November 2015 Letter from the Provost

Catholics wondering how honest they have to be when filling in their tax returns receive a clear answer in the Gospel. A delegation sent by Pharisees and Herodians once asked Our Lord if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Their intention was to push Him between a rock and a hard place. Were He to say no, then they could denounce Him to the Roman authorities for sedition. If He answered yes, the result would be hysteria from the puritanical Jewish zealots.  Our Lord pulled the rug from under all of them by requesting a coin and asking: “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They could only answer “Caesar’s”, to which He replied: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mt 22:15-22, Mk 12:13-17, Lk 20:21-26)

However much we might mistrust the government, and even if some of us might question the morality of income tax in principle, as law-abiding subjects we have to pay our dues like everyone else. On the dreadful Day of Judgment it will be the emperors of this world who will have to answer for how these revenues have been spent.

The truth is that Our Lord was not particularly interested in that coin, or in the image that was engraved on it. What interests Him is the image that every human being, including Caesar, carries on his soul. “Let us make man in our image”, says God in the first chapter of Genesis. This image of God lies in our immortal soul, and is to be found in our capacity to know and to love. It is this divine image that makes every innocent human life inviolable and sacred to God, from conception into eternity.

When we lose sight of this wondrous reality, the results can only be dire. The human race in ‘the West’ seems to have been going through an identity crisis for some decades. That weird and not so wonderful creature whom twentieth-century theologians categorised as ‘Modern Man’ has been conditioned to think of himself as nothing more than a developed ape, with the consequence that the animal part of human nature – the emotions – often trumps over reason. In this climate, we should learn to recognize and to welcome any signs that the prevailing cult of sentimentalism has not yet become a fully-ensconced tyranny. The recent defeat of the Assisted Dying Bill in the House of Commons is one such indication. Many self-appointed policy-formers, in collusion with much of the media, have been successful in creating the impression that legalized ‘mercy killing’ is an inevitability in a modern secular society. The fact that there are still enough people in our elected Parliament who recognize the intrinsic difference between a suffering animal and a terminally ill human being to block such a bill has given heart to those who care about the sanctity of human life.

This wondrous image of God in the human soul which is a part of human nature and therefore common to all, has of course been disfigured by sin. In coming to redeem us, Our Lord intends to restore it to perfection. In addition to the image of God which belongs to our nature, He also comes to elevate us to His supernatural likeness. We receive this in the Sacrament of Baptism, when Sanctifying Grace is infused into our hearts and we are raised up to a participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

The greatest treasures in the hoard of a coin collector are those issues which are rare and beautiful. A dedicated connoisseur will sacrifice much to acquire a prize that is unique. To God, each and every human soul is unique and infinitely precious. Our Lord was willing to give every drop of His Precious Blood on the Cross, not just for the human race as a whole, but for each one of us individually. In so redeeming us, He takes possession of us, elevating us to that Divine Likeness which is a share in His own life.

Most of us probably pay our taxes without much enthusiasm. We render to the Inland Revenue what we are required to by law. Heaven forbid that we should ever become so begrudging in the tribute that we render to God. If our spiritual lives are reduced to avoiding mortal sin and grudgingly obeying commandments and rules (“Father, which parts of the Mass do I have to be present for to fulfil my obligation?” is a classic instance of treating-God-like-the-taxman) then we end up spiritually impoverished. The benefits which earthly governments provide in return for taxation are sometimes of dubious value. In return for our hearts and souls, Almighty God promises us untold riches and everlasting happiness with Him in Heaven. Let us render ourselves to Him generously and without reserve.

Fr Julian Large

October 2015 Letter from the Provost

Deo gratias, there is always a steady stream of couples arriving at the Oratory to make enquiries about marriage preparation. London universities and the employment provided by local shops and hospitals ensure that these enquirers come from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds. However, one factor that many do seem to have in common is that, by the time they have decided to be married, they are already living together. It would serve no purpose to be seen to become hot under the clerical collar about this. That which according to the Gospel is clearly gravely sinful has, in the view of most of our contemporaries (including many of those who have been through the Catholic school system), become the norm.

The priest has the responsibility of informing such a couple that his role is to help them to prepare as thoroughly as possible for the wondrous blessings that God will rain down on them in the Sacrament of Matrimony. He probably needs to explain from scratch the nature of a Sacrament – how each Sacrament has been instituted by Our Lord Himself as an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, and how the sign actually brings about the grace that it signifies. In exchanging marriage vows, a couple will become one flesh in a covenant overflowing with divine grace. And it is in the “marital act”, when husband and wife unite physically as one body, that this bond is consummated and made indissoluble. This covenant provides the context of faithful commitment and stability that God desires for the procreation and nurturing of children.

