February 2015 Letter from the Provost

In the whole of Sacred Scripture, there is no scene that appeals to the imagination of children better than Noah’s Ark. The drawings that decorate the walls of Christian primary schools all over the world tend to depict smiling giraffes stretching their necks out of the windows of Mr and Mrs Noah’s well-appointed living quarters while lions and sheep stand shoulder to shank in bucolic harmony on the deck.

The reality must have been somewhat less idyllic, after Noah and his family had sealed themselves into the damp and dark, and huddled in close confinement with malodorous ill-tempered beasts while the rising torrents thundered and crashed all around them.

During Lent we are encouraged to batten down the hatches against the temptations of the world and the devil from without and to do battle with the wild beasts of our own vices within. Meanwhile the Ark which is the Church transports us on the forty day journey into the Pascal Mystery of Good Friday and Easter. For the same period that Noah and the animals were shut up in the Ark, we are to apply ourselves with greater intensity than usual to what, as disciples of Christ, we are meant to be doing all the year round: praying, alms-giving and mortification.

Say the word mortification in polite society, and the reaction will most likely be negative. The post-Freudian mindset in which modern opinion has been formed tends to associate the idea of Christian mortification with a warped, unwholesome view of human nature.

Obviously this is a case of double standards in operation. The same metropolitan sophisticates who shiver with disapproval at the mention of Christian mortification will gladly spend mind-boggling sums of money on starvation diets and self-torture regimes in Teutonic spas, all in the cause of body beautiful. At the more fashionable of these places the menu is likely to consist of formidable doses of Epsom salts and pieces of stale bread, each morsel of which has to be chewed forty times. Presumably the calories burnt in exercising the jaw exceed those consumed in the food.

Dare to suggest that it is a good Catholic practice to fast and discipline our bodies for the sake of our immortal souls, however, and the response will be an embarrassed silence.

Perhaps this has something to do with a suspicion that the Catholic Church has contrived to make a cult out of suffering for its own sake – a prejudice which has been exploited and reinforced in our age in novels like The Name of the Rose and The Da Vinci Code. But nothing could actually be further from the truth. The suffering which Christians voluntarily embrace is very much a means to an end. Through self-denial we detach ourselves from enslavement to earthly preoccupations so that, as St Peter says, “your prayers may not be hindered.” (1 Pt 3.7) We endure discomfort so that our wayward appetites might learn obedience to our reason and to our will. In this sense, mortification serves to liberate us from the tyranny of our passions.

None of this is unique to Christianity. We only have to reflect on the ascetic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism to realise that the practice of self-denial is a feature of many religions. Where the Christian understanding of mortification is perhaps unique is in the fact that it is woven so inextricably into the very Mystery of Redemption itself.

In the words of Our Lord: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains alone. But if it dies it bears much fruit.” (Jn 12.24) Although these words obviously refer to His own Passion, they also apply to us, because while His Passion and Death pay in full the price for our sins, we are invited to unite ourselves to and participate in that work of Redemption. This is surely what St Paul means when he says “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body that is the Church.” (Col 1.24) There can be no suggestion that the Sacrifice of Calvary is in any way deficient. Less than a drop of the Precious Blood would be more than sufficient to save the whole human race. What St Paul is saying is that when our own sacrifices and sufferings are united with those of Our Saviour, then they take on the supernatural value that merits rewards not only for ourselves but also for Christ’s Mystical Body the Church.

There can be a temptation to assume that real mortification is just for a chosen few – those spiritual champions and heroines who retire from the world to the cloister and the hermitage. But the truth is that we all receive the vocation to die to ourselves when we are baptised. To understand this better it might be a good idea at the beginning of Lent to read and reflect on the sixth chapter of the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?” asks St Paul; “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Rom 6.3-4) After Baptism, we are to continue dying to ourselves, so that the life of the Resurrection might take ever greater possession of us. We are to dethrone the ego and all self-centredness so that He might be enthroned in our hearts forever.

The Sacrifice of all sacrifices that He made on the Cross was a gift of His own self, and herein is the key to any genuinely Christian mortification. For our self-denial and sacrifice to be pleasing to Almighty God, they cannot consist in a sterile exercise in self-improvement.  They must be accompanied by an increase in charity. For this reason, in Lent, the Church also enjoins us to give alms. And surely whatever we are able to give materially is meant to be a mere token of a growth in the virtue of charity. Whether or not we have managed to lose an inch or two around the waist by the time Good Friday arrives will be of little interest to God. What will be pleasing to Him will be a heart that has been expanded by loving, giving and forgiving with ever greater generosity and self-sacrifice.

The Church, then, is like a great Ark, and Her Liturgy is the seascape through which She transports us. During the forty days of Lent, we are carried towards and through the Mysteries that are central to our Redemption. If we make a serious effort to deny ourselves, to pray more and, most importantly, to be more charitable and giving, then we shall take part in this voyage not so much as passengers and spectators but as participants. Through our own mortifications, our prayers and our growth in charity we shall be more effectively united to the Passion and Death of Our Lord. Having died to ourselves, we shall be better prepared to participate in the joy and the glory of His Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Fr Julian Large

January 2015 Letter from the Provost

The beginning of January is traditionally a time for New Year’s resolutions. The ‘lifestyle’ sections of the newspapers, meanwhile, encourage everyone to enrol on stringent ‘detox’ programmes to repair any harm inflicted on the body by the excesses of the Christmas holidays.

It is easy for us to smile at these secular attempts at self-improvement. Usually the resolutions made on 1st January will soon be broken and forgotten, and in many cases they were not worth keeping or remembering in the first place. ‘Detoxing’ often seems to involve the consuming of expensive quack potions, the purgative effects of which have never been proven scientifically to have any lasting beneficial effect on the human body.

Rather than mocking from the sidelines, however, perhaps we should baptise the spirit of the season and make our own resolutions and submit ourselves to some spiritual detoxification. Of course, for Catholics, the ‘new year’ actually began liturgically some time ago, on the First Sunday of Advent. But if we neglected to make good resolutions then, or made some but have since lapsed, now would be an excellent opportunity to renew them or to forge resolutions afresh.

For a disciple of Christ, good resolutions are actually something that have to be made or renewed every day of the year throughout a lifetime. Whether it is to be kinder, more truthful, to be less angry or to give up gossiping, or to avoid those places, situations and people that lead us into sin, such resolutions should be a fruit of the examination of conscience that we are encouraged to make towards the close of every day. With our ‘morning offering’ – the daily prayers with which we launch ourselves into the world – we can then ask for the divine help we need to keep our resolutions.

