April 2014 Letter from the Provost

One of the London Oratory fathers who died a few years ago used to say that to observe Lent well it is necessary that we do not observe it perfectly. In chapters to puzzled novices he explained what he meant. A great obstacle to spiritual growth is pride. If, at the end of the penitential season, we feel pleased with ourselves thanks to an unblemished record of fasting, praying and almsgiving, then our Lent has been a failure. It would be better occasionally to have lapsed in the resolutions that were made on Ash Wednesday, if this has made us humbler and if we have persevered in trying to keep a good Lent.

This is a principle that stands for the Christian life in general. Sin is the greatest possible evil. And yet we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Confessing our sins – especially if we enunciate them to another human being in the Sacrament of Penance – is profoundly humbling. The humility that accompanies the penitent’s gratitude for God’s mercy is an essential foundation for all of the blessings that He wishes to build in our lives. Our failures can actually be far more useful to God than our successes.

By the time this edition of The Oratory Parish Magazine rolls off the press, it is likely that most of us will have been humbled during the last few weeks, as broken resolutions have had to be remade. If we have deluded ourselves into believing that our Lenten observance has in fact been faultless then it is probably time to examine our consciences a little more thoroughly. The Lenten precept to give alms is a reminder that it is only when we are living in charity that our self-denial and devotions can be pleasing to God. Has our exercise of charity – in our deeds and words, even in our thoughts – really left nothing to be desired? What about sins of omission? Have there been opportunities to bring God’s love into other’s lives that we have let slip for the sake of our own comfort? To paraphrase St John of the Cross, at the end of Lent we shall be judged on love.

In the Christian life, resolutions are not just something to be made on New Year’s Day and Ash Wednesday. Our good resolutions have to be renewed every day of the year, along with prayers for the supernatural assistance we need to keep these resolutions in a way that is pleasing to God. We also need to be on our guard against the insidious demon who tries to convince us that having fallen so often we might as well give up altogether. Hearken instead to the words spoken by Pope Francis at the beginning of his pontificate and repeated in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.”

Humbled by our failures then, and emboldened by Our Lord’s promise “Ask and ye shall receive”, let us renew our Lenten resolutions to fast, to pray and to give alms or perform other acts of charity according to our means.

Anyone who is enduring a real struggle keeping Lent should ask the question: ‘Am I making an effort to keep Lent liturgically?’ The liturgy gives meaning to our self-denial and serves to reinforce our efforts, both through the petitions for divine assistance with which the Church bombards Heaven at this time of year, and by the richness of liturgical symbolism.

Through the Church’s sacramental life this symbolism becomes efficacious, meaning that it actually bestows the graces that it signifies. In the words of St Paul, in our Baptism, we have been buried with Christ. The closing of the waters over our heads signifies our descent into the Tomb, having been united with Our Lord’s Death. As we rise from the waters, it is with the new life of the Resurrection coursing through us. And in that moment of our Baptism, we receive the vocation to keep dying to ourselves in this life, so that the supernatural life of the Resurrection might take ever-greater possession of our hearts and souls. This is the context in which the mortification (‘putting-to-death’) aspect of Lent has to be understood.

At Mass we are able to participate in an intimate way in Our Lord’s Death and Resurrection. Our acts of self-denial mean that we have something real to present in the way of sacrifice along with the gifts of bread and wine. During the Offertory, we should “offer up” our own sacrifices and sufferings, along with everything we have and everything we are, when the celebrant holds up first the paten and then the chalice. This is the way that we participate “actively” in the Mass, ensuring that we are truly, if mystically, united to the Sacrifice of Calvary when that Sacrifice is made present on the altar, and also united with Our Lord’s Living and Risen Body in the Blessed Sacrament after the words of Consecration. Good Friday and Easter Sunday are made present in every Mass.

As the season of Lent progresses, the Church’s liturgy plays these Mysteries of salvation in slow motion, so that we are able to participate in them with more reflection and greater intensity than usual. On Passion Sunday, we come to Mass to find all statues and images veiled. These shrouds serve as a memento mori, reminding us to renew our Lenten mortification so that we have something more substantial to unite with Our Lord’s Passion in Holy Week. 

On Holy Thursday, we enter the mystery of the institution of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of the Sacrament of Our Lord’s Body and Blood at the Last Supper. At the end of that Mass, we accompany the Blessed Sacrament to the Altar of Repose, to unite ourselves with Our Lord’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. On Good Friday, we find the altars stripped and bleak. For three hours, we watch and venerate the Cross- and this is pretty much on empty stomachs, Good Friday and Ash Wednesday being the only two real fast days that remain in the Church’s calendar. The Blessed Sacrament is consumed at the end of the Liturgy of Our Lord’s Passion, so that for the rest of the day and throughout Holy Saturday the empty tabernacles bring us face to face with the desolation of Jerusalem after Our Lord’s death and burial. 

Then, Deo Gratias, the flame that flickers in the darkness of the night at the beginning of the Easter Vigil suggests that something is stirring in the Tomb, until finally the explosion of bells, music and light that erupts at the beginning of the Gloria in excelsis leaves us in no doubt: Christ is risen, sin and death have been conquered, and the Church cannot contain Her jubilation.

The Liturgy ensures that we follow this drama not as mere spectators, but as real participants. And the more we unite ourselves to Our Lord’s Passion during Lent through acts of sacrificial love, the more fully we shall be able to participate in the joy and the life of the Resurrection on Easter Day.

March 2014 Letter from the Provost

Everyone today seems to be terrified of salt. An Oratory father was recently celebrating a Baptism which, at the request of the parents of the child, was in the traditional Roman Rite. One of the ancient rituals involves placing a few grains of salt on the baby’s tongue. Afterwards a godparent admitted that she had been unsettled by this. When asked why she exclaimed: “But father, salt is a poison.”

The truth, of course, is that salt is an essential constituent of the human body. We need to consume a moderate amount of salt regularly to maintain the healthy functioning of our bodies. Salt can even have medicinal uses. The Provost suffers from mild hypotension which can cause light-headedness during liturgical functions. A liberal sprinkling of salt on his boiled eggs and a weekly dose of The Tablet works wonders at raising his blood pressure to the normal level.

Since the earliest centuries, salt has been used by the Church as a sacramental. Originally it was placed in the mouths of catechumens during the process of preparation that they had to undergo before Baptism. The symbolism of this was that they were being given a taster to make them hunger for the truth of the Gospel. The salt used in Baptism has also been blessed and exorcised, which endows it with power against the devil.

On the natural level salt also has a preservative quality. In the days before refrigeration, it was used to protect perishable foods. When we baptize a child who is not yet at the age of reason, the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity are planted like little seeds in the child’s heart and soul. Placing salt on his tongue in the traditional form of Baptism is symbolic of our prayers that these supernatural treasures will be kept uncorrupted and healthy until he reaches the age when he can consciously engage with them and begin to practice the Faith. In the prayers of the Ritual, salt is described as “the first nourishment” that the child receives at Our Lord’s table. In this sense it can be seen as an appetizer that prepares him to receive the Living Body of Christ in Holy Communion.

Perhaps we can draw an analogy between salt and the religious faith in the age in which we live. Just as salt is considered to be a threat to our health, so religious faith, and particularly our holy Catholic Faith, are seen by many to be a force for ill in the society in which we live.

Very recently the United Nations presented a report on the Vatican in which it strongly urged the Church to change Her teaching on abortion and contraception, amongst other things. In other words, the U.N. seems to be demanding that the Church should deny Her own identity as the pillar and the ground of Truth established by Our Lord Jesus Christ to teach all nations and in all ages with divine mandate. The French Government, meanwhile, has established a “National Observatory of Secularism”. One of its tasks is to monitor religious communities for “signs of pathology”, one of which seems to be adherence to the teaching of the Catholic Catechism on issues such as the sanctity of human life and matrimony.

To many educated and articulate policy-formers, then, the Gospel in its fullness is viewed in the same way that many people see salt – a danger to public health, which must be eliminated from the diet for the organism of human society to flourish.

But if we deprive our bodies of salt, then it is only a matter of time before we shrivel up and expire. And the same goes for the society in which we live if we stifle the religious expression on which our culture is founded. Remove the Gospel from the menu, and civilization will wither and expire. The Catholic Church is the single voice that speaks most consistently and clearly for the protection of human life when it is at its most vulnerable and innocent, in the mother’s womb. Silence that voice of the Church, and we shall soon find that no innocent human life is safe anywhere.