Most young people who care to have anything at all to do with the Church today are looking for authenticity. Nowadays there is little social pressure to have a religious wedding, so if a couple does turn up seeking marriage in a Catholic church, then we should assume that they are open to exploring and living according to the Catholic understanding of marriage.  Once they realize that, if the vows they will exchange on the big day are to have the “feel” of authenticity, it is essential that they are not already living as if they are “one flesh”, then they are usually willing to make the required adjustments in their life. The considerable inconvenience that this often involves on a practical level helps to focus their minds on the momentousness of the decision they have made to marry in the Church, and brings home the supernatural character of Holy Matrimony. To benefit from the life of grace, they first of all need to be in the State of Grace. Once they understand how Holy Matrimony as a state of life is nourished and supported by the other Sacraments, then, with the help of Confession and Holy Communion, they are able to make the most of what the Church has to offer spiritually as they lay the foundation for a new life in the months leading up to their marriage.

The appetite for authenticity on the part of young couples thus provides priests with an invaluable opportunity. But it also presents a challenge. Gross scandals involving abuse of status and betrayal of trust in recent decades have made many sensible and good people understandably reluctant to take the ecclesiastical hierarchy seriously as a voice of moral authority. In these circumstances, priests can hardly be surprised if, when extolling the beauty of virginity and holy purity, or explaining the sinfulness of cohabitation and contraception, the response from the audience is the glazed expression that denotes disconnection.

This is when that weird and wonderful phenomenon that Teutonic theologians love to call “the lived experience of the people of God” can really come into its own. If we are gullible enough to believe what is communicated through much of the media, then we might feel compelled to concede that supporting traditional Catholic wisdom on marriage means committing ourselves to a lost cause. The actuality on the ground, however, is that the Oratory parish (and the same must be true of many Catholic parishes) contains a good number of young Catholic couples and families who are actually making a very serious effort to do things the “Catholic way”, and who have embraced the Church”s doctrine on chastity and marriage. Once sceptical newcomers are introduced to the “lived reality” of this priceless human resource, they find a culture which they probably assumed had gone the way of the Dodo in the 1960s. And when they see the fruits that come through the sacrifice and virtue involved in the authentically “Catholic way” of marriage and family life, they find themselves hard-pushed to deny its attractiveness.

Of course, that wider family that is the Catholic parish will also include members who have not been called to marriage, and those whose lives have been blighted by the hardship of break-ups and other complications. The Church on earth is not an “elect” of the righteous who have attained perfection. We are all of us sinners, and the Church is a field hospital in which we each come to receive healing and to assist in the binding each other’s wounds. A healthy parish is one in which kindness, humility and friendship attract sinners to repentance and onto the gold-paved road to sanctification. But it is still the young families with children who will always be the most precious jewels, on the human level, in a parish’s crown. The “lived reality” of their witness is more eloquent to the beauty of the family than any sermon. Their existence proves that it is possible to build and sustain a Catholic culture in today’s world.

Proclaiming the viability of the Christian family and Christian married life with credibility and resonance is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Synod of the Family which takes place in Rome this October. Much supernatural assistance is required. During this month of the Rosary, let us offer many prayers to Our Lady Queen of the Family with this intention.

Fr Julian Large

September 2015 Letter From the Provost

Whenever we say the Apostles' Creed, we profess our belief in the Communion of Saints. This should evoke an image of a great society of mutual assistance, in which the saints in Heaven intercede for us, while we help the Holy Souls in Purgatory with our prayers and by the indulgences we are able to gain for them. This dynamic of charity is a reflection of the Divine Charity which characterizes the Life of the Blessed Trinity, and is a practical expression of the theological virtue of Charity, which is infused into our souls in Baptism.

In The Creed in Slow Motion Monsignor Ronald Knox reminds us of a more prosaic meaning. He says that if you were to have asked St Paul what he meant by ‘the Communion of Saints" he would have said that “when one set of Christians is hard up another set of Christians, in a different part of the world, sends round the hat and takes up a collection for them.”

This is what we need to do, quite urgently, for Christians in the Middle East, where whole Christian communities have been obliterated and continue to be eradicated in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya. Christian men, women and children are being tortured and slaughtered. Countless thousands of the survivors have been driven from their homes and are currently living in abject poverty in refugee camps, in fear for their future.

One of the terrible sufferings these poor people have to endure is the dreadful sense of having been forgotten. Four hundred Christians are murdered on one day, and one hundred and fifty Christians kidnapped on another day, and we hear very little, if anything, about it. Most of the media takes very little interest in the plight of persecuted Christians, and the leaders of the world have other priorities.

The Oratory Fathers recently invited Aid to the Church in Need to make an appeal in our church on behalf of the persecuted. This appeal has so far raised around twenty five thousand pounds. As this persecution is an ongoing crisis, it is hoped that we shall continue to raise funds for those Christians who need our help and will continue to need all the assistance we can give for a long time to come.

As well as giving materially, we also need to pray. The extinction of the Christian presence in great swathes of the Middle East is arguably one of the greatest calamities that civilisation has ever faced. Previously, when western Europe was threatened by the Turks, Pope St Pius V, in addition to calling on Christendom to raise an army, instructed all Catholics to pray the Rosary. It is no exaggeration to say that the victory of the Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto on 7th October 1571 saved western Christendom from enslavement. The Feast of the Most Holy Rosary was established in thanksgiving for Our Lady’s intervention.