 On the Feast of the Epiphany, the Church celebrates the manifestation of the Word Incarnate to the Gentiles, which demonstrates to the world that the salvation the Christ Child offers is not to be restricted to any particular race or nation. He has come to bring detoxification from the effects of Original Sin to all people and peoples who will kneel in adoration at the Crib. The Epiphany also commemorates two other manifestations, which the liturgical calendar unwraps gradually by presenting them separately in the Gospels appointed for subsequent days. These are the miracle at Cana in Galilee, at which the water turned into wine prefigures the miracle of Transubstantiation at Mass and the transformative power of the Sacraments in general, and the Baptism of Our Lord by St John.

It goes without saying that Our Lord had no need of Baptism. Saint John’s Baptism was a ritual washing, which symbolised the washing away of sins. We can imagine the waters of the Jordan as teeming with the sins of those who flocked to the banks of the Jordan and were moved to repentance by St John’s hellfire preaching. When Our Lord entered that river, He detoxified the waters by taking those sins onto His own shoulders, just as He would bear the sins of the world on His shoulders on the Cross. And in that moment of contact with the Word Made Flesh the waters of Baptism ceased to be merely symbolic and became truly efficacious in dissolving sin and restoring the soul to the life of Grace by applying to us individually the merits of His Sacrifice on Cavalry.

Those of us who have been blessed with Baptism have already been detoxified from the poison of Original Sin. Subsequent sins committed, however, mean that we often need to ask God’s forgiveness and allow Him to detoxify us anew. In the Sacrament of Penance, we open our hearts in repentance, and the humility it requires to enunciate our transgressions and to resolve to make amends is so pleasing to God that He washes us through with an ocean of grace, restoring to us the spiritual nutrients that have been dissipated.

At Our Lord’s Baptism the Heavens open and the Holy Ghost appears in the form of a dove while the voice of God the Father declares: “Behold my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” This demonstrates that Baptism is a Trinitarian event, in which we are united with the Son, become living Temples of the Holy Ghost and beloved children of the Father. At the font, then, we are actually elevated to a new and supernatural level of life, in which we participate in the communion of life and love that flows eternally between the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.

One good resolution we can all surely make at the beginning of this year is to deepen this relationship of communion and communication by putting greater effort into our prayer life.  People get into a stew about prayer, with the result that they can end up avoiding it altogether because they “do not know how to pray.” The simple answer is: “Get on with it.” Certainly, there are different ‘schools’ of prayer, and yes there are vast libraries on the subject full of fascinating and invaluable insights written by saints and mystics. In its essence, however, prayer is no more complicated that “the lifting of the mind and heart to God.” When we do that, and when we communicate our thoughts, our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears, thanks, praise and petitions to God, then He is able to communicate His divine life to us in abundance. When our words run dry, we need not be discouraged. It is a reminder that we also need to rest in silence, allowing God to speak to our hearts. Our Holy Father St Philip encouraged very simple prayers to put ourselves in God’s presence, such as “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray to Jesus for me.”

To find basic nourishment for prayer and meditation, we should revisit Holy Scripture. At this time of year, the mysteries celebrated in the Epiphany – the adoration of the Magi, the marriage at Cana and the Baptism of Our Lord – provide a rich source for inspiration. In a season in which we are used to hearing high-minded clerics declaiming against the evils of consumerism, we can try another type of consuming: consume the word of God in Scripture. Devour it and digest it, like the Prophet Ezekiel eating the scroll of God’s judgments so that it became a part of him and he had something to say. Combine this with the spiritual detoxification of Confession and with the restorative exercise of prayer, and we shall have made some New Year’s resolutions worth keeping.

Fr Julian Large

December 2014 Letter from the Provost

If recent celebrations of Christmas are anything to go by, many thousands of the faithful and the not-so-faithful will flow through the Oratory Church this 24th and 25th December. In some churches those who roll in for Midnight Mass and never darken the doorstep of a church again for another 364 days risk public castigation. This would never happen at the Oratory, where the fathers are delighted to welcome all-comers – especially those who slip in at the back of the church just for the pre-Mass carols and then get swept up to the front by the crowd and end up stuck listening to the sermon.

The Crib excludes no one. The open stable is an invitation. It reminds us that the new born King of kings came to Bethlehem to establish His rule not by force but rather by winning a place in the hearts of His subjects. He comes in fragile human flesh as an innocent child to impress on us that, unless we become like little children ourselves, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We have to divest ourselves of the encumbrances of worldly sophistication, and clothe ourselves in the simple garments of meekness, poverty of spirit and purity of soul.

The circumstances of the Nativity are an invitation especially to the poor and the homeless. The poverty of the stable will surely speak with special poignancy to those Christian communities and individual Christians around the world who have been dispossessed through persecution and conflict, and who will have no church to go to this Christmas. The scene at the Crib should inspire us to pray for those of our fellow Christians who have been uprooted, and to donate what we can to excellent charities such as Aid to the Church in Need who support them.

Like the open stable, the manger is an invitation. To the Catholic sensibility the fact that the manger is a feeding trough and Bethlehem means ‘House of Bread’ must suggest a highly Eucharistic significance to the scene in the stable. For centuries the Preface used at the Mass of Corpus Christi, which is always celebrated during the height of summer, and at other Masses of the Blessed Sacrament, was always the Preface for Christmas. This served to emphasise the fact that the Eternal Word Who became Incarnate in Palestine two thousand years ago also comes to us in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity at the Altar every time the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered by a priest.

The scene of a baby placed in a feeding trough in a draughty stable should move us to offer Him a home. And what better place to give Him a home than in our own hearts? This is what we do whenever we receive Him sacramentally in Holy Communion. We consume the Word made Flesh, so that He takes up His abode within us. And if the reception that the King of Kings receives from the world is often cold and hostile, we pray that within our hearts He may find an abode that is warm and tender.

The Church’s rules or precepts only insist that a practising Catholic must receive Holy Communion once a year, around Easter time, just as we are only bound to make a sacramental confession of our sins once a year. This is to ensure that when we do receive the Blessed Sacrament it is always in a State of Grace. Yes, Holy Communion is ‘food for the journey’ rather than a reward for perfection. But it is not something that we should ever dare to take lightly. If the light of grace has been extinguished within us through mortal sin, then the first thing we need to do is to have it rekindled in our hearts through the Sacrament of Penance. The grace that was given to us so momentously in the Sacrament of Baptism needs to be restored to us through the momentous action of the confession of our sins. If someone is living in an irregular relationship, then he needs to make the necessary adjustment to his life that is required for life ‘in the Spirit’. This conversion is a necessary part of the divesting of any worldly encumbrances that prevent us from being like little children. Repentance and restoration to grace turn our hearts into living tabernacles fit to receive the King of Kings.

At Holy Mass the Word is made Flesh by the transformation of bread and wine into Our Lord’s Body and Blood. And we are fed with this Sacrament – the Blessed Sacrament – so that we too might be transformed, and so that we might carry Our Lord with us into the world. We have to pray that when others encounter us, they see the face of Christ, and find the embracing warmth and acceptance that the shepherds found at the hearth of the Manger.