There is no need to despair, however. Yes, salt might have fallen out of fashion. In the most pretentious restaurants it is apparently considered unsophisticated to ask for salt to be brought to the table. But statistics show that people secretly crave salt more than ever. A consumer study conducted not long ago by the Daily Mail has demonstrated that while shoppers like to keep up a respectable facade of healthy eating, the ready-to-eat salads that sell best of all in supermarkets are actually full of salt, even if the high salt content is hidden in the small print on the back of the packet.

And even though it is unfashionable to admit to being Christian, and especially to being Catholic, we can be sure that the human heart continues to crave Catholic Truth. Man’s psychological health depends on the reassurance that his life has a purpose. The Gospel tells him that he was called into being by a Creator Who knows and loves him. The restlessness inside man means that he longs for the knowledge that he has been made for eternal life and everlasting happiness in Heaven. When he is sick, the Gospel will give him the words of life that will give meaning and value even to his suffering. When he is dying, the Church has a Sacrament to strengthen him and to prepare him for his inevitable encounter with Almighty God when his soul departs from his body.

Our Lord tells us that we are “the salt of the earth”. We live in a society that is grazed and wounded by selfishness and Godless materialism, amongst other things. Salt irritates wounds. But it can also help to disinfect them and to heal them, when applied with care.

In bearing witness to our Catholic Faith, it is inevitable that we will cause irritation, especially to the secularist crusaders who would like to bully us out of existence. But we are called to be the salt that reminds society that it is wounded. We have to provide the reasoned voice that keeps the discussion alive. The temptation will sometimes be to keep quiet and to blend in. Only if we live our Faith with ever greater confidence, courage and patience, however, shall we be able to bring the healing and new life that Our Lord wants for this world.

Analogies can only be taken so far. Whatever the benefits of salt to the human body, it should probably only ever be used in moderation. Not so Faith, Hope and Charity: we must pray for these virtues in abundance.

February 2014 Letter from the Provost

During the last weeks, the liturgical calendar has furnished us with many opportunities to contemplate the Jewish roots of our holy Catholic Faith. The Word was made flesh in the womb of a Jewish Mother, and the Holy Family were devout Jews who observed the rituals and customs of their religion. Eight days after the Nativity, Our Lord formally received the name ‘Jesus’ and was made a member of God’s chosen People in the ceremony of Circumcision.

On 2nd February we celebrate Candlemas. The mystical significance of the Christ Child’s Presentation in the Temple was not lost on Simeon, the devout old man who had been assured by the Holy Ghost that he would not die before setting eyes on ‘the Christ of the Lord’. Simeon’s Canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, is sung by the Church each night at Compline, and expresses all the longing of the Old Testament for the universe-changing event which Simeon witnessed unfolding before him: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace … for mine eyes have seen thy salvation … a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.” At Candlemas we process with candles to celebrate this inextinguishable light that has come into the world.

For Christians, the Old Covenant is completed and fulfilled in the New. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, the new “Law of the Gospel ‘fulfils’, refines, surpasses and leads the Old Law to its perfection.”

That being said, the common spiritual patrimony of the Old Testament that we share with the Jewish people, and the Jewish foundations of our Catholic Faith, mean that it is only natural that there should always remain a unique and indissoluble bond between Jews and Christians. Despite tensions that have sometimes scarred this relationship, love for the Jewish people and respect for their traditions is a mark not only of any civilized Christian but also of orthodox Catholicism.

In contrast to the anti-Judaism of dualist heretics such as Marcion, the Church insisted from the beginning that the Old Testament forms an essential component of the Gospel. St Augustine taught that Christians must treasure the living witness to the promises of the Old Testament that the Jews continued to provide, and in subsequent centuries this doctrine gave theological reinforcement to the Church’s desire to protect Jewish communities from any persecution.

In the sixteenth century our holy father St Philip Neri was noted for the friendships he cherished with members of Rome’s Jewish community, a number of whom converted to the Faith. In Philip Neri, The Fire of Joy, Fr Paul Turks explains: “It appears as if the Gospel, that is to say, the whole of Sacred Scripture, was for Philip the link to the Jews. Without citing the details of particular conversions, one can say that Philip did not debate, but begged them ‘to pray to the God of Abraham and Isaac’, and professed that he himself would convert to Judaism if he saw that the Law was better. He would not engage in militant disputes … it was Philip’s respect for the liberty and the conscience of the other and his open-hearted kindness that helped them to conversion.”

When the prominent Roman Jew Solomon Corcos was baptized in 1582, he adopted the name Boncompagni, after the family name of Pope Gregory XIII. After his conversion, he and his Corcos-Boncompagni descendants were major benefactors of the Chiesa Nuova. Amongst other works, they commissioned the magnificent statue of St Philip in the sacristy by Algardi.

In subsequent centuries, the Roman Oratorians sought to maintain our holy founder’s relations with the city’s ancient Jewish community. This solicitude was recognized in 1999, when the saintly Fr Alfredo Melani of the Oratory’s Garbatella parish was recognised by the State of Israel as ‘Righteous among the Nations’ for his work rescuing Jews who sought refuge from Nazi persecution. Another Roman Oratorian, Fr Giuseppe Ferrari (‘Padre Peppino’ to those of us who knew and loved him), housed Jews in the attics above the Chiesa Nuova, in the stanze of St Philip, and even in his own room, during the Nazi occupation. The Israeli descendants of some of the survivors kept in touch with him until his death in 2008. He declined to accept any honour for himself, on the grounds that it should rather be granted posthumously to Pope Pius XII, who had asked the Roman Oratorians to help the city’s Jews.

In our own age, the Church can be grateful for those of Her Jewish friends who have come to Her defence when Catholicism has been under attack. After the war Pope Pius XII was acclaimed as a hero by prominent Jews, but since the 1960s aspersions have been cast on his response to the plight of European Jewry. While some of his harshest accusers have been disaffected Catholics, Pius XII’s most determined defenders are Jewish. They include the distinguished American historian, Rabbi David G. Dalin, who argues that Pope Pius XII deserves to be hailed as a ‘righteous gentile’, and the indefatigable justice and truth campaigner Gary Krupp, who founded the Pave the Way foundation to promote friendship between Christians, Jews and Muslims of good will, and who has made restoration of Pope Pius XII’s reputation his life’s work.

During various plots to derail the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, it was often the Church’s Jewish friends who proved most valiant in defending His Holiness. In 2008 the Pope was vilified after composing a new Good Friday prayer for the Jews for use in the Usus Antiquior. The prayer asks God to “illuminate their hearts, so that they acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all men.” While certain Catholics denounced the prayer as politically incorrect, it was vigorously defended by the eminent American scholar of Judaism Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who wrote that the Catholic prayer “manifests the same altruistic spirit that characterizes the faith of Judaism”, and pointed out that in the standard liturgy of the synagogue, the Jews pray for the conversion of gentiles three times a day, while the Catholic prayer is only used liturgically once a year.

Again, in the pre-orchestrated hoo-hah that ensued when Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre, the most robust supporter of the Pope turned out to be the American Orthodox Jewish leader and champion of the pro-life cause, Rabbi Yehuda Levin. While Catholics cowered, Rabbi Levin fearlessly declared that the Pope’s initiatives to restore unity within the Catholic fold could only contribute to the common good, on the grounds that a strengthened and unified Catholic Church is necessary for the safeguarding of civilization and the sanctity of life.

After Pope Benedict XVI announced his abdication last year, Jewish leaders all over the world acclaimed him as a friend. Typical of the accolades was a statement from Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger: “During the period of his pontificate there were the best relations ever between the Church and the Chief Rabbinate.” And Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar praised the Pope as a “justice warrior”.

Closer to home the ever gracious Chief Rabbi-emeritus, Lord Sacks, has long been a consistent defender of the role of Christianity in the public life of this realm, and has publicly decried the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, which he recently described as a tragedy “going almost unremarked.”

On the Feast of Candlemas, as we celebrate the encounter of the Old Covenant with the New, we should praise God for these invaluable marks of friendship, and contemplate ways in which we can help the Church to forge ever closer ties with our allies in the Jewish community. In the spirit of St Philip, we should continue to pray, unashamedly but with utmost respect and charity, for the salvation of the Jewish people. At the same time we can give thanks for the prayers that the liturgy of the synagogue offers thrice daily for our own salvation. May their prayers and ours be answered at the Throne of Grace.

January 2014 Letter from the Provost

As the Church’s liturgical calendar transports us through the Christmas season into Epiphany, we continue to meditate on the centrality in the Christian life of giving. Last month we gave thanks for the greatest gift ever – God’s gift of Himself, when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity took on our human flesh and was born into the world in Bethlehem so that He might eventually give Himself on the Cross for our salvation. This month, we celebrate the arrival of the Magi from the east, who bring their own precious gifts to the Christ Child. These gifts carried by kings from the east represent the oblation that we must all make of our hearts as we kneel in homage to the King of Kings.