The plight of Christians in the Middle East is desperate. But even on the natural level there is perhaps a glimmer of hope. In the person of Pope Francis, the Church on earth has been granted a Sovereign Pontiff who has captivated the hearts not only of his own flock, but seemingly of the western world and the mainstream media. Since the publication of his encyclical on the environment, the Holy Father has even been acclaimed as a “world leader” by some of the most hard-bitten secularists on the planet today.

We can only pray that the moral authority which even the media and anti-clerical potentates are now attributing to the Holy Father will play in favour of our persecuted Christian brethren. This month, Pope Francis will visit the President of the United States of America in Washington. On 25th September the Successor of St Peter will address a meeting of the United Nations in New York. Pray hard that the Holy Ghost will take possession of that assembly, so that the hearts of the powerful will be moved to take decisive and swift action to save what remains of the Christian presence in the Middle East. Pray that the Paraclete will inspire the Holy Father to find the right words to galvanise that assembly into action.

In this time of great urgency and untold suffering, there is something we can do, as members of the Communion of Saints, to assist those of the saints who are currently suffering persecution, homelessness and death. We can give generously, to an extent that is self-sacrificial. We should aim to turn that £25,000 raised so far into £100,000, and much more as the months go by. And we can all pray. One of the most powerful weapons we have is the Rosary. Pray it every day for persecuted Christians. And may Our Lady of Victories and the great Pope St Pius V intercede for us all.

We would like to encourage readers to make a donation to Aid to the Church in Need, and to consider supporting their work in favour of persecuted Christians on a more continuous basis. Donations may be made through the Oratory (please make cheques out to “the London Oratory Charity” and indicate in a covering note that they are for the Middle East appeal.) You can also donate directly online, at http://www.acnuk.org/donate2.php. Please go to the “Oratory Middle East Appeal 2015” donation category.

Fr Julian Large

August 2015 Letter from the Provost

The prophet Amos was given an unenviable mission. A herdsman from a backwater in Judah, he was sent by God to the Northern Kingdom of Israel to proclaim a message of judgment. The Northern Kingdom was not what we might consider to be prime mission territory. Its powerful ruler Jeroboam II had secured a period of peace and plenty. Samaria, the capital, was a byword for luxury and sophistication. Religiously the kingdom also seemed to be thriving. The sacrificial worship of the Israelites was conducted with pomp and circumstance, and the prosperity was interpreted as divine favour.

         However, behind this veneer of comfort and religiosity, the reality was not so pleasing in the eyes of God. Thriving commerce had brought the Israelites into contact with pagans, and the true religion was being contaminated by worship of heathen idols. And while the economy boomed, corruption and injustice were rife.

         Needless to say, the arrival of a cowherd from the wilds of the south was not well received. Amos was eventually driven out of the kingdom by the chief priest at the great sanctuary in Bethel.  Within forty years the mighty Northern Kingdom had been destroyed and its population was deported by the Assyrians in 720 B.C.

         In purely human terms the mission of Amos looks like a flop. But the important thing is that Amos was obedient to God’s command, and so he fulfilled his mission. We can be confident that Amos enjoys his reward in Heaven, even if we cannot be so sanguine about the destination of those who rejected his prophecy. Amos was a faithful servant of the word of God, even if that word fell on deaf ears.

         When we talk about the word of God in the Old Testament, we are talking about the words of Holy Scripture, and the words that were pronounced on the lips of the prophets under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In the New Testament the Word of God Himself comes to us as a Person. This is the Eternal Logos, God the Son – the Word of God with a capital ‘W’. And again, like the prophets in the Old Testament, the Word of God Who is God receives a very mixed reception. Two thousand years after the Resurrection, we find a large-scale rejection of the word of God. The word transmitted in Holy Scripture is disdained by those who make the laws which govern our society. And the Word of God Who is God is largely ignored by those whom He came to save.

         Nevertheless, it remains our task as Christians to proclaim the word of God. In this challenging climate bishops and priests have to do what they can to make the word of God as accessible and attractive as possible. And it is up to all of us to give credibility to our belief, by living in charity and especially in the care we show towards those in need. At the same time, the Gospel can only be effective when proclaimed in its integrity, and this includes the hard bits as well as the passages from Scripture which no-one minds hearing. Some will embrace the Gospel in its completeness while others – perhaps even the vast majority – will reject it. Many reject it today because they are frightened of sounding a discordant note when everyone else is singing obediently from the same libretto.

         Of course, everyone is glad to hear about mercy and love. And the New Testament is the greatest love story ever told. But Our Lord also sends His Apostles to preach a Gospel of repentance [Mk 6.12]. In order to taste the sweetness of God’s mercy and to participate in the Divine Love which is the essence of the Life of the Blessed Trinity we first need to confess our sins and receive forgiveness.  This message of repentance will lodge in the throat of a society which, if it deigns to acknowledge the reality of God at all, only allows Him to exist in so far as He affirms us.

