April 2019 Letter from the Provost

Talking to parishioners, it transpires that many of them have a great love for the season of Lent. The crowds that packed the Oratory church on Ash Wednesday, even though there is no precept of obligation to do so, and the impressive size of the procession around the Stations of the Cross on Friday evenings, suggest that penance and mortification still exercise a significant hold on the Christian imagination. Whatever Freudian psychologists might assume, this is not because we are suffering from psychotic morbidity, or at least not most of us. Rather it is because these forty days, if we make a real effort to observe them, are spiritually liberating and refreshing. If, through our Lenten observances, we allow the great vessel that is the Church to transport us through this season of the liturgical calendar as active participants rather than as mere spectators, then we shall be well prepared to experience the joy and the power of Easter when the bells ring the Gloria back in at the Easter Vigil.

          When we were baptised we died to the old Adam within us. As the waters closed over our heads, we descended into the Tomb to be buried with Our Lord and Saviour. Moments later, emerging from those waters, we were raised from the dead. This is the supernatural reality of Baptism – we die and are buried with Christ, and the life of the Resurrection is poured into our hearts. And in our Baptism we receive the vocation to keep dying to ourselves in this life so that the life of Our Risen Lord might take ever greater possession of our souls. This, of course, is one of the primary purposes of Lent – dying to ourselves through self-denial.

          We might imagine that this is a thought that the weird and wonderful creature whom Teutonic theologisers like to call ‘Modern Man’ would find off-putting, even grotesque. But on the 1st January many of our secular-minded contemporaries will have made resolutions aimed at self-improvement. The difference is that most of these secular resolutions will have been focused on self – self-improvement through losing weight, self-improvement through obsessive control over the quantities of vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates entering their digestive systems, self-improvement through the toning of the body beautiful at the gym, self-improvement through ‘empowerment’ and ‘affirming’. Bookshops these days are full of material on how the reader can transform himself into Superman through the triumph of mind over matter.

          The purpose of Lent, in contrast to all of this, is to replace self with God, and to put the service of God in our neighbour at the centre of the frame. If we are thoughtful in the way that we market what our religion has to offer, however, then perhaps we can take advantage of the modern mania for self-improvement. After all, the practice of the Catholic religion, as exemplified in the Lenten observances of fasting, prayer and almsgiving, offers the ultimate holistic approach to self-improvement available on this planet. It is spiritual detox par excellence.

          When people talk about their Lenten resolutions, it’s quite common to hear something like “I find it more useful to take something up, rather than to give something up.” Our initial response should be gladness that they are doing anything at all. But taking something up and giving something up are not necessarily mutually exclusive. During Lent we are supposed to do both. The particular observances we resolve to assume are really tokens of virtues which we should cultivating throughout our lives. In fasting, we renounce legitimate pleasures in order to unite ourselves with Our Lord’s hunger in the desert, but also to loosen the hold that created goods hold over our appetites. In taking up extra devotions, we cultivate living in God’s presence and open the channels of communication as wide as possible so that He is able to communicate His divine life to us in abundance. In giving alms, we recognise and pay homage to the image of God that is emblazoned on our neighbour’s soul.

          And the ‘secret’ of keeping a good Lent? It is the same ‘secret’ that animates every aspect of our lives as Christians: charity. The Old and New Testaments make it clear that without charity our sacrifices become empty gestures and our prayers just prattle. It is charity that makes our other observances pleasing to God. And in this area of charity, the Gospel makes stringent demands. We are to love not only our neighbour, but also our enemy. We might well ask how can we be expected to love someone who has harmed us without any sign of repentance, and even to love an enemy who persecutes us without ceasing. First of all we have to try to understand how God loves us. Whenever we sin we make ourselves enemies of Christ, contributing to His suffering during His Passion. And yet He sees in us a potential for great goodness and beauty of soul, offering us His forgiveness even before we ask for it. Indeed, our repentance is the fruit of the grace which He extends to us before we have turned to Him. To love our enemies, we must begin by praying for them. Our prayer should be not only for their conversion, but that God will bless them in every way He sees fit. That way, we begin to grow in charity, whatever emotions might be assailing us.

As Holy Week approaches, it is likely that we shall have failed in the resolutions that we made on Ash Wednesday. The humility that it takes to acknowledge our failures and ask forgiveness is very precious to God. It is an essential prerequisite in the foundations of all the blessings He wishes to build in our lives. So we should renew our resolutions now, and pray for the grace to keep them well so that when Easter comes we shall be well prepared to participate in the joy of the Resurrection. We should also keep in mind that when Easter does arrive, God will not be measuring our waistlines to see how many pounds we have shed. What He is looking for is actually expansion. He wants to find hearts that have expanded in generosity and charity.

Fr Julian Large

March 2019 Letter from the Provost

In this quite troubled world in which we live today, it is not as if there is no-one looking for solutions. In recent weeks politicians, businessmen, celebrities and journalists all gathered in the Swiss Alps at the World Economic Forum to discuss the pressing issues of the day. The general consensus that seemed to emerge from the conference was that the two greatest evils facing humanity at the moment are climate change and inequality. It then transpired that the airports servicing this get-together in Davos had been congested by a record influx of private jets. The press reported that participants in the conference were being ferried in and out of Switzerland on around 1,500 private flights.

As the canapés circulated on the second day of the World Economic Forum, photographers on the other side of the Atlantic captured the moment that New York State’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, signed in a law that allows the abortion of healthy babies up until the moment of birth. Surrounded by smiling politicians, Mr Cuomo decreed that prominent public buildings around Manhattan were to be lit pink to celebrate. Other states across the U.S.A. quickly announced that they were aiming to secure similar legislation as quickly as possible. Back in Davos, meanwhile, no-one seemed to think that any of this was worthy of a mention.

The further that our society moves away from the Gospel, the blinder and the more brutal this world inevitably becomes. When barbaric legislation facilitating infanticide is seen as a reason for public celebration it is hard to imagine how much lower we could sink.

We must, however, avoid being uncharitable towards those people in Davos who convinced themselves, and perhaps others, that climate change and inequality are the greatest evils in the world today. When it comes to the environment, the Church teaches with perfect clarity that human beings have a moral duty to be responsible custodians of this planet, the care of which we see being entrusted to Adam and Eve in Genesis. (Gen 1.28) Any exploitation of the earth’s resources which is motivated by greed is undoubtedly a sin. As for equality or the lack of it, the moral principle is not quite so clear-cut. The truth is that we are none of us truly equal in so far we all come into this world with different gifts and limitations. The Kingdom of God is a hierarchy – Christ is King, and in Heaven there is royal court in which Our Lady reigns as Queen over the Angels and Saints. But the Gospels do tell us that the rich have a responsibility to the poor, and that this responsibility is so grave that their salvation depends on it.