We might well ask ourselves: What does the world outside make all of those thousands streaming in and out of the Oratory Church over Christmas? Most probably, it says: ‘So what?’ and then carries on very much as before. That should bother us. It poses a serious challenge to us as disciples of a Saviour Who came to win a place in the heart of every man, woman and child. How can we attract these ‘outsiders’ and bring them towards discovering the Bread of Life Who offers us and them eternal life from the Manger?

What if our parish were to be a byword for the Corporal Works of Mercy – for visiting prisoners and the lonely and for extending the embrace of care and friendship to those who have nothing and no one? That would be a sign to the world that the Word Made Flesh is not only alive in the Tabernacle, but also very much alive and active in our hearts. The sight of the Christ Child in the frailty of human flesh, exposed in the stable to the cold of the night, should move us to want to minister to Him. He invites us to minister to Him in His poor and in those who suffer through the isolation of feeling unneeded and unwanted.

The Oratory currently offers various ways of ministering to the Christ Child in the needy, including support for the homeless, the possibility for families to adopt an elderly person or couple, and visits to the housebound. To find out how you might become involved, please see our website www.oratoryfriends.org or email us on friends@oratoryfriends.org.

Fr Julian Large

November 2014 Letter from the Provost

Historically, Church synods have sometimes been the occasion of acrimony. A series of rancorous ecclesiastical gatherings in the 9th Century culminated in the “Cadaver Synod” in 897, when His Holiness Pope Steven VII dug up the rotting corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus, dressed it in pontifical robes and put it on trial in the Basilica of St John Lateran. Declared guilty of perjury and other offences, the papal cadaver was then stripped, mutilated and eventually dumped in the Tiber. In more robust ages than our own, ecumenical councils have provided the setting for name-calling, beard-pulling and broken noses. Judged by these standards, the proceedings of the recent Synod on the Family in Rome seem to have been positively civilised. Clashes of opinion on such occasions are only to be expected, however, and so, in itself, the fact that there were reports of disputes around the Synod should not shock.

Religious differences tend to evoke a passionate response. We see many examples of this in Our Lord’s ministry, which culminated in Him being crucified at the instigation of the religious hierarchy of His day. In the Gospel of St Matthew we find an account of a man sick of the palsy who is carried to Him on his bed. Our Lord horrifies the Scribes by telling the man his sins are forgiven. The forgiveness of sins is an indisputably divine prerogative. As His Holiness Pope Francis is reported to have said in a recent sermon, “God is a God of surprises”, and this particular expression of Our Lord’s compassion is evidently one surprise that the Scribes are not ready for. Rather than rejoicing at His mercy, they accuse Him of blasphemy.

 Telling a sick man that his sins are forgiven today, in the current climate, would be likely to cause outrage for different reasons. The very suggestion that there might be any connection between sin and sickness would have most people up in arms. “How cruel”, we would hear; “How ‘judgmental’. How dare you talk about sin to someone who is ill?” The tyranny of the cult of sentimentality under which we now live means that a priest has to be especially sensitive in the way he asks a dying patient if he would like to confess his sins. Even the faintest implication that a sick person might not be guaranteed an immediate front seat in the Heavenly Court is likely to provoke uproar on a hospital ward.

The media reported some very strange news from the Synod in Rome. There were accounts of proposals being made for the Church to abandon all use of words like sin in connection with premarital cohabitation, or adultery with regard to divorced couples who remarry without gaining an annulment. As ever, we should exercise extreme caution here. The media’s main priority is certainly not the promotion of the Kingdom of God. As Catholics, we do not base our Faith on the reports of the press. Our Faith is founded on the word that the Incarnate Word entrusted to the Apostles, a life-giving doctrine that has been transmitted unchanged for two millennia, and which will continue to be taught, unchanged, until the end of time. Our Faith is sustained, not by reports from the BBC or even the Catholic press. It is sustained by the divinely revealed truth of the Gospel. And in the Gospel, Our Lord has very clear and unmistakable words about divorce and remarriage. He uses the word ‘adultery’ in this context without hesitation.

In the Gospel account of the healing of the man with the palsy, Our Lord leaves us in no doubt whatsoever about the main priority of His mission. Yes, He desires to heal the sick and to befriend the poor. But first of all, and most importantly, He comes to conquer sin, and to save us from our sins. Thanks to sin, we are all sick and we are all poor.

Saving men from their own sins is, for Our Lord, the highest form of compassion. It would have been easy for Him just to tell the paralysed man “Arise and walk. You are healed”. That would have been politically more astute, from a worldly point of view. Then He would have gained the adulation of the multitude without opening himself up to the charge of blasphemy.

But Our Lord is the Saviour and not a politician. He goes straight to the very heart of the human predicament, and tells the man: “Your sins are forgiven.” And the fact that the man then gets up, and carries the bed on which he has been carried up to now, gives credibility to Our Lord’s claim to forgive sins. It leaves the scribes looking very silly. Rather than acknowledging their fault in humility, however, these professional religious men plot revenge.

There is no suggestion in the Gospel that the man’s sickness was a direct result of any sin that he had committed himself. But Our Lord knows that all sickness and all suffering is ultimately a consequence of that Original Sin of Adam and Eve. That act of rebellion was a calamity, which sent fault lines ripping through the whole of Creation. And as Our Lord has come to make all things new by reversing the deadening consequences of Original Sin, He goes straight to the origin of human suffering: “Be of good heart, son, your sins are forgiven thee.” The man is made whole in body and soul.

Today, there is a frantic, frenetic effort to drive a wedge of opposition between compassion and mercy on the one hand, and orthodoxy in Faith and Morals on the other. All that matters, apparently, is to be ‘nice’, and to be accepted by the society in which we live. We are told that we cannot talk to people about sin any more, because that will sound ‘judgmental’ and it will only drive people away. The damage to the Church’s credibility from an internal culture of cover-up and dissimulation which has prevailed in recent times also makes the clergy understandably timid about talking about other people’s sins.

But look at how the Good Shepherd shows compassion. He goes out in search of His sheep and He saves them from sin. He does not leave them drowning in the mire of sin, with the empty assurance that everything is alright. He risks the wrath of the Scribes and Pharisees by forgiving sins. That is true charity and true compassion. And it is the very essence of the Church’s mission. When He looks at the sick man, He does not just see someone who is physically paralysed. He sees a wonderful potential for spiritual flourishing which has been thwarted by sin. His desire is to remove that obstacle so that the man is liberated and free to grow in the divine likeness for which he was created.

We just cannot have true charity or true compassion without humility. And humility means recognising ourselves for what we are. It means realising that, while we have been created in God’s image, we have lost the likeness to God through sin. So humility involves acknowledging the reality of sin, and the fact that we have all, each and every one of us, sinned, and we all need God’s forgiveness. Take this acknowledgement of sin away, and our efforts at compassion and charity become mere humanitarian activism, and that cannot save anyone.