         It can be tempting to reinterpret the word of God beyond recognition in the futile hope of adapting the message to modern prejudices, but then the Gospel is sapped of vitality. Such theologizing and prevaricating also constitute a calamitous contravention of Our Lord’s instruction to His Apostles when He sends them out to preach repentance. “If any place will not receive you and if they refuse to hear you,” He tells them, “shake the dust that is on your feet for a testimony against them.”

         One of the glories of the Oratory Church is the series of statues of the Twelve Apostles, by the baroque sculptor Giuseppe Mazzuoli, originally created for the nave of Siena Cathedral. Looking at those statues we should consider that all but one of the Twelve were put to death for preaching the Gospel of repentance. Some of them carry the instruments of their martyrdom. St Andrew stands in front of his cross. St Bartholomew carries the blade with which he was flayed. And yet they were not a failure. Yes, they enraged the religious and civil leaders of the day, and they paid the ultimate price. But their blood fertilized a mustard seed which flourished into a mighty tree, in the branches of which the birds of the air have come to make their nests for two millennia. We should ask the Twelve Apostles, and the Prophet Amos, to intercede for us. Like them, may we have the courage to sing those discordant notes that need to be heard while the rest of the world sings so obediently from the same libretto.

Fr Julian Large

July 2015 Letter from the Provost

Five hundred years ago this month, our holy father St Philip Neri was born in the early hours of 22nd July, the feast of St Mary Magdalene. Just hours later the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity were infused into his soul in Baptism. In the wretched heat and humidity that afflict Florence in high summer it was prudent to administer the Sacrament without delay.

Our Lord tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard which when it is sown is the tiniest seed in the field, but when grown it becomes a tree in the branches of which the birds of the air come and make their nests. The seed that was planted in St Philip' heart in the famous Baptistery of St John, and which germinated and took root during his childhood in Florence, would eventually flourish into a mighty tree in Rome. His own room was the nest (he actually called it his nido) in which the fledgling first Oratory would become the base for an apostolic mission that would earn him the glorious title Apostle of Rome.

As other Oratories began to be established, it was St Philip's wish that each house remain autonomous, and this status is preserved to this day in the Church's law. Nevertheless, every Oratory is to be like a branch that is animated and nourished by that supernatural life that was nurtured in St Philip's nido half a millennium ago. The purpose of an Oratory in the plan of salvation is to give encouragement and direction to anyone who seeks spiritual refreshment in the shade of its bough. An Oratory is supposed to provide a spiritual home, usually in an urban context, in which friendship with Our Saviour is nurtured under the gentle guidance of St Philip and the protection of Our Lady.

St Philip came to be listed among the saints of the “Counter Reformation”. Mention of this authentic and glorious renewal in the life of the Church conjures up images of the Church rolling out all the engines of spiritual warfare. Established religious orders were to be reformed or suppressed; new congregations would be equipped with spiritual and intellectual artillery to defend the Faith and reclaim territories lost to schism; Jesuits were to be deployed around Europe to engage heretics in public dispute, or despatched to risk life and limb recruiting converts from the heathen New World. In contrast to this, St Philip's own mission within the Church Militant took place entirely on the home front. In the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, "He put away from him monastic rule and authoritative speech as David refused the armour of his king....His weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light and fervour and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation. He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there, and his home and his family gradually grew up around him." In other words, it was through personal contact and friendship that St Philip contributed to the renewal of the spiritual life of Rome that was essential to the success of the Catholic Reformation.

Under the tyranny of sentimentalism that reigns supreme today, there is a danger that friendship can take on a shallow meaning and be understood mainly in terms of feelings and utility. To understand how friendship was so effective in St Philip's apostolate, it is necessary to appreciate the classical and Christian traditions in which he had been formed by the Dominicans at San Marco, and through his later studies in Rome. In the Aristotelian understanding, friendship is a "settled disposition" - a habit, based on virtue. It involves the recognition of an intrinsic good in the other, and a reciprocated commitment to serve that good and make it flourish. In a truly virtuous friendship, the parties will also work together for the common good. Whereas for Aristotle such friendship is only ever possible between equals (he said that the one good we must never desire for our friends is that they become gods, because if our wish were fulfilled then we should immediately forfeit their friendship), St Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Sanctifying Grace makes even friendship with God a reality. This is because God actually shares His Divine Life with us through Baptism.

St Philip excelled in making men's hearts receptive to this vocation to live as friends with God. His joyful influence fostered an ambience in which his spiritual children found pleasure in each others’ company and came to assist each other in living virtuously. A shy cobbler whom St Philip spotted sitting at the back of the Oratory was summoned to the front and hugged like a long-lost child returning to a family that included cardinals and princes. A watch-seller on the verge of bankruptcy found himself suddenly overwhelmed by eager customers at the Oratory, where St Philip's friends had been primed to empty their purses and buy every watch and clock he could provide. This infectious spirit of generosity and charity was fostered by visits to attend to the poor in the Roman hospitals. Even those who came to the Oratory with unworthy motives were eventually captivated by the "Winning Saint", and some found themselves taking Holy Orders or religious vows as a result.

