Father Hugh Barrett-Lennard, who died just six days short of his ninetieth birthday in 2007, is remembered with great fondness by those who encountered him during his sixty-two years at the Oratory. In addition to a host of remarkable qualities, he was endowed to an uncommonly high degree with the attractive gift of seeing the best in his fellow human creatures. As a chaplain in one of London’s tougher jails, he organised annual Corpus Christi processions within the prison precincts. The four “lifers” whom he trained to carry the canopy over the Blessed Sacrament might have been notorious violent criminals in the eyes of their warders. To Father Barrett-Lennard they were a quartet of “the most excellent gentlemen – impeccably pious Catholics”.
One Holy Week about twenty-five years ago the ceremonies in the Oratory church were disturbed by a heckler, whose protests reached a resounding crescendo during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday. Removing his cotta in the sacristy afterwards, Father Barrett-Lennard remarked “It was decent of that fellow to cheer us on, but he might have chosen a more appropriate moment to shout, ‘Long live the Oratory!’” It had to be explained that what might have sounded like “Long live the Oratory!” to the innocent ears of Father Barrett-Lennard was actually “Pagan idolatry!”
Mercifully such interruptions of our liturgical functions tend to be quite rare occurrences. There was, however, an incident during last month’s Corpus Christi celebrations which left a number of parishioners feeling unsettled. As the Blessed Sacrament procession made its way towards the front of the church after leaving the courtyard of Oratory House and proceeding along the pavement of the Brompton Road, the face of a pedestrian who was approaching head-on became animated with indignation and he began to protest quite vigorously. Entering the church and processing up the nave it was still possible to hear cries of “You Catholics will burn in hell!” coming from the street.
It should not surprise us if our religious practices sometime elicit hostile reactions from those who have not been blessed with the light of our Catholic Faith. To non-Christians who are zealous for the honour of their particular deity, our belief in the Blessed Trinity can easily seem like the polytheism of pagans, and the worship that we offer to Our Lord Jesus like a shocking blasphemy. Is it so strange that to a convinced Protestant the adoration that we lavish on the Blessed Sacrament (the “Latria” that is due to God alone), and the veneration with which we honour Our Lady and the saints, should seem to be flagrant idolatry?
And so we must strive be patient with the hecklers, and charitable towards those whose consciences make them feel duty bound to protest. The vehement objection of the man whose religious sensibilities are inflamed by the sight of us adoring what he sincerely believes to be a wafer of bread probably indicates that he is more solicitous of God’s honour than those who politely step out of the way of our processions with their gazes glued to telephone screens, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening around them. In the view of our founding Provost Father Faber, the tepidity of the indifferent was a more formidable obstacle to evangelisation than the hot-blooded animosity of protestors. When the first generation of Brompton Oratorians were fixing riot shutters to the ground floor of the Oratory House in the 1850s, he told them not to worry themselves unduly, adding “the first brick through the window will be the sign that the message is getting through.”
Having been a fanatical persecutor of the early Christians, St Paul became “Apostle to the Gentiles” and the most effective missionary in the history of our Church. One of the most implacable and vociferous opponents of the Church in more recent times, meanwhile, was the Jewish Frenchman Alphonse Ratisbonne, whose railings against the Mystical Body of Christ on earth are not suitable for repetition in a family publication. Thanks to a divine intervention which involved the prayers of his Catholic acquaintances, the recitation of the Memorare, the Miraculous Medal, and apparitions of a black dog and Our Lady, he received the Faith miraculously in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome, on 20th January 1842. After baptism, he trained for the priesthood, becoming Father Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, S.J., and founded an order devoted to missionary work among his fellow Jews.
Those familiar with the life of our holy father St Philip will be aware of the numerous instances in which his patience, charity and prayers gained the souls of those who had come to mock and to obstruct the work of the first Oratory in Rome. So let us ask Our Lady and St Philip to fortify our intercessions with their own, as we pray for the hecklers who occasionally raise their voices, along with those who sometimes vandalise the fabric of the church. Pray that the zeal which makes them so obnoxious in their ignorance will be transformed by the gift of the Faith into a burning devotion that sanctifies and saves their souls, and contributes to the mission of God’s Church on earth.
Father Julian Large