At that first coming in Jerusalem, Our Lord and King was clothed in meekness. Born in a stable rather than a palace, His throne on this earth would be the Cross, and His crown a wreath of thorns. He seems to have chosen that His Kingship should be something we must be free to embrace or to reject. But He has promised that there will be a Second Coming, on which occasion there will be no mistaking His Kingship. Returning in glory amid angels and clouds, His presence on that day will fill the skies from east to west. And the judgement that the world receives on that day from the King who comes in power will depend on the reception that the world gave to the King who arrived for the first time in the frailty of an infant’s flesh.

In St Matthew’s Gospel, Our Lord gives us quite specific details of the criteria that will be applied to us as individuals on that Day of Judgment. To those gathered at His right hand He will say: “I was hungry, you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” And when they ask Him: “Lord, when did we do these things for Thee?” the King will answer: “As you did it to the least of one of my brethren, you did it to me.” The reward for those on His right hand: “Come, Oh blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

But to those on His left hand – those who neglected Our Lord in His sick and in His poor – He will say: “As you did not do it for the least of these, you did not do it for me. Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

These very startling words leave no room for doubt: giving of ourselves in ministering to the disadvantaged can never be seen a mere supplement to a life of piety and devotion. God Himself has told us that our salvation actually depends on it. So we each have to ask ourselves this question: what can I do to minister to Our Lord in His poor and destitute?

Last November, we launched an appeal to our parishioners and regular worshippers. It was not an appeal for financial assistance, but rather for ‘human resources’ to assist us in our mission to the needy whom God brings into our lives. I would like to use this Provost’s Letter to extend that appeal to all of our readers.

Speaking with those who frequent the Oratory, it is clear that there are resources of expertise and good will in our congregation that can be put to excellent use serving Christ in His poor, and also with the running of this busy parish. The question we are asking everyone to pose to himself or herself is this: “Is there more that I could be doing for the good of the Church, for the community and for my own spiritual growth?”

To enable us to expand and co-ordinate our apostolate more effectively, we have enclosed a copy of a questionnaire in all of the hard print copies of The Oratory Parish Magazine. 

The questionnaire gives you the opportunity to tell us ways in which you might be able to assist us in our service to the parish and in the wider community. Perhaps you can help us in a new project to assist in the rehabilitation of ex-offenders. Or you might be able to provide informal advice on debts or legal matters to someone who needs help. The list is long and varied. Other possibilities include organising a mothers’ prayer group, or hosting tea-parties for the elderly. There will also be resources of skill and expertise that can be of great assistance to us in the practical aspects of the running of the church and parish.

And we invite you to your express your own ideas of how the London Oratory fathers and faithful might collaborate together to give ever greater glory to God in our society.

At the London Oratory, we always aim to give to the King of Kings the worship that is His due with as much solemnity as we can muster. Beautiful worship is an important expression of our Faith in the God who comes to us on the Altar to feed us with His Body. But our Faith must also have practical expression, in our care for the needy and the sick. When the King of Kings returns in majesty to judge the world, the authenticity of the worship we have lavished on Him in the Oratory church will be gauged by the love and care we have extended to Him in the disadvantaged and the needy. Please respond generously to our appeal.

December 2013 Letter from the Provost

At this time of year the focus of our devotions turns ad orientem, that is to say eastwards, to the scene at the Manger in Bethlehem. Perhaps this provides a good opportunity to address a question sometimes posed by visitors to our church: Why, they ask, do the fathers of the London Oratory say Mass with ‘backs to the people’? The answer the Provost usually gives, at least on a good day, goes something like this: “The priest celebrates Mass in union with the congregation, all facing towards God.”

The truth, of course, is that the Holy Mass is always the same Sacrifice of Calvary whether celebrated over a wooden box in a communist prison or on a marble altar in a cathedral. The direction in which this Sacrifice is offered does not change that. In an age when unity amongst the Faithful is one of the most urgent needs of Christendom, fisticuffs over the direction in which different congregations celebrate Mass are best avoided. The purpose of this letter is not to graze anyone’s sensibilities, but rather to explain our practice at the Oratory.

A first look at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome might seem to favour Mass versus populum, or facing the people, as more ancient and liturgically correct. The Papal Altar at St Peter’s is situated over the tomb of the Apostle near the west end of the building, and so arranged for the celebrant to offer the Holy Sacrifice facing down the nave of the basilica towards the main doors. Closer examination of the situation in St Peter’s, however, actually lends support to the practice that is maintained to this day at the Oratory. If you are ever blessed with the chance of a pilgrimage to Rome, go to St Peter’s and see for yourself.

The most edifying time of day to visit the basilica is in the early morning, when most of its altars are occupied by priests celebrating Mass. Amongst them you will see weary-eyed curial functionaries on their way to work under the neon lights of Vatican offices, and fresh-faced pastors leading pilgrimages from parishes all over the world. As the hum of quiet prayer builds up and fills the basilica, St Peter’s takes on the atmosphere of a beehive of pious industry. If you exit the building via the main doors at the right time on a clear morning then you will be greeted by the sun rising over the Apennines directly ahead. This is because St Peter’s is almost perfectly ‘oriented’. Ever since the basilica was built by the Emperor Constantine in the first half of the 4th century, any pope celebrating Mass over the tomb of St Peter at the Papal Altar around dawn has faced the sun rising in the East.

Fr Louis Bouyer, respected scholar and priest of the French Oratory, suggested that the congregation in ancient times would not actually have faced the celebrant from the nave of the original Constantinian basilica. Instead, for the most solemn part of the Mass at least, the Faithful would have turned to face the same direction as the celebrant, i.e. eastwards. The rising sun seen through the open doors would have put celebrant and people in mind of the Resurrection of Our Lord in Jerusalem, and of His glorious return at the Second Coming. Fr Bouyer’s thesis has been challenged. An alternative theory is that the congregation would have faced the altar which was screened or veiled. Either way, opportunities for celebrant and people eyeballing each other would have been severely restricted.

If you wish to consult something more heavyweight on this subject than the Provost’s amateurish meander into liturgical history, by the way, then you should read The Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Monsignor Klaus Gamber, an important liturgical scholar greatly admired by Pope Benedict XVI. Another indispensible study is Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer, by the talented Franconian polymath Uwe Michael Lang with a preface by one J. Ratzinger. And there is, of course, Cardinal Ratzinger’s own work, The Spirit of the Liturgy.

Away from Rome, the custom developed of building churches with the sanctuary at the ‘east end’ of the building, so that the celebrant would lead the congregation up at the front rather than from behind. East was considered the ideal direction for all to face, at least from the western point of view, because it was in the Orient that Our Lord lived, died, rose and ascended into Heaven. It is also from the East that we expect His return in glory at the Second Coming: “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of man” (Mtt 24:27).

Such ‘orientation’ is by no means unique to Christian liturgical practice. Jewish synagogues have traditionally been built to facilitate worship towards the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. And if an itinerant priest journeying through Hyde Park were ever wondering in which direction to set up his travelling altar, he should not have to go too far before finding a devout Muslim with his body bowed eastwards in prayer.

On sites where an east-west configuration has not been possible to achieve physically (e.g. the London Oratory, which faces north), we Catholics are still able to celebrate Mass adorientem in a liturgical sense, by means of priest and people facing in the same direction towards what is known as ‘liturgical east’, i.e. towards the altar on which Our Lord comes to us at Mass.

At each and every Mass that is celebrated, those central mysteries of our Faith that occurred in the Holy Land are made present in a mystical way as the Sacrifice of Calvary is renewed. The Word made Flesh Who came into the world in Bethlehem and was crucified in Jerusalem returns to us on the altar, so that we may adore and receive His Risen and Living Body. And it is surely reasonable that when we say “Thy Kingdom come” in the Pater Noster we should all stand united, as the Bride of Christ awaits the arrival of the Groom Who will come in glory from the East.

Whichever way Mass is offered, it is important to understand the symbolism of celebration ad orientem and to know the reasons for it, if only for the light it casts on the deeper meaning and nature of the Mass itself. For this reason, those places that maintain this tradition offer a service to the whole Church by keeping ad orientem worship alive.

During the season of Christmas especially, try to remember as the celebrant reads the Canon of the Mass that we stand and kneel united facing the Holy Land, liturgically even if not physically. Please offer petitions for our beleaguered Christian brethren in the Middle East. The Christian presence in the ‘Cradle of Christianity’ is in danger of being squeezed out of existence. In this season of joy, we must not forget those for whom the Calvary of anxiety and fear is a daily reality even at Christmas. United ad orientem, let us pray for them, as we await His Return.