So we have to be honest about sin. At the same time, we cannot expect anyone to take the moral teaching of the Gospel seriously if all we do is bang on about sin and the need for doctrinal orthodoxy. When Our Lord forgave sins, He supported this with a sign of credibility – the very powerful sign of healing the sick. This meant that when He claimed to forgive sins, He could not be dismissed as a mere fantasist or story-teller. People had to take notice, whether they wanted to or not, because His claim was backed up with a mighty miracle. And those with eyes to see acknowledged that this was truly the Saviour, Who had come into the world to save the whole man, body and soul.

And we must give signs of credibility to the Faith that is in us. Our generosity, and the compassion and the love we show to our neighbour, and especially to the sick, the poor and the elderly, must make our whole lives a sign of credibility. But for our good works to have a supernatural value that counts for Heaven, we first of all have to acknowledge our own sins, confess them and be restored to the Likeness of God in the Sacrament of Penance. Then we shall be spiritually alive, and we shall have something to offer.

The recent Extraordinary Synod in Rome marked the beginning of a whole year of discussion, which is set to culminate in another Synod next October, at the end of which the Holy Father is expected to publish an Apostolic Exhortation. Pray that the Holy Ghost will conquer the forthcoming deliberations, so that they bear nutritious fruit in the Church and in the world. Pray that the Church will speak in the language of Our Saviour with renewed energy and a life-giving zeal, so that the beauty of family life, matrimonial faithfulness, chastity and virginity are proclaimed with dazzling conviction and credibility. The modern world is like a parched wasteland thirsting for this Truth like never before. Pray that, as a result of this Synod in Rome, many sinners will be drawn to repentance so that through confession, absolution and conversion they may be raised up and set to walk again in the Life of Grace that was given to them in Baptism.

October 2014 Letter from the Provost

When St Philip died in 1595, all of his possessions were lovingly preserved at the Roman Oratory. To this day, if you manage to fight your way past the ferocious sacristan at the Chiesa Nuova, you can see them displayed in the rooms where St Philip lived. Amongst these relics there is an intriguing object that connects St Philip with England. It is an alabaster relief, sculpted in Nottingham in the late Middle Ages, depicting the severed head of St John the Baptist. A faded label describes the dramatic circumstances by which it came to Rome. It was discovered on 7th October in 1571 at the Battle of Lepanto, in the cabin of a Turkish sea captain. 

The man who rescued that image of the Baptist was a Knight of Malta whose name was Ricci. He brought his booty back with him to Rome, intending to present it to Pope St Pius V as a trophy. But on his way he called in on St Philip, and as a result of that visit the poor Pope never received his gift. Instead, St Philip persuaded his friend to leave it with him, so that he could venerate it himself. Many years before, St John had actually appeared to St Philip while he was a young layman, in a vision that convinced him to spend the rest of his long life in Rome.

At first sight, St John and St Philip might not seem to have very much in common. The Baptist was a firebrand, with a formidable line in insults. When the religious hierarchy of his day came to see him baptizing he called them a “brood of vipers” to their faces. St Philip, by contrast, was always a model of meekness and respect before his religious superiors, even though the ecclesiastical culture of Rome when he began his apostolate was a byword for decadence. While there were hellfire and brimstone preachers who stood on the street corners decrying the depravities of the papal court, St Philip’s way was quite different. He was more like a fly-fisherman, who patiently caught souls one by one and reeled them in quite gently to the harbour of salvation. In the process he converted many prelates and cardinals to the way of holiness.

On the surface, then, St John the Baptist and St Philip might look like chalk and cheese. But on a deeper interior level, there is a very strong bond that unites them. When St John is assuring his own disciples that he is not the Christ, but is rather the one who has been sent to proclaim the coming of the Messiah, he explains to them: “The friend of the bridegroom, who waits and listens for him, is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn3:29-30).

In those words of St John, we recognize an intense joy and profound humility, and there is a clue to how humility and joy are intimately connected. St John is really the proto-Apostle of Christian joy. He leapt for joy in the womb when the Blessed Virgin, who was carrying Our Saviour in her own womb, visited his mother Elisabeth. Saint Philip Neri, meanwhile, is known the world over as the “Apostle of Joy”. And the Oratory that crystallized around St Philip in his rooms in Rome was a perfect school of Christian humility.

Those of us who take ourselves too seriously would be at risk if St Philip were to appear amongst us now. We would be at serious risk of being teased and made to look silly. St Philip had a perfect horror of self-aggrandisement. When he detected that a senior officer in the Swiss Guard was looking quite pleased with himself in his magnificent uniform during a papal ceremony, St Philip ran up to him in front of everybody and pulled on his beard. When a talented new priest in the Oratory preached brilliantly the first time he went into the pulpit, St Philip ordered him to preach the exact same sermon word for word every Sunday until further notice. As a result, the congregation would groan whenever he appeared and say to each other: “Here comes the father with only one sermon.”

At his death, St Philip’s friends complained that they had no honour left – their spiritual father had taken it all from them. But he always made sure that he was the first victim of his own irony. When a delegation of Polish dignitaries who had been sent by the Pope arrived at the Oratory in the hope of finding a living saint, they discovered St Philip having frivolous pamphlets read aloud to him in the sacristy, and he boasted that it was his spiritual reading.

There was an effervescent sense of fun and spontaneity in all of this. But it also had a serious purpose: “Always humble yourself and abase yourself in your own eyes and in the eyes of others” St Philip would say, “so that you can become great in God’s eyes.” In other words, “He must increase, and I must decrease.” That saying of St John the Baptist could have been engraved on St Philip’s heart. For Philip, humility was a prerequisite for human flourishing. He could not resist deflating pompous people, and this was because he wished to liberate them from the shackles of self-delusion so that they would be free to share in the joy of divine friendship that was the mainstay of his own life.

He must increase, and I must decrease. Those words sum up what Christian humility is all about. St Thomas Aquinas tells us that the word “humility” comes from the Latin humus, for earth. And if we look in Genesis, we shall see that God made Adam out of the dust of the earth. So to be humble is nothing more and nothing less than to live in reality. It is to acknowledge that we come from nothing, and all that we have is gift. Read a little further in Genesis, however, and we shall see how the gifts keep coming. It was God Himself who breathed the breath of life into Adam’s face. Read the Scriptures more thoroughly and we shall see that God also intends for us a Divine Likeness, which means ennoblement and a participation in His Own Life.

This means that there is nothing degrading about Christian humility. Rather it is the indispensible foundation for all of the great blessings that God wishes to build in our lives. Humility is the beginning of genuine self-awareness and of human greatness.

Most of us, at some stage in life, will be afflicted by a nagging sense of our own inadequacy – we certainly should be, unless we are monsters of self-satisfaction. The way that fallen human nature tends to deal with this is through pride. The proud man exalts himself in the hope that it will provide him with a sense of worth and inner peace. It never does. Even the pagan Greek playwrights knew that hubris was the precursor of tragedy. 