This school of Christian friendship was the magnificent mustard tree which developed from that seed of the Kingdom planted in St Philip's heart half a millennium ago at his Baptism on 22nd July 1515. By his intercession, and under the protection of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin, may it continue to flourish in the Oratory today and for centuries to come.

Fr Julian Large

June 2015 Letter from the Provost

The Oratory Calvary that was installed in 2012 is an internationally eclectic ensemble. The magnificent sculptures were carved in Seville. The background depicting Jerusalem is the work of an English painter, and the classical rail protecting the Calvary was copied from the altar rails in the former abbey church of Ursberg in Bavaria. 

A Premonstratensian foundation of the twelfth century, Ursberg was secularized in 1803 and eventually entrusted to the care of an order of nursing sisters. The abbey church does not appear in the guidebooks dedicated to the ‘baroque trail’ of southern Germany, but its interior is a beautiful monument to the creative genius of local craftsmanship in eighteenth century Swabia. Surrounded by farmland and forests, the impressive abbey buildings are home to a community of nuns who provide education, employment and accommodation for 2,500 handicapped men, women and children.

Standing in the courtyard in front of the abbey church it is hard to imagine that this tranquil spot was the scene of a terrible crime that cried to Heaven for vengeance. In 1941, government officials arrived to load hundreds of the handicapped residents, including children, onto buses. Tears streamed down the cheeks of the nuns as their helpless charges were driven away, never to be seen again.

The residents of Ursberg were victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme, euphemistically called ‘mercy killing’ by the regime that perpetrated it. When this crime was introduced as a policy, it seemed for an awkward moment that many Church leaders had been struck dumb in the face of such horror. But the Church’s prophetic voice found robust expression in the pulpit of Bishop Clemens August von Galen, the ‘Lion of Munster’. His fearless denunciations actually succeeded in forcing a halt to the programme being carried out as a public policy, although in reality the murdering continued to be perpetrated undercover. Needless to say, the moment the war was over, Sadducees who had formerly questioned von Galen’s belligerence suddenly became quite eloquent in hailing the Lion of Munster as a national hero, and by the time von Galen returned from Rome with a cardinal’s hat in 1946, many who had previously given him a wide berth jostled with each other to be immortalized standing next to him in the ‘welcome home’ photographs.

Historic events like the ‘mercy killing’ of the handicapped patients at Ursberg should make us reflect on developments closer to home in our own day. In 2006, the Royal College of Obstetricians presented a proposal calling on the medical profession to consider the ‘active euthanasia’ of disabled children – for ‘the overall good’ of families, and to spare the parents the emotional and financial burden of bringing up sick babies. The Timesreported that this submission received strong support from geneticists and medical ethicists. In 2012 a respected Oxford academic and doctor, originally from Milan, published an article in the British Medical Journal in which she argued that doctors should have the right to kill newborn babies because they are disabled, too expensive or simply unwanted by their mothers. In another article published in the Journal of Medical Ethicswith a fellow Italian bioethicist, she recommended allowing the infanticide of healthy babies in cases where mothers no longer have the time or energy to care for them.

The debate continues, and the British press occasionally reports unsettling allegations of the illegal ‘mercy-killing’ of sick children in hospitals in Britain. Last year Belgium became the first European country to legalise the ‘mercy-killing’ of children at any age. The underlying argument – that once you gain acceptance for abortion it also makes sense to dispose of unwanted children after birth – contains a chilling logic.

When considering the ideological dangers that threaten our civilization, we should avoid making statements such as “It’s like living in Nazi Germany.” One significant difference is that we are free to speak out. As Catholics we should value this hard-won liberty, and use it to engage with public life. Young Catholics should consider involving themselves in politics, in order to keep the Christian voice alive in Parliament. The rest of us can at least support pro-Life groups, which keep us informed and alert us when we should write to our M.P.s. Under National Socialism, any German who made a fuss about the inviolability of every innocent human life from conception to death, regardless of race or any other consideration, could expect a knock on the door from the Gestapo. In the Soviet Union, such views could earn a one-way ticket into a mental asylum. In England in 2015 we are free to proclaim the sanctity of human life as much as we like.

We also have a secret weapon: prayer. Cardinal von Galen was beatified in 2005. Please pray for the miracles that will secure his canonization. The Lion of Munster would make a fitting patron for our age. Pray that through his intercession, the prophetic voice of the Church will sound loud and clear in defence of the Gospel of life. And when you kneel down at the Oratory Calvary, reflect on what happened at Ursberg, and take hope: the witness of the nuns who pray and work there today is a wonderful testimony to the triumph over evil of faith, hope and charity.