November 2013 Letter from the Provost

Grown-ups reading The Oratory Parish Magazine will remember the years of rationing that followed the Second World War, when every ounce of sugar, drop of petrol and sheet of paper was held to have value.

How distant that world seems today, when almost everything we buy comes swathed in layers of packaging that is torn off and immediately discarded. Supermarkets and fast food chains consign tons of unsold perishables to dustbins every night. Public buildings are heated to such blistering temperatures that it should not surprise us if hospitals become incubators for tropical diseases.

One of the best-known stories of wastefulness ever told is the parable of the Prodigal Son. Having turned his back on his family and squandered his patrimony on fast living, he finds himself in destitution. The foreign land in which he takes up residence is blighted by famine, so that he is reduced to coveting the husks that he is employed to feed to swine. In the Jewish context in which this story was told, we can assume that the boy’s proximity to pigs is a sign of moral degradation.

This parable might be read as an allegory for the society in which we live today. Pope Francis recently decried a “throw-away culture” which he says has “enslaved the hearts and minds of so many.”

Increasing wastefulness with material goods in recent decades has been accompanied by prodigality with the treasures of a spiritual patrimony. Many of our contemporaries have turned their backs on the Christian heritage on which our civilisation was constructed. As a result of this, many who on the material level have been blessed with an embarras de richesses now find themselves in a land that has been blighted by spiritual and moral famine. 

The parable of the Prodigal Son should give us hope. It is when he has hit rock bottom that the boy wakes up to the desperation of his predicament. In his hunger pangs his mind returns to the comforts and the security of his father’s house – so much so that he resolves to return home and to offer himself as a lowly servant in the household.

Is our society hurtling towards rock bottom? The context for the Holy Father’s reflections on wastefulness was an audience with gynaecologists in the Vatican. Amongst other casualties of the “throw-away culture”, His Holiness identified unborn children, and also the elderly who are sometimes cast aside as if they had passed a sell-by date. When human beings, each and every one created in God’s Image, are consigned to the scrap heap in their thousands every day, it is hard to imagine how much lower there is to descend.

There are indications of an increasing awareness of the desperation of this predicament. The vulgarity and aggression that are characteristic of so much contemporary culture seem to indicate a growing sense of dissatisfaction. At the same time there are so many signs of good faith and a sincere desire to ‘make the world a better place’. We must never forget the essential goodness of humanity which, while wounded by Original Sin, has been created by Almighty God for truth, love, and life eternal. Within every man and woman alive on this planet today there is a God-given capacity for expansion and holiness. Our vocation as Christians is to recognise this potential in our neighbour and to do what we can to make it flourish. We know in faith that ultimately the only solution to the world’s problems is to be found in a Person – Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

So the throw-away culture presents not only a challenge but also a great opportunity. Surely the circumstances are ideal for us to say: “Wake up! Return to your Father’s house. There is no need to live off these filthy husks that are only fit for pigs. A feast has been laid out for you at the marriage feast of the Lamb of God.”

The Prodigal Son, however, is blessed with one great advantage. The thought of his father’s house evokes nostalgia. It is a place that conjures up memories of security and love. Many of our contemporaries do not have any such nostalgia for the Church. Rather, the image that comes to their minds is of the abuses of authority and betrayals of trust that have soiled the garments of the Immaculate Bride of Christ in recent decades.

This means that we must be patient and understanding with those who, through no fault of their own, have gained a most negative view of the Church as an institution. To borrow the jargon of the spin-doctors, we have to ‘detoxify the brand’. It is down to us to make the Church that we love attractive by our holiness. We have to demonstrate by the peace that is in our hearts and by our generosity of spirit that the Church has something priceless to offer to the world today. And we have to bear witness to the Faith, Hope and Charity that are within us, so that those who are lost will come back to the House of our Father.

The Pope recently described the Church as a field hospital after a battle. When, in the Creed, we proclaim our belief in a ‘Holy’ Church, we mean this in much the same way that we might describe a hospital as ‘healthy’, at least when we are talking about the Church on earth. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and She has been endowed with everything necessary to make us holy, just as a hospital has the means to foster health. We do not come to Mass expecting to find a congregation full of perfect saints any more than we expect to find the incumbents of hospital beds in excellent health. But anyone coming into our church should find at least find humility, kindness, and healing.

At the Oratory we have many strangers coming to Mass. We need to ask ourselves what sort of reception they are likely to receive. Is the worship that we pay to Our Lord in our liturgical functions matched by the solicitude we extend to Him in our neighbour, and especially in the disadvantaged?

We should assume that the young woman who does not genuflect to the Blessed Sacrament and who pushes past us with her two unruly children, knocking our Missal to the floor, has been brought to us by God. Perhaps she has not yet been baptised, or been to Mass since her first Holy Communion. Perhaps she is a single mother, and is currently under unbearable pressure to have an abortion to prevent the birth of a third child. Her emotions on entering the building include embarrassment, reluctance and fear. But some stirring of Divine Grace in her heart has given her the courage to cross the threshold.

What will she find? Heaven forbid that she should encounter the disapproving frown of the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. May she find in us the merciful and loving face of Our Saviour, and through our witness and kindness may she come to realise that a life lived in Christ has a value that is beyond price.

October 2013 Letter from the Provost

Last month, His Holiness Pope Francis issued a most urgent call to prayer. The intention was for peace in Syria, where civil war has inflicted terrible suffering for the last two years. Recent threats of foreign military intervention and the presence of warships from Russia, America and France in the Mediterranean mean that there is currently much unsettling talk of the possibility of conflagration igniting on an international scale.

In response to the Holy Father’s plea, Syria sustained a concentrated bombardment on Saturday 7th September. This bombardment did not consist of weapons of destruction, thanks be to God. Instead, Syria was bombarded with grace, as salvos of prayer that were loaded with Faith, Hope and Charity were launched to Heaven while the Pope presided at a vigil for peace in Rome. A well-attended Mass for peace at the Oratory was followed by four hours of prayer, timed to coincide with the papal prayer vigil. With Rosary and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, we broadly followed the pattern of devotions and intercession at St Peter’s.

Pope Francis reminded us that prayers are fortified by penance. Confessionals were set up around the colonnades outside the Vatican Basilica because, as His Holiness explained, prayer rises from a heart that has been purified by reconciliation with God. When we are in a state of grace the Holy Ghost intercedes from the depths of our souls “with sighs too deep for words”, and our petitions merit a positive response from God. Before praying for any important intention, then, we should examine our consciences closely. If we are aware of any mortal sin, we need to receive God’s forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance. If our prayers are to be sure of finding favour before the Throne of Grace, it is necessary for the flame of charity to be alive in our hearts.

The Pope also declared 7th September a day of fasting. The connection between fasting and prayers of petition is evident in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Book of Jonah we see that “God repented” of the sentence of destruction He had pronounced over Nineveh, in response to the fasting of its inhabitants. In the Gospels, when the disciples fail to exorcise an evil spirit, Our Lord explains that this particular type of demon is driven out “by prayer and fasting.”

Perhaps we feel helpless as world events unfold around us. Fatalism and despair are easy temptations to give in to, especially when ‘the people in power’ seem hell-bent on a course of destruction. As Christians, however, we are never powerless. We can and we must pray. At the end of last month’s vigil in Rome, the Pope exhorted us to keep praying for peace in Syria.

The month of October is devoted to one of the most powerful forms of prayer, the Rosary. The magnificent Lady Altar in the Oratory Church can be read like a triumphal arch, testifying to the victories that God has granted to His Church in response to devout recitation of the Rosary in the face of imminent danger. Originally built in Brescia for a Rosary Confraternity, it was saved by the Oratory Fathers when the original Dominican Church in which it stood was closed during the Italian Risorgimento.

To the left of the altar is a statue of St Dominic, who is said to have been issued with the Rosary by Our Lady as an invincible weapon in his struggle against the Albigensianheretics of the Languedoc. Albigensianism was an expression of dualism that denied the reality of the Incarnation and aimed to abolish the Sacraments. For Albigensians, salvation involved spirit liberating itself from matter which was considered evil. This bizarre heresy, which forbade procreation and advocated suicide through starvation, actually gained a considerable following amongst the educated and powerful. The Rosary, with its traditional meditations focusing on Our Lord’s infancy, sufferings and Resurrection, and on Our Lady’s bodily Assumption and glorification in Heaven, proved the ideal antidote to the disembodied spirituality promoted by the heretics. Besides the graces given in response to its recitation, the Rosary played a crucial role on the devotional level in the eradication of an ideology which had threatened to overrun the whole of southern France.