However, if we are talking about the environment, we have to realise that a mother’s womb in which an innocent human life is conceived and nurtured is the most sacred environment of all. And if we are talking about equality, we have to realise that the dignity of the human person is a principle which is rooted in the sanctity of each and every innocent human life at every stage of its existence from the moment of conception. This means that any attempt to create an environmentally responsible and just society that fails to recognise the inviolability of an innocent child’s life inside the mother’s womb is without any foundation in reality, and doomed to failure and collapse.

The opinion makers of our time seem to have lost sight of this altogether. As a result, grave crimes become a daily occurrence, and we are in serious danger of becoming desensitised to great evil. But we must not allow ourselves to be desensitised, because if we fail to challenge those of our elected politicians who vote in favour of legislation facilitating infanticide (and there is currently well-funded lobbying going on in Parliament to abolish restrictions on abortion here – please see the notice that follows this letter) then we become complicit in a sin that cries to Heaven for retribution.

Certainly, sounding a discordant note when everyone else is singing obediently from the official hymn sheet will mean that we expose ourselves to opposition and ridicule. If we happen to work for the medical profession or in education, there is a serious possibility that we shall find ourselves overlooked for promotion or even out of employment. But as Our Lord warns us in the Gospel: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did of the false prophets.” (Lk 6.26)

On the other hand, “Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and revile you ... on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold your reward is great in Heaven.” (Lk 6.23) It might surprise us that being persecuted and despised are counted among the Beatitudes. But the ancient Greek word for beatitude, or blessedness, is Makarios. It was applied primarily to the pagan gods, whose essential happiness was held to remain unaffected by the vicissitudes and tragedies of life on earth. We mortals must inhabit a fallen world in which we are buffeted by no end of trials. But if we are in a state of grace, then we have a flame of the Divine Life alight in our hearts, something that no external circumstances can touch or diminish, and only our own sin can extinguish. This revealed truth should be an encouragement to any young person considering going into public life but fearful of hostility.

Looking at the world today, it seems that Our Lord has too few friends, too few disciples. Such was the case at the time of His Passion, when He was abandoned even by St Peter, the chief of the Apostles. But we have the benefit of knowing the outcome of Good Friday – that outcome was Easter, and we have experienced Easter for ourselves in our Baptism when we were filled with the life of the Resurrection. Let us answer the Baptismal call to discipleship and friendship now, in the confidence that whatever trials it might bring, it will also give us a share in Beatitude now, and Beatitude in its fullness in eternity.

Fr Julian Large

URGENT APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE UNBORN CHILD

Later in the year, a group of MPs will be bringing forward an amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill which will seek to introduce abortion on demand to Northern Ireland and remove most of the current legal safeguards around abortion in England and Wales. Right To Life UK is working with Peers and MPs in Parliament to counter these attempts, which they have identified as the biggest challenge on this issue since the Abortion Act was introduced in 1967. If you would like to donate to this campaign or get involved, do contact the team at info@righttolife.org.uk. For more information on Right to Life UK visit www.righttolife.org.uk.

February 2019 Letter from the Provost

Visitors to the Oratory Church are often surprised by the Jewish-looking candelabras on either side of the sanctuary. The Oratory ‘menorahs’ are probably as close as anything in existence to exact replicas of the original lampstand that was placed in the antechamber to the sanctuary of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem. They were a gift of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, who was received into the Catholic Church in 1868 and commissioned William Burges to copy them from a marble relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, where booty from the Temple was carried in triumph after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70A.D. The Temple Menorah is believed to have been destroyed some time after the Vandal invasion of the fifth Century.

          The Oratory lampstands were placed in the sanctuary in testimony to our belief in the continuity of the religion of our Jewish forbears with our own religion as Catholics today. They testify to our conviction that the Old Testament has found its complete and definitive fulfilment in the Church which is the New Jerusalem. The Presence of God that once dwelt in the Temple’s inner sanctum is now enthroned in the hearts of all who have been made members of the Mystical Body of Christ through Baptism. The new Holy of Holies is to be found in the Altar, on which Our Lord makes Himself present at every Mass, and where He remains day and night in the Tabernacle. A Catholic church, then, is a holy place, and when our friends tell us that they do not need a church to pray in – that they can do it just as well on a hillside or in the bath – then we can say to them: Yes, it is always a good thing to pray wherever you are and whenever you can. But there is nowhere else on earth today where we find Our Lord present in the same way that He is present on the Altar and in the Tabernacle.

          Given our unwavering insistence on the unique sacredness of our consecrated buildings, non-Catholics are sometimes genuinely taken aback by the atmosphere of informality that tends to pervade in our churches. Converts to the Faith have to get used to the way that ‘cradle’ Catholics seem to pile into church at the last possible moment, and potter around lighting candles and visiting the statues of their favourite saints even after Mass has begun. Perhaps such casualness should be frowned upon. But such familiarity probably has its source in a religious instinct that is quite healthy. After all, as disciples of Christ there is a sense in which we inhabit this world as exiles in a foreign land. Coming to Mass, visiting the Blessed Sacrament and communing with the angels and saints is probably the closest that we shall ever get to coming ‘home’, at least on this side of Heaven. And home is exactly how we should see a church or chapel where a flickering lamp tells us that Our Lord in is residence and waiting to receive us into His royal Presence. This is a King who has ennobled us by pouring a participation in His own life into our hearts in Baptism; a King who invites us into intimate union with Him by feeding us with His own Body.

          At the same time, of course, we always have to be careful to ensure that familiarity never breeds contempt. In the Gospel, Our Lord expels the racketeering traders from the Temple because they have profaned the House of His Father. As He drives them out with a homemade whip, the disciples are reminded of a verse from Psalm 68: “Zeal for thy house hath devoured me.” On the practical level, zeal for the Father’s House means that we should certainly make every effort to act accordingly in any place that is consecrated to the worship of God, doing our best to arrive on time for Holy Mass and respecting the sacred purpose of our surroundings. Parents should teach their children to genuflect and to receive Holy Communion with real devotion, and set a good example by making a prayer of thanksgiving with them afterwards. But Our Lord’s cleansing of the Temple is not primarily a lesson about outward decorum in church. It relates very much to our interior dispositions. After all, thanks to our Baptism, each one of us is a living Temple of the Holy Ghost. As such we have to be purged of everything that does not belong. The Holy Ghost cannot be expected to co-habit with gossip, unkindness and conceit. Our Lord gives us the example of an impeccably punctilious Pharisee who is so proud of his own piety and yet defiles the Temple by looking down on a despised publican who is too ashamed to lift his head. It is the publican who returns home in favour with God.