Fr Julian Large

May 2015 Letter from the Provost

Normally we celebrate a saint’s ‘birthday’ in Heaven, on the date of his departure from this world to the next. Two notable exceptions are the nativities of Our Lady and of St John the Baptist. This year Oratories around the world will also be marking the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of our holy Father St Philip Neri, whose heavenly birthday occurred on 26th May 1595, and whose earthly nativity took place in Florence on 22nd July, 1515.

We might well wonder what on earth St Philip would make of this world and of the Church half a millennium after his entry into it. Pray God we shall each of us be able to ask him face to face in Heaven. Meanwhile we can but speculate.  Familiarity with St Philip’s life however, may enlighten us on how best to engage with contemporary society in the spirit of our heavenly patron.

The context of St Philip’s astonishingly successful apostolate was one of the more tumultuous periods in the history of Christendom. The Florentine society into which he was born had recently experienced a presage of the cultural tension that would, within his youth, explode into ideological warfare and full-blown schism during the Protestant revolt. In 1498, the Dominican Girolamo Savonarola had been burned at the stake following his sustained campaign of denunciation against the corruption of the disgraceful pontificate of Pope Alexander VI. St Philip actually nurtured a lifelong devotion to Savonarola, drawing a halo on a portrait of the friar which he kept in his room at the Roman Oratory, and praying fervently to the Blessed Sacrament to prevent Savonarola’s writings being condemned in the 1560s.

Similar abuses and scandals to those against which Savonarola had railed in the 1490s were rife in Rome at the time of St Philip’s arrival there in 1534. To make matters worse, the Sack of Rome by the mutinous troops of the Emperor Charles V in 1527 had left the city a devastated vineyard. Palaces had been reduced to rubble, churches desecrated, priests and cardinals murdered in the streets. The consequent low morale of the clergy was exacerbated by the moral turpitude for which the Court of the Renaissance popes has become a byword. Many priests and prelates rarely if ever celebrated the Sacraments for which they had been ordained and went about the city disguised in secular dress. There are records of Roman clergy indulging in sorcery and other abominations.

Considering St Philip’s obvious affection for Savonarola, it might be expected that he would have adopted a similarly confrontational approach to the abuses that surrounded him on his arrival in Rome. During the scandalous pontificate of Pope Julius III, however, there was never any suggestion of St Philip raising his voice against the person of the Sovereign Pontiff. Whereas Savonarola had sent out gangs of his followers to shame Florentines whom they judged to be dressed opulently or immodestly, St Philip playfully told a young man with inordinately extravagant neckwear that he would give him a hug were he not afraid of being grazed by his collar, while a woman who asked if it would be sinful to wear slippers with high heels was told: “Just take care you do not trip.” Savonarola had encouraged artists to consign their own masterpieces to the flames of his ‘bonfire of the vanities’, while St Philip commissioned the great artists of his day to produce art that continues to inspire devotion. Savonarola held polyphonic music to be decadent and inappropriate for Christian worship. The most sublime music accompanying our liturgy in the London Oratory today is the fruit of St Philip’s encouragement of polyphonic composers such as Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina and Tomas Luis de Victoria.

In other words, while Savonarola lambasted the evils of his society, St Philip had a gift for recognising what could be ‘baptised’ in the culture of his day and used for the edification of man and to the glory of God. In the words of Bl. John Henry Newman, “he preferred to yield to the stream and direct the current which he could not stop, of science, literature, art and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.” His positivity and lightness of touch were so effective in gaining converts that he became known within his own lifetime as the ‘Christian Socrates’, thanks to his dexterity in drawing men away from worldliness and ever deeper into spiritual insight.

Pessimists might easily give up on our culture as one spiralling into self-destruction. St Philip would teach us rather to focus on its potential. There is around us a real hunger for spirituality, even if people are not sure where to look for it. There is a craving for authenticity, although the criteria used to evaluate what is authentic often seem to be hopelessly shallow. Five centuries after his birth into a world which by God’s grace he helped to transform, let us ask St Philip to intercede for our success in doing the same.

Fr Julian Large.

April 2015 Letter from the Provost

Perhaps we think of tension as an evil always to be avoided.  The bodybuilding supremoCharles Atlas would have disagreed. Observing big cats stretching their limbs at the zoo he asked himself: “Did you ever see a tiger with a barbell?” Inspired, Atlas then developed his ‘dynamic tension’ exercise program that was taken up by Kung-Fu guru Bruce Lee and boxing legend Joe Louis, among others. It is founded on the simple principle of tensing muscles in the body while moving against them.

Dynamic tension can also have a role to play in toning the Mystical Body of Christ on earth. We might keep this in mind as October’s Synod on the Family in Rome approaches, as the media presents differing points of view in terms of political warfare. Tension can actually make the body stronger.

In the Gospels, we see a pattern of tension in the interactions between Our Lord and many of His listeners, and especially with the religious hierarchy of Jerusalem. The more He reveals of His mission and of His divine identity, the more the opposition against Him swells. In the fifth chapter of St John’s Gospel, He is condemned for healing a paralysed man on the Sabbath. In response to this criticism, He says to His detractors: “My Father is working still, and I am working.” On hearing this “the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but made Himself equal with God.” His reaction to this is to push the point of His equality with the Father even further: “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.”