Humility liberates us from the insatiable appetite for honours and recognition. If we decrease, by placing Our Lord at the centre of our lives, and by honouring our neighbour over ourself, then the Life of Christ will increase within us to overflowing, just as it overflowed in St Philip, and in St John the Baptist.

May we decrease, so that the Life of Our Saviour is able to increase within us. And through the intercession of St Philip and St John the Baptist, may our joy be full in this life and, more importantly, in eternity.

September 2014 Letter from the Provost

A century since the beginning of what was called “the war to end war”, we are living in a world in which violence and conflict seem to be gaining ground every day. From the Middle East comes news of ancient Christian communities being wiped out. From Syria and northern Iraq come reports of Christians who refuse to renounce the Faith being crucified, reports of Christian women being sold in slavery to savages, reports of children being dismembered or buried alive because they have been baptised.

It would be quite easy for us to carry on oblivious to all of this, if we wanted to. The liberal media is so reluctant to draw our attention to the persecution of Christians that we could easily bury our heads in the sand and ignore the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Christ, if we wanted to.

But if it all seems so far away and even irrelevant to us, perhaps we should take note of a chilling warning that was issued recently to the west by the dispossessed Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul. Mosul is a town in northern Iraq, which until less than a month ago was home to one of the world’s most ancient Christian communities. Until a few weeks ago a form of the language spoken by Our Lord, Aramaic, was still to be heard in the streets of Mosul. It is no longer. For 1,600 years the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered continually in Mosul. It is no longer.

Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona warned us that the forces that have wreaked murder and destruction in his diocese will soon rise up in our own western societies. He said this in such a direct and startling way that I am reluctant to repeat his words verbatim in The Oratory Parish Magazine for fear of being labelled a panic-monger. This prelate, however, is a shepherd who has been driven from his diocese. His cathedral is now a mosque, and those of his flock who have not been slaughtered, or forced to apostatise, have been put to flight. Surely we cannot dismiss what he has to say. His own suffering, and the horrors he has witnessed, give to his words a certain authority.

We might well feel that the values of liberal democracy that we hold dear are under threat. But look more closely at our liberal democracies, and at the sins and the crimes against God’s law that they currently facilitate in our once Christian Europe, and we shall probably have to admit that our liberal democracies have already sown the seeds of their own destruction.

The freedom and democracy that we so cherish cannot be taken for granted. They can only be sustained in a society which values and nurtures virtue, reason and discipline. When a liberal democracy legislates in favour of the killing of the most vulnerable – of the unborn, the sick and the elderly – then it has already signed its own death warrant. When legislation is enacted that goes against the very laws that God has inscribed in nature, then our society becomes ever more hollow, fragmented and vulnerable.

On the natural level, then, things are not looking so good for the future. And in all of this, the Church finds Herself under increasing pressure. Weakened by scandals and religious indifference and by the wounds of division within, it might seem that She is in no strong position to face the challenges that threaten harm to Her from without.

What gives us hope, however, is the promise made to St Peter by Our Lord: “You are Peter. And on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

If we glance at the history of the Church, we shall be amazed to see how She has already survived so many persecutions and crises. Civilisations have crumbled, and the Church has survived them, administering the same Seven Sacraments. Ideologies have risen and fallen on Her right and on Her left, and the Church persists, teaching the same Gospel that She always taught – a Gospel which is unchanging but always fresh and life –giving, because the word of God is unencumbered by ideological shackles and enlivened with the Holy Spirit. Persecutions rage and storm, and always the blood of the martyrs brings forth the green shoots of new life.

And all of this because of that divine guarantee that Our Lord gives to Peter: “The gates of Hell shall not prevail.”

That promise made to Peter has held good for all of Peter’s successors. And this has nothing to do with their personal virtues or weaknesses as incumbents of the See of Rome. Some popes have succeeded Peter magnificently, teaching the Faith as if they were divinely inspired. Others have been lacklustre. Some have been great saints, others notorious sinners. But always, Peter remains the rock of stability and the keystone of unity in the Church. The Faith remains the same and the Church continues to save, sometimes helped by the shepherds appointed to guard and guide the flock, sometimes in spite of them. All thanks to Our Lord’s guarantee of supernatural protection, made to His Bride the Church through His Vicar on earth.

The worst thing that we can do when we are under pressure, as individual Catholics, is to lose our nerve. We are disciples of the Prince of Peace, and if there is to be any true peace in the world, then it is down to us to be courageous and untiring in extending the reign of our Monarch. Only when the Prince of Peace is enthroned in every man’s heart on this planet will conflict be quelled.

Within a few weeks, a Synod of Bishops will open in Rome to discuss the family. Potentially this is a wonderful opportunity for bishops from all over the world to share their experiences and to enrich the spiritual and pastoral life of the Catholic faithful in our age, so strengthening the mission of the Church. At the same time there is pressure on this Synod, from the media and elsewhere, to change the teaching of the Church on issues such as the indissolubility of the sacred bond of Holy Matrimony.

Of course, this can never happen. If it did, it would mean that the Church had been lying to us about a matter of Faith and morals, and that promise made by Our Lord to Peter would turn out to be false. It would be blasphemous even to suggest such a thing. Nevertheless it seems likely that media commentary will generate much doctrinal and spiritual confusion amongst those who allow their understanding of the Faith to be moulded by reports from the television and the newspapers. Any perceived ambiguity and contradiction will be milked for everything it is worth. And the last thing the world needs in the current state of emergency is the decadence of a Church hobbled by dissent, confusion and disunity.

The Holy Father has asked us to make Sunday 28th September a special day of prayer for the Synod on the Family. Please make a note of that in your diaries. And perhaps it might be a good idea to fortify those prayers with some fasting on the preceding Friday

Let us not be Huffington Post Catholics or Sunday Times Catholics. Our Church has been founded on a rock. Pray for St Peter’s successor in these challenging times. Some pundits have built up such impossible expectations for the Synod of Bishops that disappointment on the popular level seems inevitable. Whether or not a pope is in the good books of the BBC or the world’s press, however, is neither here nor there. It is Peter’s God-given duty to feed the sheep with the pure undiluted milk of Christian doctrine in season and out and, if and when the time comes, to stretch out his own arms and give his own life for his flock. Please pray for our beloved Pope Francis, that God will guide him and inspire him. And pray for all of those Christians who suffer persecution today. Pray also that through some miracle of conversion their persecutors will open their hearts and embrace the rule of the Prince of Peace. Extremism is a dirty word. But we do need more extremism in this world, actually: conflict and violence will only be defeated when the religion of extreme love and extreme mercy reigns supreme.

August 2014 Letter from the Provost

If a Catholic priest or bishop in our age were to preach that there is no Zoroastrianism in Heaven, or Seventh Day Adventism or Hinduism or Anglicanism, I think we can imagine the reaction. The printing presses of the liberal media would probably explode.