On the right side of the altar stands another Dominican, Pope St Pius V. This pontiff organised a Christian League to defend Europe from the threat of Ottoman invasion and called for a Rosary Crusade to ensure a Christian victory over the Turks. When the warships of the Christians engaged a superior Turkish fleet in the Gulf of Lepanto in 1571, the Pope was granted a vision in which Our Lady revealed that the Christians had been victorious, thanks to the recitation of the Rosary.

The central niche of the Lady Altar is occupied by a nineteenth century statue of Our Lady of Victories. The first shrine to Our Lady of Victory was erected in 1213, after the defeat of the Albigensians at the Battle of Muret, which St Dominic attributed to the power of the Rosary. In thanksgiving for Lepanto, Pope St Pius V instituted a commemoration of Our Lady of Victory on 7th October, the date of the battle. This was altered by his successor Pope Gregory XIII to a commemoration of Our Lady of the Rosary, which he allowed to be celebrated as a feast in any church which had an altar dedicated to the Rosary. A century later, a Rosary Crusade and invocation of Our Lady of Victory also preceded the important Christian triumph over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna, which took place in 1683 on the 12th September, the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary.

These battles were all decisive in securing the freedom of Christendom. The Oratory Lady Altar was constructed only ten years after the Battle of Vienna, in 1693, while the fear of Ottoman invasion was still very much alive. Protection from Turkish aggression was a major concern for all of the Rosary Confraternities that were established around the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas at this time. Eventually, in 1716, the Holy Roman Empire would win a critical victory over the Turks at the Battle of Petrovaradin in Serbia. This occurred on 5th August, the feast of Our Lady of the Snows. In recognition of the role of the Blessed Virgin’s intercession on this occasion, Pope Clement XI extended the celebration of the feast of the Holy Rosary to the whole Church.

Throughout October, the Rosary is prayed at the Oratory’s Lady Altar twenty minutes before the evening Mass. A plenary indulgence may be gained from praying the Rosary in a group, under the usual conditions. At this time of great urgency, when it is no exaggeration to say that Christianity risks extinction in the Middle East and Holy Land, please join us in praying daily for peace, and especially in praying for our beleaguered fellow Christians. If you cannot come to the Oratory then unite yourselves with us at home or wherever you are. On countless more occasions than those mentioned above, the intercessions Our Lady of the Rosary have rescued Christendom from calamity.

Our Lady Queen of Peace, pray for us.

September 2013 Letter from the Provost

On the morning of 26th September 1863 Fr Wilfrid Faber lay dying in Oratory House. Fr John Bowden prayed with him during the last hour of his life, and recorded what he saw: “Just after seven a sudden change came over the Father; his head turned a little to the right, his breathing seemed to stop; a few spasmodic gasps followed, and his spirit passed away. In those last moments his eyes opened, clear, bright, intelligent as ever, in spite of the look of agony on his face, but opened to the sight of nothing earthly, with a touching expression, half of sweetness, and half of surprise.”

Tributes flowed. In the words of Mgr Manning, future Archbishop of Westminster: “He was a great priest; he was the means of bringing multitudes into the one Fold, and he died as a priest should die, amid the prayers and tears of his flock … a great servant of God has been taken from us.”

A certain amount of cold tripe has been deposited on the memory of Fr Faber in more recent decades, by authors who have managed to misread the complexities of a nature that was impulsive and playful but also profoundly serious and generous. For anyone who is familiar with the life and achievements of the ‘real Faber’, however, and especially for those of us whose lives are warmed by a daily sense of his benign fatherly presence, it is impossible to imagine that he might not by now be rejoicing in the eternal vision of the Blessed Trinity in Heaven. 

He is not, however, a canonized saint. We shall therefore celebrate a Requiem for his soul, as was done on the 100th anniversary of his death in 1963. This will take place at 8am on 26th September. If, after a century and a half, Fr Faber no longer needs the graces that will flow from Calvary in St Wilfrid’s chapel that morning, then we can be sure that they will be distributed to a soul that does.

Later on the same day we shall celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving for our beloved founder’s life, and for all of the blessings that God has worked and continues to work through him. This will be a solemn votive Mass of the Most Holy Trinity, and will take place at 6.30pm. The special preacher will be Fr Anthony Symondson S.J., distinguished architectural historian and a long-standing friend of the Oratory fathers.

And so Fr Faber’s death will be marked by prayers for his soul and thanksgiving for an extraordinary life that made such a priceless contribution to the spiritual landscape of this country and far beyond. But the question remains: what else can we do at the Oratory to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of our founding father?

The Oratory itself is a monument to Fr Faber. He did not see the current church which was built twenty years after his death, but virtually every sanctuary lamp and candle pricket is imbued with the Romanitas of which he was probably the greatest champion that this realm has ever known. Every time we restore or embellish a chapel we honour the memory of the pioneer who managed to establish an outpost of Counter-Reformation Rome in Victorian South Kensington. The care and devotion that still go into celebrating liturgical functions, and the crowds that flock to Mass and Benediction, ensure that the Oratory is saved from becoming another museum in a street of museums.

For a clue as to how we can most fittingly mark this anniversary, however, we should look back to the day of Fr Faber’s funeral. Among all the memorials – literary and architectural – that have been crafted to honour the memory of Father Faber’s life and work, surely the most precious and telling tribute of all remains the great number of the poor Catholics who converged on the church from all over London on 30th September, 1863, many of whom could not enter the building because it was so full.

The original ‘brief’ given to the Birmingham and London Oratories, issued by Bl. Pope Pius IX, had been to evangelise primarily the “educated classes” of their respective cities. The establishment of the Oratory near the Strand, however, coincided with a vast influx of destitute Irish seeking refuge from the potato famine, which meant that the London Oratorians immediately found themselves immersed in corporal works of mercy among the capital’s most disadvantaged inhabitants. 

Last Good Shepherd Sunday Pope Francis preached that a good priest is one who takes on the smell of his sheep. Father Faber took on their fleas. The church and house in King William Street became infested with insects that teemed over cassocks, beds and altar linens. The itching was so unbearable that Fr Faber could not sleep, but he mustered enough energy to start the ‘Company of St Patrick’, which enlisted laity to visit the slums and to assist the Fathers in ministering to the spiritual, physical and social needs of Catholics who were found there.

With the move to Brompton, it might be imagined that Fr Faber was finally free to devote himself, undistracted by vermin, to the care of his “poor Belgravians”. But the poor followed him. An account of 1858 describes them making pilgrimages across London to be elevated and transported by the “sweet strains of heavenly music” and “all that is grand and solemn and sublime in the ceremonies” here at the Oratory. The Oratory Fathers opened ‘ragged schools’, and the work in the slums continued. They realised that what is now called ‘social outreach’ was not just an unavoidable adjunct but an essential ingredient to their apostolate as sons of St Philip Neri.

Perhaps the most appropriate tribute the London Oratory can pay to Fr Faber’s memory, then, will be for us to re-examine what we do for the needy in this city. What we do actually provide is largely untrumpeted. The Oratory has a committed St Vincent de Paul Society, which assists at some of the capital’s soup kitchens, as well as visiting the housebound and bringing immobile parishioners to Mass. Every day, significant numbers of the homeless arrive at the door to receive sandwiches produced in the kitchen of Oratory House. And a high percentage of the Fathers’ ‘on duty’ hours in the parlours is spent talking to Fr Faber’s dispossessed and destitute.

There is, however, much more that could be done. Listening to parishioners it becomes clear that there are untapped resources in our congregation – rich seams of skill and expertise, and a very serious desire to honour Christ in the poor and needy. Recently we have been in consultation with the Archdiocese of Westminster, and with local churches and charities, to find out what sort of contributions we can make that will be most beneficial to the needs of the time and the place in which God is asking us to build His Kingdom. We are currently producing a questionnaire to ascertain the numbers and profiles of parishioners who would like to participate. Watch this space, and pray that God will guide us to seek His Glory in all things.

Meanwhile, please join us at the Mass of thanksgiving on 26th September.

August 2013 Letter from the Provost

Last month the Holy Father blessed a new statue in the Vatican Gardens. It is a figure of St Michael the Archangel doing battle with the devil. His Holiness used this ceremony as an opportunity to entrust the Vatican City State and all of its inhabitants and employees to the Holy Archangel’s protection. “St Michael defends the people of God from his enemies,” explained the Pope, “above all from the enemy par excellence, the devil”. The Holy Father added: “In consecrating Vatican City State to St Michael the Archangel, I ask him to defend us from the evil one and banish him.”