          To help us all pray at Mass on Sunday mornings, the Oratory provides a room in St Gregory’s Library, near the main entrance to the church, where parents can take (and must accompany at all times) any of their young children who become restless. But the room is certainly not compulsory for all children, some of whom are capable of enduring a whole Oratory sermon without so much as a single yawn or a squeal. We are blessed to have world class choirs singing at many of our liturgical functions. But that does not make the Mass a concert, and if a child expresses her indignation at the length of the proceedings with an occasional howl, then we should avoid Medusa-style glaring and hissing at all costs. The Oratory menorahs are a reminder that we are all of us called to be united in charity as God’s chosen people. Never let it be said that we are God’s frozen people.

Fr Julian Large

January 2019 Letter from the Provost

A major highlight of any pilgrimage to Rome must be a visit to the basilica of St Mary Major. This ancient and beautiful church is a magnificent testimony in mosaic, marble and bronze to Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin. It was built by Pope Sixtus III to commemorate the recently concluded Council of Ephesus of 431, at which Our Lady was granted the title ‘Mother of God’ by dogmatic definition, and it has been renovated and embellished during successive pontificates down the centuries. Amongst other treasures it possesses the Manger in which Our Lord was lain in Bethlehem.

          Thanks for the formal and definitive recognition of Our Lady’s title ‘Mother of God’ must go in large part to a Syrian monk by the name of Nestorius, a favourite of the Emperor Theodosius II who pulled strings to have his protégé made Archbishop of Constantinople, the most important See after Rome itself. Nestorius’s learning and legendary eloquence, and his extraordinary charisma, made him one of the most sought after spiritual gurus of his era. He was the type of intellectual and ecclesiastical celebrity who, had he been alive today, would have been the ultimate doyen of the Kensington housewives’ weekday coffee morning scene.

          He was also a heretic. Deigning to allow Our Lady the title Christotokos (Birth Giver of the Christ), he adamantly refused to allow Her the title ‘Birth Giver of God’. Mercifully, Rome refused to meet heresy halfway, even when the heresiarch concerned happened to be the mighty bishop of the richest city in Christendom and in cahoots with the secular powers. After a good deal of acrimony and invective during the proceedings of the Council, the Blessed Virgin’s title Theotokos, ‘Mother of God,’ was splendidly defined with utmost solemnity. Nestorius was condemned, deposed, and despatched to a monastery, where he refused to recant his anathematised opinions to the end of his days.

          To give credit where it is due, Nestorius had a point. It is undeniable that, while receiving His body and His human nature from His virgin Mother, the Christ Child received His divine nature directly from God. But no mother gives birth to a mere nature. Every mother gives birth to a person. And the Blessed Virgin, like every mother, also gave birth to a person. Within that person there were two natures, human and divine. But as far as being a person goes, Christ is divine. He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son, Who at a recorded moment in history took on our human flesh and was born in a stable in Bethlehem, where potentates from the East fell on their knees in adoration in recognition of His divinity.

          What’s in a name? When we are talking about Mary the Mother of God, there is an awful lot in the name. The title Theotokos safeguards the doctrine of the Divinity of Our Lord, and our salvation depends on the truth that He was and is God as well as man. Yes, when He was on the Cross, it was in His humanity that He suffered and died. But it was a divine person Who endured that Passion, and this is what gives His Sacrifice the infinite value and power needed to save us. In the Gospel of St John, Our Lord says “I have called you friends”. (Jn 15.15) Certainly it is through human speech that He communicates these words to human ears, but it is a divine person Who is speaking. And this invitation from God to man to divine friendship is a crowning glory of our Christian Faith. What other religion can make such an audacious boast as that?

          And so we treasure the title Theotokos, and we delight to honour Our Lady as the Mother of God. The Eternal Word became flesh in Her womb. His flesh is taken from Her flesh. Thanks to the fiat She gave to the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation, She gave birth to God the Son made man, and so we are able to be saved from our sins. Father Faber expressed our Christian joy in this mystery most sublimely in his Carol ‘Like the Dawning of the Morning’, which he addresses directly to the Blessed Virgin and which can be found in all eight verses in any respectable Catholic hymn book:

And what wonders have been in thee
All the day and all the night,
While the angels fell before thee,
To adore the Light of Light.
While the glory of the Father
hath been in thee as a home,
And the sceptre of creation
Hath been wielded in thy womb.

          We have left behind us a year during which there has been a great deal of darkness, and much uncertainty and anxiety about the future. As we enter 2019, let us put fear aside and entrust ourselves, our loved ones and this whole world to the protection and the intercession of the Blessed Mother of God. May She bring us, and this world around us, to the Light of Light Whom She presented to the Magi in Bethlehem.

Fr Julian Large

December 2018 Letter from the Provost

Rorate Caeli desuper et nubes pluant justum – Aperiatur terra et germinet Salvatorem.

(Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down the just One – Let the earth be opened and send forth a Saviour.)

These words from the prophet Isaias, which form the versicle and response at Vespers during the next weeks, really set the tone for the whole of Advent. They are pregnant with longing. It is as if the dry dust of the parched earth itself groans with expectation of the oceans of refreshment from Heaven that will transform the desert into a vibrant landscape of life and colour.

          We often hear it said that “you can’t turn the clock back”. But in this period of Advent, the Church’s liturgy does just that, on one level at least. The liturgy is like a ship that carries us through the Mysteries of our holy Faith, and allows us to experience them not just as mere spectators but as participants in the drama of redemption. The clock is turned back as we are transported to that time of longing of the Prophets. Advent is a season of penitence, in which the liturgical colour is purple and we make reparation for sins. But it is also filled with joyful expectation, as we prepare to celebrate the arrival of the Prince of Peace at Christmas and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The liturgy transports us to the past not for the sake of nostalgia or sentimentality, but rather to equip us with the spiritual and supernatural resources which we need to live in the present. In that first coming in Bethlehem, the Messiah came to earth in meekness as an infant. He did not come to impose a new regime by means of swords or armies. Rather, He came to win our hearts through repentance and conversion.

          The meekness of His first coming and His respect for our freedom mean that for two thousand years men have remained at liberty to close their hearts to Him. And today many have closed their hearts to Him. The results are all around us. We see it in the moral vacuum that has been created in our own society, which in many ways is in open rebellion against the laws which God has written into nature. A culture which has been hollowed out from the centre is like a fragile shell – one serious blow, and the whole thing is likely to collapse. This past year, sections of the British media openly celebrated the lifting of the ban on abortion in Ireland, which has facilitated the ‘legal’ extermination of countless innocent lives. In our own Parliament, meanwhile, there are moves to remove what little protection the unborn child still possesses inside a mother’s womb. We might well ask: “Why does the Prince of Peace not intervene to rectify this?”

          The Gospel readings in Advent assure us that the time for His second coming and definitive intervention has been set, even if the date has not been revealed to us. And when He does return, it will not be in meekness and frailty as with His first arrival in Bethlehem, but rather in majesty, with armies of angels. On that Day of Judgment justice will be done, and be seen to be done, on a universal scale. That blood of the innocents which cries to Heaven will find its vindication.

