October 2026 Letter from the Provost

Last month the fathers received news that a great prince of the Church would like to pay us a visit. His Eminence Ernest Cardinal Simoni was coming to London for one day, and after seeing the church would like to celebrate Holy Mass. It was suggested that a side altar be prepared for His Eminence, and two of us volunteered for the privilege of serving the Mass which would take place at midday. We expected this to be a discreet affair, with one or two of the Cardinal’s attendants present, but at the last moment decided to transfer the proceedings to the Little Oratory in order to ensure that there was no clash with the public Mass which takes place each weekday at 12.30pm.

Imagine our (pleasant) surprise then when a large number of the faithful began assembling in the courtyard of Oratory House and, by the time His Eminence arrived, there was a congregation of around two hundred crowding into the Little Oratory. London’s Albanian Catholic community had cottoned on to the news that a national hero was in town.

Cardinal Simoni’s priestly life is one of the great ecclesiastical stories of modern times. Ordained to the priesthood in 1956, and arrested by the communist authorities in 1963 after celebrating a Requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of President John F. Kennedy, he was tortured and offered freedom in return for renouncing his priesthood and marrying. Upon refusing he was condemned to death. Learning that the young Father Simoni insisted that he and other Catholics who were suffering similar persecution at the time must forgive and love their persecutors, Albania’s brutal leader Enver Hoxha was moved to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. The next thirty years were spent enduring penal servitude, during the last ten of which Father Simoni laboured in a sewage canal. Mass, Baptisms, exorcisms and confessions were conducted in secret, and countless souls were comforted and saved among his fellow prisoners.

On a pastoral visit to Albania in 2016, His Holiness Pope Francis wept as he listened to Father Simoni describing the appalling torments suffered by Catholics during the dreadful years of communist oppression, and soon afterwards named him a cardinal to honour all of the martyrs of that period, including those who, like Father Simoni, had suffered a “white martyrdom”.

At 97 years old (on the 18th of this month he will turn 98) Cardinal Simoni remains indomitable. Early on the morning of his visit to the Oratory, he had flown into Heathrow from Washington. Later in the day (although none of us knew of it at the time) he was to visit His Majesty King Charles III. During that meeting, his flat in Florence was broken into and ransacked by burglars, and on hearing of this unwelcome news after the royal audience His Eminence only asked if his statues of Our Lady and Padre Pio had been damaged. Reassured that they were safe, he replied: “So no big deal.” Within the next few days he visited Birmingham and Dublin, before returning across the Atlantic to Chicago and New York, all on his mission of giving pastoral support to the Albanian diaspora.

If the electrifying effect of the thirty-five-minute sermon which His Eminence delivered in the Little Oratory is typical of his preaching style, then it is no surprise that his appearances around the globe attract such enthusiastic and attentive congregations wherever he goes. His words were delivered with a captivating simplicity and matter-of-factness that would have prevented even the most easily distracted among us from drifting off. Pointing to the ceiling he described the beauty of the heavenly court and the immense power of our allies around the Throne of Grace as he enjoined us to invoke the aid of the Holy Angels and the Saints in our warfare against the world, the flesh and the devil. He then then pointed downwards as he warned his listeners of the reality of the everlasting torments of hell. Decrying the corrosive effects of Modernism on morality, he left no room for doubt about the necessity of chastity and purity for salvation, or the soul-destroying consequences of their opposite vices. The full cycle of all the mysteries of the Holy Rosary prayed daily was urged upon as an indispensable weapon in our battle against the forces of spiritual evil around us, and for securing the protection of the Blessed Virgin before whom demons tremble and take flight.

After the Mass His Eminence, an approved exorcist, recited in Latin and from memory the long form of the prayer to St Michael composed by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII in 1884 as a prayer of exorcism against the devil’s attempts to destroy the Church, the same formula of exorcism that he prayed last year at the altar of the Chair in St Peter’s Basilica.

We are grateful to Cardinal Simoni for this memorable visit to the London Oratory and for the blessings he brought with him, and we wish His Eminence many happy returns for his 98^th birthday and the invincible supernatural assistance of St Michael and the Holy Angels as he continues his tireless mission to bring souls to salvation.

Father Julian Large