We know from Genesis that when man first sinned it was in response to a temptation from the serpent. This gave Satan an entrée into human society, and if we look at the world today we see that this ancient enemy of God and man is all too active. Since his election our new Pope has reminded us on numerous occasions of the reality and the malice of the devil, and of the evil one’s activity in the world and within the Church.

For the last two millennia Catholics have taken strength and encouragement from Our Lord’s promise: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The spiritual forces of darkness – Satan and his fallen angels – are evidently no match for the Holy Ghost and the Holy Angels.

To be in a state of unrelenting conflict with the powers of evil is normal for the Church. Our Lord warns us that this will be so. Soon after His Crucifixion the Synagogue and then the Roman Empire unleashed their full fury on the early Christian community. More recently the French Revolution wrought desecration on cathedrals and churches, and torture and death on thousands of Catholic religious, clergy and laity. The last century brought persecution under totalitarian socialism in its Nationalist and Communist forms.

A glance around the world today reveals that martyrdom is by no means a thing of the past. Christians are currently being slain on a weekly if not daily basis in the Middle East and parts of Africa. They are murdered for their faith. Worshippers in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere risk being blown up by bombs parked outside their churches when they go to Mass on Sundays. The secular media seems reluctant to report this, but charities such as Aid to the Church in Need do their best to monitor this deplorable situation, and news of the atrocities is at least receiving some coverage in Christian news services.

It would be over-egging the pudding to talk at this stage about full-scale persecution in our supposedly freedom-loving western world. Discrimination, however, is a growing reality for Christians everywhere. Catholic employers in America have been preparing to face the consequences of having to break the law when they refuse to implement their government’s healthcare program, which insists on the provision of cover for contraception and abortion. A few years ago Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago – a mild-mannered prelate who is not given to histrionics – said the following: “I expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

Recently in France innocent men, women and children were bashed up by the police for joining millions of demonstrators who gathered on the streets in support of the traditional view of marriage and the family. Hundreds were arrested just for wearing T-shirts depicting the outline of a man and a woman with two children. Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Colo, the mayor of a town in the Pyrenees, was told that he faced the prospect of five years in jail and a £65,000 fine for refusing to officiate at a so-called marriage between two men. M. Colo said that he would go to the gallows rather compromise his conscience on the issue.

As the pressure increases we can thank God for that promise of Our Lord that “the gates of Hell will never prevail against His Church.” However desperate things have been in the past, and however much hardship there will be in the future, we have His promise that the Church will survive, that the Faith will be taught, and that the Sacraments will be dispensed – at least somewhere on this planet – until His return in Glory at the end of time.

Very often, however, this promise of Our Lord is misunderstood. Many people interpret the statement that “the gates of hell will not prevail” incorrectly. They take it to mean that the forces of evil will not triumph over the Church. And while that is certainly one of the implications of Our Lord’s words, it is not what He actually says. His promise is that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. There is an important difference here.

In the days of siege warfare, the gates were the most vulnerable point of a city under attack. Breach the gates, and you could take the citadel inside the walls. So rather than telling us that His Church must always be on the defensive, Our Lord is actually instructing us that His Church should actually be on the offensive, storming the gates of hell and taking the forces of evil by siege. A valid rendering of His words in English would be: “the gates of hell will not hold out against [the Church]”.

The Church’s mission is not to huddle together dodging whatever arrows and bombs that are thrown and waiting for Our Lord to come and rescue us. The Church’s mission is to evangelise the world and to Christianise the culture in which we live by preaching the Gospel in season and out of season. Our mission as baptised Christians is to brave the arrows and missiles as we build the Kingdom of Heaven in that part of creation that has been entrusted to our care and influence.

If we lose sight of this pro-active mission of the Church, the consequences can only be regrettable. When those of us who are responsible for teaching the Faith forget that we are supposed to be members of the Church Militant, then the Church as an institution becomes inward-looking and self-serving. Batten down the hatches against the storm that rages outside, and the atmosphere inside eventually becomes fetid and unwholesome. The result can only be that zeal is suffocated and scandals proliferate. 

Our Lord established His Church as an hierarchical society, with Peter at the head of the Apostles. As a global institution the Church requires canon lawyers, diplomats and curial officials to serve Her mission of rescuing souls from damnation and saving them for eternal life. However, when bureaucracy, management and diplomacy become ends in themselves and the mission to evangelise is sidelined, then something rotten sets in. And as Pope Benedict XVI once warned us: “The greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the Church.” The most appalling harm that has been inflicted on the Church within our lifetime has not been the result of terrorist bombs and communist jails. It has been the devastating assault on the Church’s credibility from the internal abuse of trust and authority by clerics who have evidently lacked all sense of the sacred, and who seem to have had so little faith in God’s promises that they have even lost the fear of divine punishment for their crimes.

During his consecration of the Vatican and all who sail in her to the patronage of St Michael, the Pope prayed that the Holy Archangel would intercede for Vatican officials to make them strong “in the good fight of faith.” In words which some respected commentators immediately linked to rumours of a forthcoming ‘reform of the Vatican’, the Pope also prayed that, through St Michael’s intercession, those within the Vatican would be made “victorious over the temptations of power, riches and sensuality.”

These days, when the reform of any human institution is the subject of conversation, we expect to hear words like ‘restructuring’ and ‘rationalisation’. The Holy Father’s actions and words in relation to the Vatican so far point to a much profounder and more effective sort of reform – the reform that can only come from interior conversion.

When Our Lord tells us that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church, He is assuring us that we need not be timid in our practice of the Faith. We are called to be bold in our proclamation of the Gospel, and courageous in its defence, so that we take the gates of hell by storm. If the Church in our age is to fulfil Her divine commission, then the spirit of the ‘Church Bureaucratic’ and the ‘Church Diplomatic’ has to be jettisoned. Our identity as the ‘Church Militant’, before which the gates of hell tremble and disintegrate, must be rediscovered.

It should come as no surprise when the devil concentrates his efforts within the Church. Of course he does. His aim, after all, is to deprive us of the life of grace and the Beatific Vision which he himself threw away forever in that disastrous act of rebellion against his Creator. If only he can keep us away from the source of everlasting life which flows from the Cross in the Sacraments and which gives nutrition in the pure milk of Catholic doctrine, then he will have achieved his purpose in our lives. And so it is only to be expected that he focuses a good deal of his destructive energies on seminaries, the priesthood, the Vatican, etc. If the faith, the integrity, and the courage of the clergy are weakened by relativism and worldliness, then the leadership of the Church Militant becomes ineffective and the gates of hell remain secure.

No amount of tampering or tinkering or ‘restructuring’ of the institution will ever defeat the devil. The weapons that he fears are prayer, piety, faithfulness and holiness. And this is where we all have a role to play in union with our Pope and our bishops in that perennially –needed reform of the Church which is based on conversion and personal sanctification. As members of the Mystical Body of Christ, we each have a contribution to make. If you and I are healthy cells in that Body, if we are full of Faith and Hope and Charity, then the whole organism benefits. Through our prayers, our humility, our purity and our acts of heroic charity, we shall participate in a genuine renewal in the Church’s life, the fruits of which will include conversions and good vocations.

In the Church Militant there are no civilians, and no-one is useless. The toothless old widow who offers up the aches and pains of rheumatism makes an invaluable contribution to the war effort. Each and every Hail Mary of her Rosary is a spiritual cruise missile that sends the demons scrambling for cover.

Difficult times might be on the way. We can be bold, however, in the knowledge that if we have recourse to his protection, Holy Michael the Archangel will defend us in the day of battle.

July 2013 Letter from the Provost

On 22nd July the Church celebrates the feast day of St Mary Magdalene. From the Gospels we know that this highly-honoured woman was among those who accompanied Our Lord and ministered to Him, that she had been exorcised of seven demons, was present at His Crucifixion and burial, and that she was the first recorded witness of the Resurrection. From at least the fifth century until the early twentieth century, Western Catholic tradition considered Mary Magdalene to be the same person as Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus), and the “woman who was a sinner” who so upset a Pharisee by entering his house to pour ointment and tears on Our Lord’s feet, as recorded in the Gospel of St Luke, chapter seven. Modern sophisticates pooh-pooh this threefold identification, but the author of the Provost’s letter is a simple convert who learnt what he knows from the Penny Catechism and is happy to bow before the ancient and almost unanimous tradition of the Latin Church.