          Just as, in the days of the later prophets, the earth groaned like a parched desert for the coming of the Messiah, so the earth groans today like a parched desert for the dew of God’s grace. And our souls also groan for refreshment and the strength we need to sustain us until He returns in Glory. In the coming weeks when grace rains down from Heaven in answer to the Church’s petitions, we are invited to spend time in Our Lord’s company so that He might refresh us and renew us. In this time of grace He wants to give us something so that we in turn have something to give to this broken and wounded world. So one thing we should do this Advent is to give some more time to God. In the coming weeks we shall no doubt be hearing a lot from high-minded clerics about the evils of consumerism. Perhaps we should try a different type of consumerism from the frenzied shopping that takes place around us in central London. We can make a resolution to be more assiduous about consuming the word of God in the Holy Scriptures. Devour Scripture, just like the Prophet Ezekiel devoured the scroll that was given to Him by God. Follow the cycle of Scriptures as proposed to us in the Church’s liturgy, reflecting on them, savouring and digesting them so that they become a part of us. Accompany this meditation with our prayers – the collects appointed for daily Mass in Advent are bursting with meaning, and full of petitions which articulate our neediness before God.

          Rorate Caeli desuper – rain down dew ye Heavens. Yes, we can be sure that there is an abundance of Divine Grace raining down from Heaven in these days. But we have to prepare ourselves to receive it.

Fr Julian Large

November 2018 Letter from the Provost

There has recently been some controversy in the English-speaking Catholic media about the place and the role of converts in our Holy Catholic Church. It is probably better not to name any names on either side because the debate quickly became acrimonious, and in these ill-tempered days we need to work for charity within the Church, as well as clarity.

          Many of us converts who followed the discussion will probably have been more amused than we were chastened to find ourselves being told by certain prominent commentators that, like Victorian children allowed into the parlour for half a scone at teatime, we are expected to be seen but not heard. The argument seems to be that having arrived so late in the day in the vineyard, we should put up and shut up. Those of us who were formerly Anglicans will probably have been told at some stage or another since our reception into the One True Fold of the Redeemer that we shouldn’t carry with us the same battles that we might have fought in the Church of England.

          None of this would have come as any surprise to the one of this country’s most famous and best-loved converts. Blessed John Henry Newman was regarded with suspicion and even hostility by many of the old-time English Catholics who had been labouring away in the vineyard under the heat of the sun since early morning. Having been scorned by many of his fellow Protestants as a crypto-papist during his Anglican days, Mister, and then Father, Newman found that after his reception into the Church his reputation was soon being trounced and his name denounced to the Roman authorities by zealots and by certain members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy who questioned his docility to teaching authority and doubted the authenticity of his conversion.

          When Newman eventually received his cardinal’s hat in 1879, aged nearly eighty, he exclaimed to his fellow Oratorians in Birmingham: “The cloud is lifted from me forever!” Never again, he believed, could his Catholicism be called into question. That was actually wishful thinking. In the early twentieth century, after heretics had applied an evolutionist interpretation to Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and claimed Newman as one of their own, the excommunicated Father Tyrrell and others tried to drag Newman down with them in the sinking ship of Modernism following its condemnation in Rome. Even though Pope Saint Pius X confirmed in a letter to Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick in 1908 that the orthodoxy of Newman’s Catholicism was beyond reproach and wholly uncontaminated by the errors condemned in Lamentabili, and even though that same great Pope lauded Newman for his constancy in defending the cause of the Faith before his fellow country-men, some of the dirt had managed to stick, so that even today there are half-baked theologisers who try to tie Newman’s name to causes which would, quite frankly, have sickened him.

          Newman did carry over with him into the Catholic Church the main battle that he had become used to fighting in the Church of England. Whether he found himself in combat with the liberalism of Latitudinarians in the common room of Oriel or with the fundamentalism of fanatical Ultramontanists in the run-up to the First Vatican Council, Newman’s crusade remained always constant: it was a battle for truth. It continued to impose strain on his friendships and to bring him suffering as a Catholic just as it had done while he was an Anglican.

          Latecomers to the Faith who are made to feel that their convert status makes them second class citizens in the eyes of some of those who make a profession out of religious commentary can take comfort in the knowledge that Blessed John Henry experienced all of this before them. The sincerity of Newman’s conversion is beyond question to anyone of good faith. As an Anglican he had increased in his sympathy for doctrines such as Transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, having considered them individually in the light of their antiquity and of their compatibility with Holy Scripture. When he made his profession of Faith in front of Father Dominic Barberi, however, he was declaring that from now on he would embrace these truths, and every other Catholic doctrine, on the grounds that they were taught by Christ’s Church. He was assenting to his firm belief that the Catholic Church was founded by Our Lord as the pillar and the foundation of saving truth, with divinely invested authority to teach on faith and morals. He brought himself to his knees before an authority which he firmly believed to be at the service of Truth, but he also fell to his knees in the knowledge that in the Church on earth that divinely invested authority is always liable to be abused by fallen men who are prone to sin, and whose intellects are often too dim to appreciate the truths they have been commissioned to teach. But he accepted this. He accepted it because he was willing to suffer for and with the Church, because he loved Her as the Mystical Body of Christ on earth, and He believed Her to be true. Newman is an example to all of us of patience and genuine piety. Suffering with and for the Church is one of the ways we show our love for Christ, and one of the signs that our faith is alive.

          For those of us who are converts to the Faith, Newman shows us how to be good converts. We must be docile, and obedient to lawful authority. But we should also be dogged in our pursuit of all truth, and we must be willing to suffer for our insistence on it. The religious submission of mind and will which we owe to the teaching authority of the Church never obliges us to submit ourselves to humbug, bluster and spin, but only to Catholic Truth in its soul-saving fullness.

Fr Julian Large

October 2018 Letter from the Provost

We live in an era which bombards us with images. Advertising companies specialise in capturing our attention with pictures which are very often aimed at our lower passions, while the Internet provides easy access to millions of images of every description. Many of these pose a deadly threat to our mental health and to our eternal salvation. Were we to engage with them, we should soon find ourselves in serious trouble. The devil knows that once he has gained access to our imagination, he does not have very far to reach down to gain possession of our hearts. At the same time, the extraordinary revolution in communications which has occurred during our lifetime also means that we are constantly assailed with information (and disinformation). In recent months, there has a been a tsunami of revelations about dreadful scandals and corruption within our beloved Church, which in turn has given rise to endless torrents of acrimony, infighting and spin. Many good Catholics have been asking how we can find peace when the central nervous system of the Church on earth seems to have been afflicted with such a debilitating disease.