But it is true that if we do manage to gain entry to Heaven – and one has to say ‘if’ because salvation is not something that anyone of us can take for granted – we shall not find religious pluralism or any type of denominational division. What we shall find is the One Mystical Body of Christ, with all of the Holy Angels and Saints united in one Body and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ at the Head. We shall find that the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church that we have known on earth has been purified, perfected and glorified – the Church Militant taken up and subsumed for eternity in the Church Triumphant.

We often hear that if religion is to have any place in modern society then we shall all have to acknowledge that all religions are equal. But for a Christian this is something that cannot really be true. It doesn’t wash. The reason for this is that Christianity makes mighty claims that no other religion has ever attempted to match. We don’t just say that our religion has been established by a remarkable and saintly messenger of God, who has come to teach us unattainable truths and to set us a unique example of integrity, self-sacrifice and goodness. Our religion has been established by one Who actually is God, and Who is Truth itself. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is a Divine Person, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. And it is only because God took on our human flesh and died on the Cross for us that anyone is able to be saved. Our Lord is the one supreme Pontifex Who bridges the infinite chasm between man and God in His own Person.

This is not to say that those who have never had the Gospel preached to them, or never encountered credible witnesses to the Gospel, are beyond the scope of salvation. Certainly not. Yes, Christ has ordained that incorporation in His Mystical Body the Church is to be the means of man’s salvation. But His love and His grace are boundless. And the Church insists that there are reflections of Divine Truth in other religions. In so far as these truths pertain to salvation, however, She claims them as Her own. When a non-Christian dies, he will see with perfect clarity that Christ is God the Son. If he dies in the grace that is a prerequisite for entry into the eternal bliss of Heaven, he will see that Our Lord has been the source of his salvation all along, even if he never encountered a Christian or a Catholic in all of his life.

Hence the seriousness with which the Church has always taken the mission described by Our Lord to Peter after the miraculous catch of fish: “Henceforth you will catch men.” Ever since that commission, the Church that Christ founded on the Apostles has been fishing for souls in every age, and in every part of the globe that She can reach.

If you go to Rome on the feast of Ss Peter and Paul, you will find St Peter’s basilica festooned with fishing nets. That is a reminder that the Pope has a responsibility for souls on a universal scale. He and the bishops have been commissioned to work continuously to bring all souls in to the Barque of Peter. We must pray for them, because the prelude to the account of the miraculous catch of fish in the Gospel, in which Peter and his companions are presented as weary and disheartened after a whole night spent labouring without success, reminds us that on our own we can do nothing, and the human spirit easily grows weary and fails.

We too are called to be fishers of men. But rather than using the great trawling net that has been entrusted to the Successor of Peter, most of us will probably find that fishing with the line is so much more effective. We have to use friendship, kindness and example to draw souls in gently, reeling them in to the Barque of Peter with patience and great charity. And this can be far more effective than we ever imagine. Don’t be taken in by the lie that the world is becoming increasingly secularized. Great parts of the globe are, in fact, embracing Islam. And in the west, more and more people are happy to involve themselves in all sorts of spiritualism and New Age superstitions, even if it is fashionable to pooh-pooh ‘organized religion’.

This shows that there is a great thirst for spirituality, and that people do have a hunger for religion, whether they realize it or not.

Perhaps many of us who are converts to Catholicism were attracted because we were impressed and even amazed by the wonderful intellectual coherence that exists within the Catholic Faith. But we have to bear in mind that rational arguments hold very little sway with many or even most of our contemporaries today. They have been brought up in a culture of sentimentality, in which they have been encouraged to make decisions based on emotions and personal ‘intuition’. They may even feel threatened and repelled by logic. And it has to be admitted that, on their own, rational arguments for the Faith are like winter sunshine: they shed light, but they do not lend much warmth.

But even in this cult of sentimentality, our Faith actually has one distinct and powerful advantage. Christianity is the only religion that makes the extraordinary claim that ‘God IS love.’ And those words of St John open up an awe-inspiring vista into the very life of the Blessed Trinity, which is an eternal and infinite outpouring of self between Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

But it is not enough to talk about love. There is one thing that we can be sure that our contemporaries will demand from us as Catholics, and that is authenticity. We have to show that the reality of God’s love overflows from our hearts, in our conversation and in our actions. To be sure, authenticity is often judged today using the most shallow of criteria. The disciples of the cult of sentiment have an insatiable appetite for novelties, gestures and sound bites. Those of us who had an old fashioned upbringing would prefer when we give alms that our left hand should not know what our right is doing. If we are to have any hope of bringing souls into the Church in this age in which we live, however, then the Church has to be seen to be doing what, in former ages, She has always done in a less self conscious manner – reaching out to the needy, the sick and the abandoned. And if we are to succeed in bringing souls into the Barque of Peter, then we have to involve ourselves in this work of God, and not to be embarrassed to be seen doing good.

There is nothing arrogant in holding the conviction that the Church is true. Today there is a false notion of humility which says that it is meekness to play down our Faith. But our mission to bring souls into the Mystical Body of Christ is truly humble in the best sense, because it is carried out in obedience to our Saviour.

July 2014 Letter from the Provost

In the mid 1980s, the university of Wisconsin-Madison in North America sponsored research on the contribution of forgiveness to mental health. The resulting studies gave birth to a new field of psychology called ‘forgiveness therapy’, and led to the establishment of the International Forgiveness Institute in 1994.

According to the Campaign for Forgiveness Research, people who forgive are physically healthier than those who hold resentments. A scholarly article entitled Granting Forgiveness or Harbouring Grudges that appeared in the journal Psychological Science in 2001, discloses that when people even just think about forgiving an offender it leads to improved functioning in their cardiovascular and nervous systems. Meanwhile, the summary of a doctoral dissertation published recently in World of Forgiveness magazine warns that less forgiving people are prone to a wide range of health problems.

In other words, modern psychology has finally caught on to something that Christians have known for the last two thousand years: forgiving others is good for us. As Catholics we should be happy that the value of forgiveness has found recognition in secular society. It is always gratifying when modern science confirms what we already know from our religion, and the more forgiveness there is in the world the better, surely.

But we also have to realise that a really Christian understanding of forgiveness involves much more than a mere ‘letting go’ of grudges and the desire for revenge. As Christians we look to Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to discover what it really means to forgive others. The greatest act of forgiveness that has ever happened took place on the Cross when He prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

People were not used to hearing words like this from a cross. The Roman statesman and dramatist Seneca the Younger wrote that those who were crucified usually cursed the day of their birth and their own mothers’ wombs, hurled abuse at their executioners, and spat on the crowd. Cicero recorded that it was often necessary to cut out the tongues of those who were crucified to silence their terrible profanities.