Assuming that the Provost and Pope St Gregory the Great are not mistaken, it would seem that there were at least two separate occasions on which Mary Magdalene anointed Our Lord’s feet. The first is that mentioned above in St Luke’s Gospel, when Our Lord is dining in the house of a Pharisee named Simon. We read that “a woman of the city who was a sinner” appears at the table with an alabaster flask of ointment and proceeds to wash His feet with her tears, her hair and the contents of the flask.

It transpires from the way this account develops that there are two ways of looking at Mary Magdalene. The first is the way of the Pharisee. Simon heartily disapproves of this woman’s presence in his house. How brazen of her to appear so shamelessly in such elevated company. His opinion of his guest of honour is set firmly in the negative when Our Lord allows this outcast to come into such close contact with Him. Simon is a classic puritan. He is concerned with the woman’s reputation. His vision is fixated on sin and corruption.

Our Lord shows us the other way of looking at Mary Magdalene. He is not really interested in her sins at all. His gaze sears through whatever corruption might be there. His vision is fixed on the magnificent image of God that He recognises in her soul. He sees her capacity to love and to flourish; and because she is willing to open her heart to receive His forgiveness, Divine Grace floods into her being and elevates her to a life of communion with the Blessed Trinity. Liberated from the shackles of her sins, she will become one of the greatest saints and contemplatives that human civilisation has ever known. Such is the love of God for those who are moved to embrace it – healing, restorative and creative.

Puritanism exists in every generation. We can detect its influence whenever we hear someone say: “Confession is too easy. How can anyone expect their sins to be forgiven by a priest in a few minutes?” The answer to this is that such instantaneous restoration to friendship with God is actually something that occurs on a regular and frequent basis within the walls of the Oratory church. Whole lifetimes of sin are forgiven in the time it takes to pronounce the words “I absolve you …”.

We are all created in the image of God. But in all of us that magnificent image is liable to become obscured by sin and selfishness. Sin is like grime on the surface of a looking glass that prevents the image of God from reflecting in our lives with the brilliance and the beauty it is intended to. The gaze of Our Lord, however, remains fixed on this divine image. Like Mary Magdalene, all we have to do is open our hearts to receive His forgiveness. Allow it to happen and, with divine grace and our co-operation, that image will be burnished into a perfect and glorious likeness to God. He has given us the Sacrament of Penance to make this easier for us, and Holy Communion to bring the process to perfection.

The first recorded occasion of Mary Magdalene’s appearance with ointment happens around one year into Our Lord’s public ministry. The second comes two years later, just six days before the Passover that will mark the beginning of His Passion. Our Lord is dining in Bethany with Martha and Lazarus, who has recently been raised from the dead. This time we are told more precisely that the ointment is a pound of pure nard worth a small fortune. Again Mary wipes His feet with her hair, and with the ointment which fills the whole house with fragrance.

Once again Mary’s behaviour attracts disapproval. This time it is Judas Iscariot who complains: “Why is this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” Just in case we are naive enough to think Judas really gives a fig about the poor, St John informs us that Judas had sticky fingers and would have been planning to pocket the proceeds for himself. Our Lord tells Judas to hold his tongue and to let Mary keep the nard for the day of his burial.

Recently the Oratory Fathers were taken to task at the end of a Sunday High Mass. An elegant woman marched towards the Provost through the lingering fog of incense and demanded to know what we Oratorians thought we were playing at. The causes of consternation included expensive-looking flower arrangements at the Lady Altar, vestments and golden vessels that had been spotted in the Sanctuary. Surely these extravagances were from funds that should have been given to the poor?

It was explained that the flowers were leftovers from a wedding the day before and that the silver gilt chalice and ciborium had almost certainly been picked up for a song in the 1850s when ecclesiastical Swabian rococo was not much in vogue. The vestments are thread-bear from a century and a half of use and, while still charming for their faded beauty, are too far-gone to fetch good money at auction. The dialogue ended in a slightly more serene atmosphere than it had begun and the articulate woman drove away placated in a gleaming new car which Google searches revealed to have cost £90,000.

Yes, we do make an effort to give the best we can to God. This is because we are grateful that He has given so much for us. Above all, we are grateful that Our Lord gave His Precious Blood on the Cross for our salvation. It is in the spirit of St Mary Magdalene that we lavish the most precious materials we can acquire around the Altar of Sacrifice on which Our Lord makes Himself present at Mass. At the London Oratory we are blessed to have some of the most accomplished musicians and singers in Christendom enriching the liturgical worship in which our hearts are transported regularly towards the heights of Mount Zion. All of this is only made possible by the sacrifices of those who maintain this high quality of worship by means of donations.

Of course, this experience of coming to Mass is supposed to change us. Our Lord transforms bread and wine into His Body and Blood so that we might ourselves be transformed and, in turn, go out to transform the society in which we live and work. We are supposed to leave the precincts of the church with a renewed sensitivity that motivates us to search for and recognise that image of God that is in our neighbour. We should go out from Mass aiming to serve God more faithfully by ministering to Him in the disadvantaged. Worshipping God at the Altar and honouring His image in our neighbour are complementary. 

If we are genuinely transformed by the embrace of God’s love that we encounter when receiving Holy Communion, then perhaps, like Mary Magdalene, we shall be inspired to give something that really costs. Someone might even decide to sell her new Porsche at a loss and donate the proceeds to the Catholic Children’s Society. No one here is suggesting that there is a moral obligation to do such a thing. It is a matter for the individual conscience. But such a generous offering would certainly go to an excellent cause.

In St Mary Magdalene, we see how gratitude begets generosity. Together, gratitude and generosity crush the puritan spirit that gives religion a bad name. Sin is the greatest possible evil. But to have repented of our sins and tasted the forgiveness that was won on the Cross gives us an experience of divine love that has the power to transform us into something truly beautiful. Repentance and confession also require in us a humility that is very precious to God. This humility is an essential foundation for the great blessings He wishes to build in our lives.

May the intercession of St Mary Magdalene save us from the puritan spirit. May it increase within us the gratitude and the generosity of soul that are the fruit of knowing that were are sinners who have been granted forgiveness.

June 2013 Letter from the Provost

When God intervenes to give someone a new name, we can be sure that we are witnessing something momentous. Abram’s elevation to Abraham signified that he was to be the father of a multitude, someone through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Jacob’s new name Israel meant ‘power with God’.

So when Our Lord tells the fisherman Simon that he is to be called ‘Peter’, this must mark a significant event in the history of salvation. By divine election Simon is to be Cephas, the ‘rock’ on which Our Lord will build His Church. To Peter will be granted the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, with the power to bind and loose, and the gates of hell will never prevail against this Church.

People often ask what is the main difference between Catholics and other Christians. Is it our devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to the saints? Or perhaps it is the Church’s teaching on Our Lord’s real bodily presence in the Blessed Sacrament and Her doctrine on the Sacrifice of the Mass?

The most precise answer is simpler than any of these. The main difference between Catholics and other Christians can actually be summed up in one word, and that word is a name: ‘Peter’.

What makes a Catholic is not just his devotion to the Blessed Virgin and his belief in Transubstantiation, essential though these are.  There are in fact plenty of Anglican parishes where the Blessed Virgin is honoured with the title ‘Our Lady’ and the saints are venerated in processions and litanies. The eastern Orthodox denominations share our belief in Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. Their bishops and priests are ordained in the same line of Apostolic Succession as ours, and they administer the same seven Sacraments.

What makes someone a Catholic is essentially communion, through Baptism, with the Pope. A practising Catholic believes that Our Lord appointed St Peter to be the Prince of the Apostles, and that St Peter’s successor is alive and reigning today in the person of His Holiness Pope Francis. A practising Catholic is one who submits himself in obedience to the authority of the Pope of the day in those areas and circumstances which fall under the Pope’s divinely ordained remit.

The Papacy is the visible guarantee of unity in our Church and of the constancy of the Church’s unchangeable doctrine. If we could climb into a time machine and return to the world in ten thousand or a million years’ time, what should we find? There is one thing of which we Catholics can be quite sure: if the world is still here, then we shall find exactly the same Catholic Church, essentially unchanged – the same structure of pope, bishops, priests and deacons; the same seven Sacraments; the same doctrine on Heaven and hell; the same command to keep the Lord’s Day holy; the same teaching on contraception and on the meaning and nature of marriage.

We know all of this with certainty because of Our Lord’s promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against His Church. We know it with certainty because our Faith is built not on clouds or pious ideas, but on an indestructible rock. If the Church had ever managed to get it wrong on any of these issues then it would mean that She had been binding the consciences of the Faithful to assent to something false. The gates of hell would have prevailed. Our Lord’s promise would be proven to be false, and one shudders even to make such a suggestion. He is Truth Itself.