          Saint Paul provides us with a spiritual antidote in his Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil 4.8) Saint Paul is not suggesting that we are to turn a blind eye to evil, switch our faces on to permanent “evangelical grin” mode and pretend that everything is fine when it clearly isn’t and the Church is enduring one of the most dangerous crises of Her entire history. Pollyannaism has never been included among the Christian virtues, and make-believe is no foundation for genuine Christian joy. If, however, we allow our hearts and minds to become pits of vitriol and despair, then we make ourselves useless as disciples, however worthy the causes of reform to which we might have allied ourselves, and the enemy of our soul succeeds in his plan of drawing us into the maelstrom of disorder which he has created for our destruction.

          The Church has always recognised the importance and the power of the human imagination, and the need to nurture the eyes and mind with edifying images and thoughts. Our holy father St Philip commissioned some of the finest artists of the late Renaissance to decorate his church in Rome. He was sometimes observed in ecstasy before the tenderness and piety of the scene of the Blessed Virgin being greeted by St Elizabeth, as depicted in Barocci’s painting of the Visitation which still adorns the chapel dedicated to that mystery. The church of the London Oratory is filled with holy images, sculpture and sacred symbols, all designed to lift the heart and mind away from earthly distractions towards the mysteries of our salvation. Step next door into the Victoria and Albert Museum, and you can spend hours contemplating the sublime beauty of Raphael’s cartoons of scenes from the lives of Ss Peter and Paul.

          The imagination is fertile, and we must plant it with wholesome and beautiful images so that when unworthy thoughts and temptations present themselves they find no room to take root within us. During this month of October the Church proposes for our contemplation the mysteries of the Holy Rosary. An invincible weapon in the armoury of the Church Militant, the Rosary has throughout history defended the Church against enemies assailing Christian civilisation from without and from the poison of heresy within. Meditating on the mysteries of Our Lord’s life, Passion and Resurrection, and on Our Lady’s Assumption and Coronation in Heaven, also has a supernatural power to fill our minds with holy images and thoughts, banishing the darkness and despondency which are the enemies of our soul.

          We can profitably use this month of October to refresh our contemplation of the mysteries of the Holy Rosary and to improve the quality of our meditations. We may do this by rereading and reflecting upon those parts of the New Testament which relate to each mystery. It might also do us good to have recourse to art. The Provost favours all things high baroque, but whether your preference happens to be primitive Tuscan or something more contemporary, the Church has produced a vast treasure house of images which are all now accessible via a few clicks on a keyboard.

          In these turbulent days, we should pray the Holy Rosary for the Church. We pray for reform and renewal, and for the harmony that can only come with faithfulness to the Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Apostles and taught continuously down the centuries. Pray for unity, purification and peace, remembering that to be useful disciples to Our Lord Jesus Christ we must be blessed with purity and peace of heart ourselves.

Fr Julian Large

September 2018 Letter from the Provost

As a former Fleet Street hack, I was asked soon after my studies for the priesthood had begun: “Wasn’t that an extraordinary change, going from journalism to the cloth?” The temptation was to answer: “Yes, in some ways leaving the gossip column to become a Catholic priest felt like abandoning a mildly disdained occupation to join what many of one’s contemporaries believe to be a criminal organisation.” That was five years previous to the explosion of revelations of sexual abuse within the archdiocese of Boston, and a full two decades before the new disclosures of  gross betrayal of trust and abuse of authority which have been shaking the Church on earth to Her foundations in recent weeks.

Fleet Street was not exactly a saint factory. But the transgressions one was likely to encounter there – heavy drinking, professional jealousy, and other indiscretions which are not so hard to guess – were generally of the variety that can be attributed to the frailty of fallen human nature. In contrast to this, the recent Grand Jury report on sexual abuse in America details events of such wickedness and depravity as to leave the most cynical tabloid reporter shaken.

All of this can only be disheartening for anyone who loves the Church. That pastors who have been ordained to be the living image of Our Lord and Saviour on earth could deliberately do such harm to those little ones whose angels behold the face of their Father in Heaven defies words. The resulting crisis of credibility which has hobbled the Church’s mission of evangelisation in recent decades can only have been exacerbated wherever the institutional response has been to issue defensive official statements crafted by expensive lawyers and spin doctors. With the latest revelations, and the promise of worse to come, the Church has experienced a paradigm shift in which PR-speak has lost any power it might once have had to reassure.

The Church is not a criminal organisation. Yes, history furnishes us with examples of clericalist mafias of various types which have managed to hijack Her hierarchical structures in the service of their own agendas. It was the Oratory’s own Baronius who coined the phrase saeculum obscurum (dark age) to describe the corrupt papacies of the tenth century which later Protestant historians would label “the Pornocracy”. Despite the transgressions of Her members, however, the Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind. She is where we find saving truth in its fullness, and where we encounter Our Lord in the Sacraments and receive Him in His entirety in Holy Communion. A supernatural field hospital in which our sins are forgiven and the wounds that they inflict on our souls are healed, She also produces saints today – among those laity and religious who devote their lives to the poorest of the poor, among priests who give their lives sacrificially for the salvation of their parishioners’ souls, among bishops who in some parts of the world risk their lives daily in the service of their flocks, and among all those “ordinary” Catholics who live the Beatitudes heroically from day to day.

After Our Lord scandalised the Jews by insisting that He is the Bread of Life and that we must eat and drink His flesh and blood if we are to have eternal life, His disciples left Him in droves. He turned to the twelve Apostles and asked “Will you also go away?” Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God.” If we now begin to witness a new exodus of members from the Church in response to revelations of dreadful scandals, we need to keep these words of the fisherman inscribed on our hearts. We must hold tight to the Faith – not some counterfeit version of ambiguities and compromises as peddled by the compromised, but the Catholic Faith in its fullness, as handed down from the Apostles and believed and lived by the Saints. If you find that current events have made you doubt your own place in the Church, please find a priest whom you trust and open your heart to him.

The chastisement which it seems the Church on earth must endure for Her renewal is a most urgent call to sanctity to each one of us. A body is only as healthy as its individual parts. As living members of the Mystical Body of Christ, we contribute to Her health by responding to that call more generously and lovingly. Any hope of restoration of the Church’s credibility in our time rests on a living witness to our Catholic Faith, which means living in charity and devoting ourselves ever more wholeheartedly to the service of the most needy and vulnerable in our society. At the Oratory, we have various study groups to encourage parishioners to deepen their understanding of the Faith. What brings our community and parish to life, however, is the active witness to Our Lord’s redeeming love that we show in the support we give to the disadvantaged, and the hope we bring to the lost. So this is a challenge to us. One initiative for which we are grateful is the Wilfrid Faber Counselling Service, which provides support from trained counselors at the Oratory on a charitable basis, supporting the priestly work that the fathers are supposed to be doing here. Among those who find support from this valuable resource are victims of abuse.