What is revealed in the Gospel, then, is the following dynamic of tension: 1. Our Lord proposes doctrine; 2. A number of His listeners are severely rattled; 3. Our Lord counters their opposition not by softening His message in order to defuse the hostility, but by expounding on the controverted doctrine with even greater clarity and force than before. The end result: there remains little room for doubt regarding His meaning, and out of the murkiness of ignorance comes the pure nutritious milk of Catholic doctrine. His enemies, meanwhile, harden their resolve to bring Him down.

On Good Friday this interplay culminates in a political intrigue among the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem which secures the Crucifixion of God the Son. Our Lord accepts this consequence of telling the truth. The grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies on Calvary bursts back into life on Easter Sunday, and His Gospel of salvation explodes with irrepressible vigour at Pentecost.

The Church follows Our Lord in this mission of fearless and unembarrassed proclamation of the Gospel. Many are the instances in history in which the ‘dynamic of tension’ has borne fruits that have enriched our understanding of the Faith and our devotion. In the 5th Century, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, downplayed the role of Our Lady in salvation history. Arguing that She gave birth to Our Lord’s human but not His divine nature, Nestorius proposed that the Blessed Virgin should be properly honoured with the title Christokos (Christ-bearer). At the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., the Church not only condemned Nestorius’ teaching as heresy on the grounds that Our Lady gave birth not to a nature but to a person, and the divine and human natures of Our Lord are united within that one divine Person; She also honoured Our Lady with the highest possible title of Theotokos (God-bearer), so that henceforth She would be hailed as Mother of God.

In the 16th Century, the dogma of Transubstantiation came under assault when significant parts of Christendom protested that what was bread at the beginning of Mass remained bread after the words of Consecration. The Church wasted no effort searching for a ‘middle way’ to accommodate the dissenters. Neither was She satisfied in merely restating Her doctrine on the Sacrifice of the Mass and on the substantial transformation of bread into Our Lord’s living Body and Blood. She went further than this and promoted the Forty Hours Devotion, in which the Sacred Host is honoured with maximum solemnity, and the faithful are invited to lavish on the Blessed Sacrament the adoration that is due to Almighty God alone. This was not for the sake of being provocative, but rather because She saw in the controversy a God-given opportunity to promote devotion to the most precious gift that Our Lord has given us on earth – the gift of His own Self as food to nourish and sanctify us.

In pushing the point of Transubstantiation to its logical conclusion, the Church is faithful to Her divine Spouse. Nowhere is the ‘dynamic of tension’ more evident than in the 6th chapter of St John’s Gospel. When Our Lord announces “I am the bread of life”, there is indignation among the Jews. He counters their murmuring by repeating His initial claim with even greater emphasis: “If any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The tension escalates until many of the disciples beg Our Lord to back down: His popularity after the miracle of the feeding of the multitude is at an all-time high, they argue; how can He throw it all away by insisting on this “hard saying” that no one wants to hear? But Our Lord presses on, so that “after this many of His disciples drew back and no longer went about with Him.” The lesson here is surely that we are never to sacrifice the truth for popular acclaim.

Elsewhere we find the ‘dynamic of tension’ at work on the subject of marriage. In the 19th chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, the Pharisees question Our Lord on divorce. He replies that after marriage a couple is “no longer two, but one”, adding: “What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” The Pharisees retort that even Moses allowed for the possibility of divorce. Our Lord responds: “For your hardness of hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” The disciples complain that this hard-line approach makes marriage sound such a formidable undertaking that it does not seem worth the trouble. Our Lord refuses to back-peddle. He has come to give us new hearts. As a result of this particular ‘dynamic tension’ we are left in no doubt about the indissolubility of the marriage bond.

We should pray hard for the Synod on the Family, and not waste energy fretting over what the press might have to say. One hears the suggestion that the best possible outcome in October can only be a soggy compromise that somehow preserves the integrity of doctrine. The assumption seems to be that the only alternative to such a trade-off is the disunity that will erupt if different schools of thought fail to reach an agreement. This surely underestimates the action of the Holy Ghost. Speaking at a press conference, His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols reminded us of the real purpose of the Synod: “on the one hand to give a resounding trumpet call in support of marriage and the stability of family life, and on the other hand to express and strengthen the pastoral response of the Church in a wide variety of difficult and pressurised situations.” Let us pray, then, not for a lacklustre compromise, but rather for a divinely-inspired consensus that gives a renewed credibility and persuasiveness to the Church’s witness to the Gospel.

Fr Julian Large

March 2015 Letter from the Provost

In the Gospel at Mass on the Second Sunday in Lent, the Church invites us to accompany Our Lord and three chosen Apostles on to Mount Thabor. To encourage us in our Lenten program of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, She allows us a glimpse of Our Lord’s divine identity in the Transfiguration. As His face shines like the sun and His garments become as white as snow, it is as if a few rays of His Glory manage to break through to stop us in our tracks.