No doubt the religious hierarchy of Jerusalem – the Chief Priests and Scribes – had predicted this sort of reaction from the agitator Jesus of Nazareth, Whose Crucifixion they had secured through manipulation of the populace. He Who had preached “Love your enemies” and “Do good to them that hate you” would surely now forget that Gospel of meekness, and in His agony reveal Himself to be no better that the ordinary run of humanity.

This was not to be. Instead of the curses and the blasphemies that they were hoping would bury the Nazarene’s subversive teaching forever, these professional religious men must have been surprised and unsettled to hear something very different: the soft and gentle prayer of pardon and forgiveness.

This act of forgiveness was no mere ‘letting go’. Rather, it was a pouring forth. This was a fruitful and healing forgiveness, one that won many souls to salvation. The Good Thief was converted at the Cross. So, according to tradition, was the centurion St Longinus, who pierced Our Lord’s side with a lance. Those same words of forgiveness that were issued from the throne of the Cross have power to heal and to transform lives today, as they have for two millennia.

When we perceive an offence committed against ourselves, what do we do? One hopes that, as disciples of Our Lord, we bring to mind those words in the Our Father: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”. And so we tell ourselves that we have no choice but to forgive. And then, perhaps, we tell ourselves to “let it go”, possibly with a shrug of the shoulders that says: “he’s not worth it anyway”, or “she’s not worth the trouble of getting upset about”.

That is certainly an improvement on harbouring a grudge. But it is not exactly Christ-like. The Creator of the Universe does not look down from the Cross on His Creatures and say: “These sinners are not worth it”. He is on the Cross precisely because He does value the worth and the well-being of every one of these sinners. And He pours out every last drop of His Precious Blood and His very last breath for each of these sinners, and for you and me, because we are also sinners. Beneath all the dross and all the accumulated grime of our sin, He sees the worth and the value of each and every one of us.

All of this is can sound quite theoretic, so we probably need some practical tips before we can forgive in a way that is Christ-like. The first practical tip is that we need to relieve ourselves of every failure to forgive and every harboured resentment by confessing it in the Sacrament of Penance. Forgiving someone who has done serious harm to us or to our loved ones goes against the grain, and we need recourse to a supernatural remedy. When Our Lord appeared to His Apostles after the Resurrection, He breathed on those friends who had betrayed and abandoned Him, and He said: “Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them.” Those sinners who knew their own need for forgiveness were themselves entrusted with the power to reconcile. That Spirit has been breathed into every Catholic bishop and priest who has ever been ordained, and the healing balm of that Spirit of forgiveness is breathed into the soul of a sinner whenever a priest says the words: “I absolve you.”

Secondly, we have to begin any serious act of forgiveness by praying: we need to pray for the divine grace we need to forgive with God’s own love. Then we need to pray for the one who has offended us. And rather than praying just for his conversion, we should pray that God will bless him abundantly in every way that God sees fit: materially and spiritually, temporally and eternally. That will show our charity in God’s eyes; and the more generous the prayer the more room we give to the Divine Physician to enter our hearts and heal us.

Thirdly, we have to remind ourselves that Christian forgiveness is not a short cut to happiness, but rather a long haul to joy that will sometimes be hard and arduous. And lastly, always remember that forgiveness is not something that we feel, but something that we do.

June 2014 Letter from the Provost

On the recent Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, there took place the episcopal consecration of a member of one of the Oratories in England (nota bene: strictly speaking, it is incorrect to speak of ‘the English Oratory’, because while the different Oratorian communities in this country are characterised by obvious similarities and connected through healthy ties of friendship, each house maintains its own autonomy, in obedience to the will of our holy father St Philip. For this reason there are as many ‘congregations’ of the Oratory as there are separate houses). The Oratory father in question was Fr Robert Byrne, who now serves as an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Birmingham.

In future histories of the Oratories in England, Fr Byrne’s name will appear in the august company of those Oratorian trailblazers Bl. John Henry Newman and Father Faber, whose new foundations have made such a significant contribution to Catholic life in this realm during the last two centuries. At the request of the Archbishop of Birmingham of the day, Fr Byrne arrived in Oxford from the Birmingham Oratory in 1990, and within three years the Oxford Oratory had been established as an independent Congregation at the church of St Aloysius, with Fr Byrne as its first Provost.

To borrow words from Cardinal Baronius’ prayer to St Philip, each new foundation is established with a certain amount of “labour, anxiety and peril”. The prayer and pastoral sensitivity on which the Oxford Oratory was founded have ensured that it has been a well-loved and much-frequented fountain of apostolic activity since its very beginning. To this day the Oratory fathers in Oxford provide an example to us all of the attraction-powers of a Catholic Faith that is lived with generosity and joy, and transmitted in an unfailing spirit of gentleness and kindness.

Here in London the fathers owe a special debt to the vineyard that Fr Byrne’s right hand planted with such abundant blessings from Our Lady and St Philip. A number of the more recently ordained fathers in our own house all received spiritual sustenance at St Aloysius during their university days. Many of the young men and women who frequent our Call to Youth activities arrive in London with a fire of zeal in their hearts which has been fanned, kindled, and often ignited, under the pastoral care of the Oratory fathers in Oxford.

Please pray for the new bishop. Being plucked from the nest is the cruellest torture that can be inflicted on a son of St Philip. Blessed John Henry Newman, who only accepted his Cardinal’s hat on the condition that he would be dispensed from the requirement to live outside the Birmingham Oratory, shuddered at the idea of an Oratorian having to reside for any substantial length of time outside of his congregation, and St Philip’s disciple Fr Baronius almost pined to death after he was created Protonotary Apostolic and then Cardinal and his position in the Papal Court required his residence outside of the Roman Oratory. From an Oratorian point of view, Fr Byrne has made the hardest sacrifice that is possible for any Oratory father to offer for the good of the Church.

This means that we should bombard Heaven with our intercessions for the new bishop, but save our congratulations for the day when, pray God, we all meet merrily in Heaven. As the awe-inspiring event of his consecration approaches, every bishop-to-be must find himself unsettled by those words of St John Chrysostom: “I do not think there are many among bishops who will be saved, but many more that will perish” (Homily III on Acts 1:12). If the account that a priest must render of himself before the Judgment seat is so much more severe than that of a layman, then the standards required from the successors of those Apostles who shed their blood for the Faith must be on another level altogether. Priests need prayers. Bishops need them more.

Shortly before Fr Byrne’s consecration, a Catholic press agent telephoned the London Oratory asking for the Provost’s ‘take’ on recent episcopal appointments. The courtesy and feminine charm in her voice belied an acerbic sense of humour, which was manifested when out of the blue she asked how the author of this Provost’s letter would feel if he were ever asked to be a bishop. He replied that, while the London fathers are unfailingly supportive of their father superior, and very forgiving of his faults, it would be wholly irresponsible of the talent-spotters responsible for scouting likely candidates for the episcopate ever to think of inflicting him on the good priests and people of a diocese, which would soon be plunged into administrative chaos.