We should pray for the victims of those shepherds who have turned out to be wolves. The consequences of this betrayal include ruined lives of isolation, sustained anguish and sometimes suicide. May they encounter the healing presence of Our loving Saviour from which they were driven by pastors who were demons in disguise. We must also commit ourselves to reparation. These sins cry to Heaven for vengeance, and we cannot know what torments they added to Our Lord’s Passion. This is a time for much prayer, fasting, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Masses of reparation. Let us also take up the prayer to the St Michael the Archangel, whose feast we celebrate this month, for the restoration of Christ’s wounded Church, and for the protection of the innocent:

Holy Michael, the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do you, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen

Fr Julian Large

August 2018 Letter from the Provost

The month of August is bathed in the glorious rays of Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven. This doctrine of the Faith was only given the official seal of dogmatic infallibility sixty seven years ago by Pope Pius XII. But the definition enshrined in Munificentissimus Deus, which was proclaimed at St Peter’s with all the splendour and majesty of the old papal ceremonies on 1st November 1950, was really a formality. It was the definitive recognition of a belief that Christians had held since the beginning. The Church was proclaiming that the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption had always been part of Her memory of events and belongs to the Deposit of Faith which was entrusted to the Apostles.

We have been given many ways of describing the Church, each of which helps us to understand a different aspect of Her nature and mission. She is the Barque of Peter, the divinely appointed vessel of salvation traversing the stormy seas of history throughout the ages, with the successors of the fisherman at Her helm. She is the Bride of Christ, born from Our Lord’s pierced side on the Cross just as Eve was formed from the side of Adam as he slept in the garden. She is united indissolubly to Her Divine Spouse and waits to greet Him when He returns to earth in Glory at the end of time. She is also the Mystical Body of Christ, into which we are incorporated as living members in our Baptism. Christ is the head of this Body, and from this head flows the supernatural life which unites us into a single whole, just as the soul which is the principle of life unites and animates all of the parts which form a single living organism.

By the time you have finished this sentence, around fifty million of the cells of your body will have died and been replaced (or so the trusting Provost read recently in a scientific journal). The truth is that our cells are dying and being replaced all the time, and yet we retain a continuity of memory and identity throughout a lifetime. Similarly, as the centuries roll on, generations of Catholics die and are replaced within the Church on earth, while all the time the Church retains Her own continuity of memory and identity. This means that when a dogma is proclaimed, She is not teaching anything new. All She is saying is that She was there when Our Lady was taken into Heaven, that She witnessed it happening through the eyes of the Apostles and that She has treasured that precious memory ever since. Dogmas are proclaimed with papal authority in order to clarify confusion and confute error, and, for the edification of the faithful and the glory of God, to ensure and promote authentic devotion to the Mysteries of salvation.

This is certainly not to say that the magnificent promulgation of Munificentissmus Deus was essentially a ‘non-event’. Heaven forbid. In an increasingly sceptical world it shot like a bolt of divine lightning across the firmament. In an age when Christians might be tempted to reduce the role of the Church to social activism, the solemn declaration of the Assumption is a powerful reminder of the profoundly supernatural character of our religion. It raises our hearts and mind to Heaven. Our Lady’s Assumption body and soul into that realm of everlasting bliss, where She reigns as Queen over the Angels and Saints, also brings Heaven much closer to us. If after the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord we were left in any doubt about the final destination of our own human bodies, the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption must dispel any doubt. Bodies do not just exist in a state, they exist in a place. In Heaven there are already two bodies that we know of, Our Lord’s and Our Lady’s. This makes Heaven a real place. And there is place there for our bodies as well as our souls.

The Immaculate Virgin is the New Eve because the obedience of Her fiat to the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation ushers in the invincible reversal of the dreadful consequences of Eve’s disobedience when she consented to the temptation of a fallen angel. Death is the result of Adam and Eve’s sin. The Incarnate Word, conceived in Our Lady’s womb at the moment when She uttered the words “Be it done unto me according to Thy word”, has overcome death in His Resurrection, and with the promised reunion of our souls and bodies at the end of time will come the fullness of salvation.

Our Lady’s Assumption has sublime implications for us then, and also for the Church as a whole. The Church on earth is called the Church Militant because we must constantly struggle against temptation and sin in our own hearts and against evils in the world around us. At times it might seem that evil is gaining ground, both because of our own failures and due to public scandals within the Church which inflict horrific damage on Her credibility and mission. The Assumption points us to that glorious moment when the Church Militant on Earth will be perfected and glorified as She is subsumed into the Church Triumphant in Heaven. Meanwhile, we ask the intercession of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven to help us in the task of beautifying the robes of the Bride of Christ with our virtues.

Fr Julian Large

July 2018 Letter from the Provost

Very early in Holy Scripture we are confronted with the presence of an evil personality, Satan, who comes to Eve in the form of a serpent. His appearance strikes a discordant note after an account which assures us of the intrinsic wholesomeness of the universe. Genesis informs us that at the end of each day of creation, God surveyed His work and “saw that it was good” (Gen 1). It is only as the Scriptures unfold that we learn that Satan belongs to a faction of an angelic order which, made in the image of God and blessed magnificently with Sanctifying Grace, had forfeited friendship with the Creator through an abuse of freedom of choice and an act of rebellion.

In the New Testament, Our Lord identifies the devil as “a murderer from the beginning” and the “father of lies” (Jn 8.44). We see how the devil earned this title in his first engagement with the human race, promising Eve that if only she and Adam would disobey God’s command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, then they would never die and would be like gods. Silly Eve forgets that she and Adam have already been blessed with immortality and that, being in a state of grace, they possess a supernatural likeness to God Who has shared His own divine life with them. In other words, the devil’s intention is to deprive the human race of the very goods which he is promising them. And because they prefer the word of the serpent over the promises of God, man falls from grace and sickness and no end of suffering become part of human existence.

A terrible and radical consequence of that original sin is death, in which man’s body returns to decay in the dust from which he was created and his soul becomes a disembodied entity. This is really a violation of what we human beings are at the most essential level of our being. In tempting us to sin, the devil achieves his aim of disfiguring the image of God which is emblazoned on our souls, spoiling God’s plan for our immortality and depriving us of the Sanctifying Grace which the devil threw away for himself forever.

Mercifully for us, this was not to be the end of the story. While the third chapter of Genesis deals with the calamitous fall of man, the rest of Holy Scripture is the account of God’s rescue plan. It culminates in a revelation of God’s love for mankind which confounds all intellectual powers of comprehension, with the God of all transcendence uniting Himself with our frail human flesh in the Incarnation, with God the Son opening His arms wide on the Cross to receive us into the harbour of His Sacred Heart, with His death, Resurrection and Ascension body and soul into Heaven. He leaves this earth in His visible form with the assurance that He remains with us in His Church, and with the promise that He will return in majesty and power to judge the living and the dead, when our bodies will be raised from the earth to be reunited with our souls in eternity (His desire is for this to be in Heaven and he will give us all the means needed to achieve this, but He respects our freedom and so our ultimate destination will depend on the choices we make now). The best news of all is that our Creator’s plan is for us to enjoy an existence more sublimely joyful and fulfilling than anything experienced by Adam and Eve in Paradise. And the King of Kings has established the beginnings of the Kingdom of Heaven already on earth, with the Beatitudes as the charter for making it a reality around us now.