Throughout His earthly life, Our Lord keeps this Divine Glory carefully hidden. This surely has to do with His plan for our salvation. He has not come to dazzle us into submission, with spectacular displays of divine majesty. Rather, He has come to invite us to unite ourselves with Him in faith and love. He unites Himself with our frail humanity in order to draw us into the Mystery of His own divine life. St Paul tells us that Our Saviour came to die on the Cross to make us co-heirs of His glory (Rom 8.17).

So why this extraordinary revelation of His Glory in the Transfiguration? The disciples invited to join Our Lord on the mountain are Peter, James and John – the same three who will very soon accompany Him into the Garden of Gethsemane on Holy Thursday. This display of glory at the Transfiguration is given to confirm them in their faith in the Incarnation. They will see Him suffer in His humanity, and so they are given this glimpse of His Divinity.

But the Transfiguration is also for us. It indicates that we, too, are called to participate in the Glory of the Blessed Trinity. The seeds of this Glory are planted already in Baptism, when Sanctifying Grace is infused into our souls, and we become living temples of the Holy Ghost. However, the splendour of this divine life radiating from the soul remains invisible until, pray God, our souls are elevated to the state of Glory in Heaven. At the end of time, our bodies will be reunited with our souls, when, as St Paul informs us, “the body that is sown in corruption” will be raised in incorruption, power and glory (1 Cor 15.42). Our Lord Himself promises that “the just shall shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt 13.43).

The Transfiguration reminds us that only a small part of the reality of things is visible to our eyes or detectable to our senses. We cannot see the angels who surround us, or even our own Guardian Angel who is always with us. Neither can we see in any direct way the effects of grace or sin on the human soul. We know in Faith, however, that the angels and demons exist, and that the effects of grace and sin on the soul are very real. This means that it is only through Faith that we are truly able to live in reality, even if now we still see through a glass darkly.

It was for our salvation that Our Lord laid His Glory aside. In the Old Testament God instructs us that no mere mortal man can look upon Him and live (Exod 33.20). Our Lord’s mission is to make God accessible. This is why, in the New Testament, He reveals His Divinity indirectly, through signs and words. His aim is to befriend His disciples on the human level, and to break them in as gently as possible to the Mystery of the Incarnation. It is also essentially important that they should appreciate His authentic humanity, as well as His Divinity.

At the close of time, this era of shadows will come to an end, when Our Lord returns in glory, and His Presence fills the skies from East to West. Then there will be no denying that Jesus Christ is God and Lord of all creation. Meanwhile, we live in faith – the faith that tells us that although Our Lord has been hidden from our eyes since His Ascension, He is in fact here with us now, in various ways. As God, He is of course everywhere. He is alive in a supernatural manner in the hearts and souls of everyone who is in a state of grace. He is present and alive in the most wonderful manner in the Blessed Sacrament.

It is surely a mark of His tenderness and love for us that He disguises Himself on the Altar, under the accidents of bread and wine, even though this means allowing for the dreadful possibility that His Presence might be desecrated. If we could see the glory of what, and indeed Whom, we receive in the Sacred Host, who amongst us would ever dare to approach the Altar for Holy Communion? Which priest would ever be brave enough to take the wafer into his hands and say the words of Consecration at Mass? But He wants us to approach Him. If we are in a state of grace, He actually invites us to receive Him and to eat His Body and His Blood.

It is very easy to lose sight of the divine nature of the Church, when the garments of the Bride of Christ can seem so spoiled by sin and by the scandal of internal politics. Like those disciples who fled when they saw Our Lord crucified, we too can become disheartened and discouraged, even tempted to flee, when we see Christ’s Church suffering because of the sins of Her members. The event of the Transfiguration, however, reminds us to look beyond the wounds and bruises that have been inflicted on the Church by the shortcomings of all of us, and to see the Church as Christ’s Mystical Body on earth which will one day be subsumed and glorified in His Mystical Body in Heaven.

Peter, James and John are given the strictest instruction to keep what they witness in the Transfiguration secret until after Our Lord’s Resurrection. But after that they are to proclaim it from the rooftops. The Transfiguration has a powerful message for us today. In contemporary life it seems inevitable that for much of the time our attention will be focused on the daily necessities of earning a living and getting from one part of our congested city to another. In Lent, however, we are invited to readjust our focus by penetrating beyond the appearance of things, and learning to live our whole lives in the presence of God Who is not only all around us, but also within us. As well as meditating on the mysteries of our salvation, we should also examine the state of our own souls. Is the grace we received in our Baptism still ablaze? Perhaps it is flickering almost imperceptibly like the pilot light in a gas boiler? Or has it been extinguished by mortal sin, so that it needs to be re-ignited in the Sacrament of Penance?

The Transfiguration points us to a glory that God wishes us to enjoy forever in eternity in Heaven. It also indicates an interior splendour that is within our reach in this life. What shall we do about it?

Fr Julian Large

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