As Catholics in the twenty-first century we can be grateful that we have this divinely guaranteed assistance to steer us through the minefields of moral dilemma with which modern life confronts us. Breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology are a testimony to the wonderful gift of reason with which God has endowed human nature. But such advances also mean that today’s world challenges us with increasingly complicated choices. The divine assurance that has been granted to St Peter and to his successors means that there is an unquenchable light to guide us through this valley of shadows.

The supernatural prerogative of infallibility that Our Lord invested in St Peter and successive bishops of Rome is really a negative, preventative, guarantee. It safeguards the Pope from falling into positive error when he teaches on faith and morals ex cathedra [i.e. in his official capacity as Successor of St Peter]. The Church has never claimed that popes are necessarily blessed with any charism of divine inspiration. They do not need to be. Everything to be known for the purpose of salvation is already contained in the Deposit of Faith that was sealed with the death of the last Apostle in around 100 A.D. With the completion of that Deposit the role of popes and bishops henceforth would be to unpack and teach that unchanging Truth, and to guard it against any dilution or novelty.

Looking at history, it becomes clear that some popes have done a better job at succeeding St Peter than others. Some have been brilliant teachers, others not. Some popes have been capable administrators, while the pontificates of others have been characterized by corruption and neglect. Even those few whose names are bywords for depravity, however, have never managed to teach heresy ex cathedra.

When a pope does a good job of succeeding St Peter it is only to be expected that he will attract flak. The Prince of the Apostles was put to death for preaching the Gospel, after all, and a number of his successors suffered the same fate. When you hear the names of Linus, Cletus and Clement in the Canon of the Mass, remember that these were popes who mingled their own blood with the Precious Blood of Our Lord in martyrdom. The shepherds appointed by Our Lord to feed His sheep are not here to appease the mob or to grovel to the press. They are here to teach the Faith in season and out, and when push comes to shove to give their lives in the service of the Gospel.

Appearing on the balcony of St Peter’s after his election, our new Pope seems immediately to have won a place in the hearts of all men of good will, both inside and outside the Church. We should give thanks for this blessing and pray that God will use Pope Francis’s disarming frankness and winning modesty to gather in rich harvests of conversions and vocations. It would be painful to see anyone of such evident goodness and integrity subjected to abuse from the rude and scoffing multitude. But it shouldn’t surprise us if and when this happens, and it certainly should not discourage us. Such a volte face is probably inevitable once the media wakes up to the fact that in addition to possessing an infectious joie de vivre and a passionate concern for the disadvantaged the Pope is also a Catholic.

We should pray for Pope Francis every day. May God bless him with a long and successful reign. May the patronage of Our Lady of Fatima protect His Holiness from all harm. And may the intercession of St Peter always gain for him the zeal and courage of those popes who, in the footsteps of the fisherman, have given their lives for our holy Catholic Faith.

May 2013 Letter from the Provost

On Pentecost Sunday the Church celebrates a birthday. She is not celebrating the birthday of the Holy Ghost. That would be heretical. As the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost is co-eternal and co-equal with God the Father and God the Son. There never was a time when He did not exist. Admittedly the Jews never identified Him as a separate Person. With the benefit of the Divine Revelation that finds its completion in the Christian Gospel, however, we can find plenty of traces of the Holy Ghost’s presence throughout the Old Testament. Scratch the surface of Genesis and there He is already in the third verse of the very first chapter, hovering over the primordial darkness at the beginning of Creation. It is His voice that speaks through the prophets and, indeed, inspires every word of the Old Testament.

The birthday that the Church celebrates on Pentecost Sunday is in fact Her own birthday. Pentecost really marks the nativity of the Catholic Church. 

Like an embryo growing in a mother’s womb, the development of the Church was a gradual process. Our Lord laid Her foundations with His public ministry. He established Her hierarchical structure when He appointed the Twelve Apostles, with Peter in charge, and commissioned them and their successors – the bishops and the Pope – to be the teachers, governors and sanctifiers in His Kingdom on earth. He made Christian Baptism the means of incorporation into His Mystical Body. In the Upper Room, where so many of the milestone scenes in the drama of our salvation took place, He instituted the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrament of the Eucharist, along with the priesthood of the New Covenant, so that Calvary might be perpetuated in an unbloody manner in all subsequent ages, so that He might abide with us and feed us with His own living Body, and so that sins might be forgiven in Confession.

It was on the Cross that Our Lord purchased the Church for Himself, winning for Her members the grace of Redemption. In the water and blood flowing from His wounded side, we are reminded of Eve being formed from the rib of Adam. And so the Church glories in Her beautiful title ‘Bride of Christ’.

It was at Pentecost, however, that the Church was really launched as a universal concern that would extend across continents and centuries. In was in that same Upper Room in which Our Lord had already instituted the Mass, the priesthood and the sacrament of Penance, that the Holy Ghost descended on Our Lady and the Apostles, and the Church ceased to be the concern of a local body of disciples and became forever truly international, truly Catholic.

While the Church is two thousand years old, She remains eternally young. It is the Holy Ghost who is responsible for this perennial youth. Biologists tell us that the cells of the human body are constantly dying and being replaced. And yet a human being retains a continuity of memory and identity throughout his life. Similarly in the Church: as Her members are born, baptised, anointed and buried, it is the Holy Ghost Who gives to the Church Her own continuity of memory and identity as generations come and go. In the words of Pope Leo XIII: “If Christ is the Head of the Church, the Holy Ghost is Her Soul.” He is the Divine Spirit Who ensures that She remains ever faithful to the same Truth, without caving in to the spirit of the age.

All of this has to do with what might be called the ‘public’ role of the Holy Ghost in the Church’s life. What about His action in our lives as individual members of the Church? Read the Acts of the Apostles and you will see that Pentecost tells us that as Christians we are all called to be ‘charismatics’.

This might sound alarming to most sane Englishmen. In this part of the world people have a healthy suspicion of forms of worship that involve breathlessness and perspiration. Being genuinely charismatic, however, does not necessarily mean praying the Our Father with arms outstretched like a Spitfire or a Messerschmitt. Being charismatic really means being full of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Above all, it means brimming over with divine love.

The word charism means gift. And it is important to discern whether perceived charisms are in fact gifts of the Holy Ghost, rather than manifestations of eccentricity or even the influence of some malign spirit.  Here we always have to remember that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of unity and of truth. And so if our gifts contribute to the unity and the building up of the Church, and if they are characterised by docility and faithfulness to the Church’s teaching authority, then we can probably be confident that they are genuine gifts of the Spirit.

The Oratory was founded by one of the greatest charismatic saints in the Church’s history, St Philip Neri. Later this month we shall celebrate his feast day. Before he was a priest, the young Philip Neri was praying in the Roman catacombs one night, for the gifts of the Holy Ghost. It was probably on the vigil of the feast of Pentecost in 1544. Suddenly the Holy Ghost appeared in the form of a ball of fire that descended into his heart with such force that he was thrown to the ground. That mysterious Presence never left him. The fire of the Spirit burned in his breast for the rest of his long life. It expanded his heart, forcing a rupture in his ribcage, and it seemed henceforth to be the source of a physical warmth and an outpouring of love that brought many souls to conversion. It made him joyful, wise and patient. It did not make him precious and esoteric but open and attractive.

Being the greatest of gentlemen, God never forces His gifts upon us. His desire is for us to receive them with open hearts. We should pray in this month of Pentecost, and in this month of the great charismatic St Philip, that the same spirit of love and zeal that enflamed St Philip’s hearts will burn in our own, so that through our generosity and our witness, many souls will be brought into the divine unity of the Catholic Church.

In occasions of necessity, the Church encourages the faithful to pray novenas, or nine day prayers of petition. The origin of this is the nine days of prayer made by the disciples in the Upper Room after the Ascension. Our Lord commanded them to remain together in Jerusalem in preparation for the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost (Acts 1, 4). To assist us in our vocation of building God’s Kingdom on earth, we might make a novena asking for the Gifts of the Holy Ghost. These gifts are wisdom, understanding, fear of the Lord (awe and wonder), counsel, knowledge, fortitude and piety. We can begin this novena on Friday 10th May, concluding on Saturday 18th May, the Vigil of Pentecost. A suggested prayer is the Veni SancteSpiritus:

Come, Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love.

V. Send forth Thy Spirit, and they shall be created

R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

Let us pray.

O God Who by the light of the Holy Ghost didst instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the gift of the same Spirit we may be always truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation. 

Through Christ our Lord.

R. Amen.