A happy ending then. However, that sin of our first parents gave to Satan an entrée into human society, and anyone with eyes to see will recognize that the devil is all too present and all too active in the world around us. Our societies seem to facilitate his increase whenever they enact legislation which violates the very laws which God has written into human nature and which He gave to Moses amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, and wherever oppression of the most needy and vulnerable, such as the unborn, becomes institutionalized.

We must never forget that Satan is the father of lies. His intention is always to deprive us of the very goods which he promises us. He betrays his hand most obviously in conflicts between nations and in the degradations and miseries that accompany war. More subtle than all the beasts of the earth, however, he also acts insidiously within our ostensibly civilized institutions. He undermines the family and the education of the young in the name of equality and diversity. He convinces us that the only way of exercising responsible stewardship of our planet is by means of essentially misanthropic programmes of population control enforced through contraception and abortion. He promises us happiness if only we learn to be spiritual without being religious, knowing full well that authentic Catholic religion is the means that God has granted us to share in His divine life now and to enjoy perfect happiness in Heaven for eternity. The devil, by the way, is the ultimate personification of one who is “spiritual but not religious”. As a fallen angel he is pure spirit, but He refuses to genuflect before the Word made Flesh Who makes Himself present on the Altar at Holy Mass. As the father of lies he is quite capable of assuming the guise of humility and meekness in order to fool us, but he has made himself incapable of obedience to God’s commandments. In addition to tempting us as individuals, we can be sure that he also tempts the Church to abandon the Gospel of salvation through the way of the Cross in favour of political posturing, just as he tempted Our Lord and Saviour in the wilderness. His proposals for enlightenment, freedom and quality of life conceal his malicious agenda to ensnare us in a reign of darkness, enslavement and the culture of death.

Ultimately, however, the devil can only be as powerful in our lives as we allow him to be. Compared with the might and omnipotence of the Holy Spirit, he is miserably puny. Next to the beauty and splendour of the Holy Angels, he and his army of renegade demons are as dismal little germs. However, just as a minute bacteria can cause havoc in our body if it gains entry through some abrasion or ingestion, so may the devil bring ruin to our soul if we allow ourselves to flirt with his beguiling promises in preference to the word of God. He may even take possession of us if we are foolish enough to open the doors of our hearts to him by dabbling in the occult. Any exorcist will tell us that fortune telling, Ouija boards and other forms of esoteric divining are like an open invitation to those elements of the spiritual realm with which we would not wish to have any contact if only we saw them in their ugliness.

In our Baptism, we have been claimed for Christ, and restored to that supernatural likeness to God which was forfeited to the human race by the sin of Adam and Eve. The devil’s burning ambition is to deprive us of this Sanctifying Grace by means of mortal sin. After Baptism, the Sacrament of Penance is the most mighty weapon that Our Lord has provided to liberate us from the power of our enemy, along with devout reception of Holy Communion, always in a state of grace. Pray daily to St Michael and the Holy Angels, before whom demons tremble and flee. In our morning offering, invite our holy Guardian Angels to read the innermost secrets of our hearts to give them the advantage over our spiritual adversaries who have not been granted such a prerogative. Best of all, we are blessed with the loving care of a Mother in Heaven, the Second Eve Whose Immaculate Conception and whose fiat to St Gabriel at the Annunciation mark decisive victories in the invincible reversal of the consequences of the Fall. Ask Her to protect us always, keeping us close to Her like little children within the folds of Her garments. This most meek and gentle handmaid of the Lord fights with the ferocity of a tiger to protect Her young ones from predators and to bring us back to safety whenever we stray. Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray to Jesus for us. Holy Michael, Archangel, defend us in the day of battle.

Fr Julian Large

June 2018 Letter from the Provost

Last month the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an annual knees-up to raise money for its costume collection. Tickets for the event reportedly cost $30,000, and tables $250,000, and the publicity department is tasked with thinking up cautiously ‘controversial’ themes which will titillate fashion-correspondents without triggering the disapproval of the politically correct. This year’s was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Outfits at the fancy dress party included a predictable rag-bag of angel wings, plastic pontifical rings and heavily-apparelled copes. One entertainer managed to balance a whole Nativity set on her head, and another announced that she had come as the Final Judgment scene from the Sistine Chapel. The media the following morning was particularly taken with a female performer who tottered up the museum’s imposing staircase wearing a shimmering mini dress and a precious-looking baroque mitre described by press agencies as a “pope hat”.

Inevitably, the Provost’s breakfast was interrupted by a telephone call from a reporter asking if the Oratory fathers were offended by a public spectacle of such irreverence. Having explained that most of the fathers had probably never heard of the Met Gala Party, he begged permission to finish his toast and promised to think of something to say as the morning went on. If the journalist had been hoping to hear an explosion of spluttering indignation as lime marmalade went down the wrong way at this end of the telephone line then she must have been disappointed, and she never bothered to ring back for a sound bite.

It wasn’t that the Provost did not try his very best to formulate a protest. He reminded himself that the Holy Mass is the foundation stone of Christian civilisation, and for billions of us around the globe the most sacred event that takes place upon this earth. Parodying the vestments of the altar in what is supposed to be a temple of high culture must surely count as “inappropriate” if anything does. And certainly there was something pitiable about the spectacle of people who like to think of themselves as rather cosmopolitan and sophisticated making themselves look so ignorant and boorish. One could easily imagine these aristocrats of popular culture all shaking their expensively-coiffured heads in solemn accord about the brashness of a certain world leader, without having stopped for a single moment to reflect on the vulgarity of an occasion into which they had seen fit to thrown themselves with such abandon.

The truth, however, is that the Catholic religion does not really ‘do’ taking offence. Perhaps this makes us quaint in a modern culture in which ‘safe-spaces’ and ‘no-platforming’ have become de rigueur, but Our Lord’s injunction to turn the other cheek, and the example of those heroes of the Faith like our holy father St Philip who refused to take themselves very seriously, mean that while sticks and stones might break our bones, name-calling and mockery do not generally have the power to provoke us to fits of outrage. Certainly it can be argued that when Our Lord saw the Temple defiled he made a whip and sent the money changers flying, but the fact that in the new dispensation we are all made living temples of the Holy Ghost through Baptism means that most Christians today probably understand that event in the Gospel primarily in terms of self purification with the assistance of God’s Grace.

