach to mortality. At a “memorial service” it often seems that the purpose of the proceedings is to distract the congregation from the terrible reality of death with humorous anecdotes and panegyrics. And when funerals become unofficial canonisations, at which it is assumed that the deceased are already and automatically in Heaven, then a great disservice is done to those dead who are in need of our prayers. The Catholic response to mortality is not to indulge ourselves in the brittle consolation of wishful thinking but rather to confront death head on. The Church proposes a positive and practical way of accompanying a soul on its journey into eternity by means of our prayers. The most powerful prayer we have been blessed with is the Holy Mass, each and every celebration of which is offered for the living and the dead. At a Requiem Mass, specifically, the merits of Our Blessed Lord’s Passion and Death are applied to the soul of the deceased to purify it and speed its entry into Heaven. At the end of a Catholic funeral, the mortal remains of the deceased are honoured with incense and holy water, a powerful sign of our faith that the bodies of the Baptised are living temples of the Holy Ghost, and of the promise of Easter that when Our Lord returns in majesty our bodies will be raised up and reunited with our souls forever, the bodies of those who have died in a state of grace to be glorified in Heaven.

In recent decades the fathers of the London Oratory have generally allowed for tributes to be given at the end of funeral and memorial Requiem Masses. After prayer and reflection, we have recently decided to discontinue this permission. The Church in Her wisdom explicitly forbids eulogies during the obsequies for the deceased. And while tributes delivered have often been thoughtful and touching, and sometimes even edifying, there have also been too many occasions when they have struck a painfully discordant tone which has been quite incongruous with the solemnity of the Requiem Mass. A wake, or the reception that often follows a funeral, is a much better venue for a tribute.

This Eastertide, as we rejoice in Our Lord’s triumph over sin and death, let us in charity continue to pray for the souls of the faithful departed, that they may enjoy the full fruits of the Resurrection in glory, and that we shall one day be reunited with them in the company of the angels and saints at the Throne of Grace.

Father Julian Large