The Provost was also able to reassure his interviewer that, in the unlikely event of such a dreadful request ever being made of him, he would most definitely turn it down. This has nothing at all to do with humility. It is because he knows his character lacks the steel of those pioneering Oratorians who have founded great new houses – a steel that must presumably be an essential component in the backbone of any bishop if he is to preach the Gospel in season and out of season in this difficult age and so avoid the flames of hell. Removed from his nido and separated from the companionship of his brethren at the London Oratory, this Provost would be a broken fellow, rendered useless to Church and society, most probably reduced to scratching a living in tabloid journalism. Mercifully, the rate of consecrations of Oratorians to the episcopate in this country is currently no higher than one a century, so the Provost and the Catholic faithful of England and Wales can breathe easy.

Please pray that God will always bless Bishop Byrne in his new apostolate, and especially in his efforts on behalf of the cause for canonization of Bl. John Henry Newman, which he has promised to promote. Pray, every day, for all of our bishops, that God will keep them, save them and inspire them, so that the Faith may always be taught and fanned to a golden blaze in our land. And pray, of course, for the sons of St Philip who serve the Church in the different Oratories of this country. May we always be faithful to the way that the Apostle of Joy has shown us.

May 2014 Letter from the Provost

“I am a very spiritual person Father, but I am not religious”. If only the Provost had received five pounds for every time he heard this old chestnut or some variation on it, he could by now have sponsored a top-of-the-range new amplification system to replace the tired old microphones and speakers that sorely need replacing in the Oratory church.

The first thing to be said in answer to this bromide is that religion is not a sentiment but a virtue. The human mind is capable of establishing that God exists, that He is infinite in all of His perfections and that everything in Creation receives its being from Him. We do not need Divine Revelation to tell us that every rational creature is therefore bound to render to the Creator the worship that is due to Him as the source of all being and the principle of government of all things.

Lactantius, Christian apologist and mentor of the Emperor Constantine, speculated that the word religion derives from religare, meaning ‘to bind’. Although this particular etymology has been challenged, it certainly expresses a phenomenon that is manifested in diverse ages and cultures – the sense that somehow man’s good relationship with his Creator has been undone and needs to be re-connected. A tie that has been broken needs to be ‘re-bound’.

Left to his own devices, man will devise homemade answers to the quandary he finds himself in, and his own solutions to the problem of his awareness of some need for salvation. He might easily conclude that the existence of evil can be explained by the existence of some lesser malevolent god as well as the good God. Perhaps he will decide that salvation must consist in the spiritual soul somehow struggling free from what he perceives as its imprisonment in flesh and matter, and arriving in a realm of pure spirit, possibly via a process of reincarnation. Here we have the birth of man-made religions. Man’s intellect having reached the boundaries of what can be known by reason alone, it then carries him into the thickets of myth and superstition, a dark realm of gaping chasms where demons lurk in readiness to take advantage of his blindness.

Thank Heavens, the God Who has endowed us with a mind capable of discerning His existence has not left us prey to myth and superstition. He has revealed Himself to us, along with everything we need to know and to do to be saved. The fullness of this Divine Revelation is not some shadowy gnosis, accessible only to an initiated caste of cognoscenti. Neither is it a book. ‘It’ is in fact a Person. The fullness of Divine Revelation is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made man. In the Divine Person of Jesus Christ God has revealed Himself to us as The Way, The Truth and The Life.

Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has given to us a very definite religion. On Holy Thursday, we saw how He instituted the Sacrifice and the Sacrament of the Mass, commanding the Apostles whom he ordained to the priesthood on that same occasion to: “Do this is memory of me.” Having on different occasions instituted all seven of the Sacraments, He entrusted their administration and governance to the Apostles, and to their successors the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter. Likewise the Gospel (the whole body of Catholic teaching) has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the Pope, whose duty is to preserve this ‘Deposit of Faith’ from novelty and to teach it in its fullness in every age.

The devil is spiritual but not religious. As an angel he is pure spirit. According to tradition he set out on life as one of the most splendid angels, the name Lucifer denoting his office as ‘bearer of the light’. And he is distinctly anti-religious. It was an irreligious act of rebellion against the Creator that occasioned his fall from grace. The Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez is among those who have speculated that this calamity occurred after the angels had been given a preview of the creation of man. The devil was distinctly unimpressed by the idea of glorious spirit being ‘contaminated’ by contact with matter in a lesser creature. When it was further revealed that God would unite Himself with human flesh in the Incarnation, and that the angels would have to bow down and worship the Word made flesh, the thought of such an ‘indignity’ was too much for his pride to bear. The cry “Non serviam!” that issued from the fallen angels as they were expelled from Heaven has echoed throughout history whenever sin has been committed ever since.

Father Suarez’s thesis would certainly help to explain the devil’s particular malevolence towards human beings. It might also throw light on the source of the insidious strains of dualism that have so persistently threatened to pollute the pure milk of Christian doctrine down the centuries.

Our Lord’s Incarnation puts paid to the pernicious notion that spirit is good and flesh is intrinsically evil. The Resurrection of His Body, in which His spirit and flesh were reunited, demolishes the argument that salvation involves the soul freeing itself from matter. His Ascension, body and soul, into Heaven should leave us in no doubt that Heaven is a real place in which our salvation will include the reunion of our bodies and souls for eternal life. Since the Assumption of Our Lady, there are already two bodies that we know of at the Throne of Grace.

Baptism sanctifies not only our souls but also our bodies, because through this Sacrament our bodies become living temples of the Holy Ghost. And so our bodies have an essential part to play in religion. Grace is imparted to our souls by the touch of physical substances such as oil and water to our flesh. We worship God through singing His praises with our lips, and we honour Him on our knees as we adore Him at the Altar. We achieve the higher level of Communion with Our Lord by receiving His Body in Holy Communion.

Through the Incarnation, places and objects take on a role in our sanctification. Whenever someone says: “Father, I can pray to God on a mountain or in the bath, I don’t need to go to church,” one has to explain as patiently as possible that, while praying in the bath is indisputably a laudable habit, you will not very often find the Mystical Body of Christ united around the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary taking place in a bathroom. We can and should pray to God in all places, but there is something unique and irreplaceable about worshipping Him at Mass, especially on a Sunday.

Another type of dualism that many people fall into very easily is the thought that religion which includes worshipping God with beauty and solemnity is somehow incompatible with love of the poor and care for the disadvantaged. The God we honour in the Blessed Sacrament with incense and sacred music is the same God Whom we go out to look for in the needy. The Sacrifice of all sacrifices that is made present on the altar is the main source of strength for all of those acts of self-sacrificial love by which we should strive to bring Our Lord into the lives and hearts of our neighbours.

So please, as Christians, let us not be ashamed to be both spiritual and religious.

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.