It is of course possible that the Met’s PR team was hoping to stir up a publicity storm by inciting wild-eyed fanatics to rain down threatening condemnations on the editor of Vogue magazine. If this was the case, they obviously picked the wrong religion. The reaction of a practising Catholic is more likely to be the not so newsworthy response of patience and prayer. While acknowledging the crassness of the occasion, we cannot read the inner secrets of the hearts of the organisers and participants and would not wish to judge their motives as malicious. We can pray for all involved. Perhaps the realisation that they have so publicly associated themselves with such a massive style-fail will help them to take themselves a little less seriously. A good dose of humility is a necessary mix in the foundations for the blessings God wishes to build in all of our lives.

At the London Oratory we still use the traditional style of vestments which largely inspired the costumes at that party. Some of the older sets were bought with generous donations from Irish immigrants who were fleeing famine in the 1850s. Threadbare after centuries of use and therefore of negligible monetary value, they are nevertheless very much part of what St Philip called “the patrimony of the poor.” Worshipping God in such beauty and solemnity at the altar, we should pause to ask ourselves how much we do as a community and a parish to honour Him in the most needy in our city today. If we were neglecting this essential part of the Christian mission it would mean that our use of splendid vestments and vessels in church was at least as grotesque and potentially more offensive to Almighty God than anything on display at that Metropolitan Museum fancy dress party. Examining our consciences regularly and carefully, we shall probably find there is always much room for improvement.

Fr Julian Large

May 2018 Letter from the Provost

Reading the newspapers, even (perhaps especially) some of the Catholic ones, we could easily end up thinking that the Catholic religion is all about issues. Can women be priests? Should the Church give Her blessing to the use of artificial birth control? Should the divorced and remarried be allowed to receive Holy Communion?

          These are all matters of importance. If the Church is to be faithful to Her identity as the pillar and foundation of Truth, (1 Tim 3.15) then Her teaching must always be continuous and consistent with principles that She has upheld and taught since the age of the Apostles. However, these particular questions have already been settled long ago. In that sense they are non-issues and a woeful diversion of energy. If we allow the orchestrated controversies that are being fabricated around them to become the main focus of our engagement with the Faith, then how shallow and how impoverished our spiritual lives must become. It will mean that we have allowed the media, and those whitewashed sepulchres who use the media to peddle their own agenda of confusion and division, to set the narrative for our lives as disciples. What ineffective and useless disciples we shall then become, and how sad for us that we shall never experience that Christian joy and the serenity of heart which Our Lord promises to us when He says “Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you” (Jn 14.27) – a promise repeated at every Mass, between the Consecration and Holy Communion.

          In the Gospels we see how the disciples were thrown into turmoil by the crucifixion. Shattered by the terrible events of Good Friday, they were fearful and confused. Even when Our Risen Lord appeared in their midst, they thought that they must be seeing a ghost. But when He showed them His hands and His feet, and the truth of what had really happened began to sink in, then their joy was so overwhelming that they were dumfounded. After eating a piece of fish before their eyes, He then explained to them how – if only they had been listening at the time – He had already told them while He was with them that He must be put to death before rising from the dead.

          The disciples had been so taken up by events that they had not really listened to the word of God even when the Word Himself had lived with them and taught them. But their experience of the Resurrection would change all of this. From then on the Apostles would be anchored in their Risen Lord, and the serenity, courage and joy this gave to them meant that, having been huddled together behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, they would now go boldly into the lion’s den itself to proclaim in the Temple, of all places, the good news that Christ was risen. Neither the furies of the Synagogue nor the steel and might of the Roman Empire would daunt them.

          We, like the Apostles, have the benefit of experiencing the Resurrection. We have experienced it first hand in Baptism, when we were raised from spiritual death and made temples of the Holy Ghost. We experience it in the Sacrament of Penance which lifts us from our sins and restores us to the life of grace. Above all, we experience it in Holy Communion, where we encounter Our Risen Lord and He feeds us with His living Body.

          In the Acts of the Apostles, we read about St Peter going into the thick of the lion’s den, and preaching the Resurrection to the Jews in the Temple. He does not hesitate to accuse them: “It was you who accused the Holy One, the Just One, you who demanded the reprieve of a murderer while you killed the Prince of Life.” But Peter concedes: “You did not know what you were really doing.” (Acts 3.13-17) In other words, the Jews who had called for the release of Barabbas and the death of the Saviour had been the victims of a fake news campaign, whipped up by leaders and their spin-doctors whose motivation was anything but spiritual. Those priests could probably have recited the verses of the Scriptures by rote, but their politicking and worldliness had made the word of God a dead letter to them. Rather than penetrating into their hearts and souls and transforming them, the Scriptures had become a tool to be wielded in the service of human power and status. No doubt the people had listened to the reading of the Scriptures in their synagogues just as we listen to them at Mass. But their interest in them had remained superficial, and so they were easily hoodwinked and manipulated into committing the most terrible crime.

          Where do we look for truth? In our own time, a culture of political spin and prevarication has created a severe crisis of credibility in public life, to such an extent that this age in which we are living has been called the post truth era. We are overwhelmed with conflicting information from all directions, but where, and to whom, should we go for the truth? If we are looking for the truth that brings us serenity of heart, then the best place to look is probably not in the newspapers, or on the internet or television. We shall most certainly find it in abundance in the Gospel. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were despondent. They had seen the one whom they had thought would be the Saviour of Israel denounced as a rebel by the same fickle crowd that only days before had welcomed Him as a hero. But when Our Lord joined them on the road and began to open the meaning of the Scriptures to them, then their hearts began to burn within them. They knew that this was no fake news. It was the real thing. Their lives were transformed by it.

          We must ask Our Lord to open the Scriptures to us. We need to put down our newspapers and turn away from our television and computer screens. We need to place ourselves in His presence and to sit down and read in a reflective and prayerful way the life-giving words of Holy Scripture. A good place to start, to keep the power and joy of Easter ever fresh in our hearts, is in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, and the Acts of the Apostles. No fake news there. Just the pure life-giving and liberating words of Divine Truth. The more we allow this Truth to penetrate our hearts, the freer we shall become from the tyranny of spin and emotionalism which spawn so much turmoil in our society and can create a frenetic atmosphere within the Church.

          Having experienced the Resurrection in Baptism, may we always be anchored, like the Apostles, in Our Risen Lord. We must not allow the controversies and acrimonious debates that fly around us to be a distraction from the business of getting to know Him better, and giving Him room to speak in our hearts, and cultivating the quietness that will enable us to listen to Him. The Blessed Virgin, who “kept these things and pondered them in Her heart” (Lk 2.19) and Who remained united with Her Son during His Passion while others fled, is our model of the contemplative reading of the Scriptures.  Our holy father St Philip, whose apostolate coincided with a period of violent upheavals within Christendom, is our model of Christian joy throughout adversity.

          Let us pray for peace in the world, and peace in the Church. Let us ask Our Lady and St Philip, during this their month of May, to gain for us ever greater peace of heart, so that we might be more effective disciples.

Fr Julian Large