June 2022 Letter from the Provost

June 2022 Letter from the Provost

The liturgical texts of Eastertide have enabled us to participate in the joy of the Apostles, who enjoyed a precious forty days with Our Lord after His Resurrection, as He talked with them, taught them and dined with them. We have also witnessed the astonishing and wonderful effect that their encounter with our risen Lord had upon them. From fugitives huddled together behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, they became fearless evangelisers, preaching the news of the Resurrection throughout Jerusalem, even returning to the heart of lions’ den, the Temple. We can imagine the apprehension that the disciples must have felt when Our Lord explained that, after this period of contact and communication with His disciples, He must soon depart. However, He told them not to be sorrowful, but rather to rejoice. And we rejoice not only for God the Son, Who, mission accomplished, would now go to His Father in Heaven; we also rejoice for ourselves, in the knowledge that He has gone to prepare a place for us, taking His humanity and flesh and making Heaven a real ‘place’ for us.

If Our Lord had remained on earth in the form in which He walked and talked with the disciples after His Resurrection, then the Church would necessarily have remained a local phenomenon, focussed on where He happened to be present at any particular time. By His Ascension, He made way for the descent of the Holy Ghost on Our Lady and the Apostles at Pentecost, an event which really marks the birth of the Church as a truly Catholic entity, universally present in every subsequent age and spreading throughout all parts of the earth. Just as the soul maintains a continuity of memory and identity throughout the life of a human being as the individual cells of our bodies die and are replaced, so the Holy Ghost ensures the Church’s organic unity, and Her own continuity of memory and identity in every age, as generations of Catholics come and go.

The Gospel – that is, that Catholic Faith, including everything we need to know and to do to be saved (‘faith and morals’), as contained in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition – forms what is known as the Deposit of Faith. The Church has always taught that this Deposit of Faith was completed and sealed with the death of the last Apostle. This means that after St John the Evangelist, who died towards the end of the First Century A.D., there would be no new revelation until the return of Our Lord in glory to judge the living and the dead. The teaching mission of the Church, invested in the bishops as successors of the Apostles, is to safeguard, unpack and proclaim this Deposit of Faith in every generation. The presence of the Holy Ghost enables Her to proclaim this holy Gospel with nothing added and nothing subtracted.

Our Lord warned us to expect false prophets teaching in His name. In our own day we witness, and possibly experience ourselves, the spiritual turbulence caused by the stirring up of controversies over settled doctrines, most often in the area of morals. In Germany the dissenters have become so radical and loud that there is talk of open schism, but these problems are by no means confined to the Teutonic world. It is striking how often the innovators claim the Holy Spirit as their guide and inspiration. They should be more cautious: Our Lord has warned us of the dire consequences awaiting those who sin directly against the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. The confusion caused by these sterile debates, which dissipates the Church’s missionary energy, suggests that their source is not the Holy Spirit at all, but rather that spirit whom Our Lord identified as a deceiver and a murderer of souls from the beginning.

We must pray for the Church, then, as She navigates these choppy waters. We should, not, however, allow ourselves to be unsettled. If Our Lord has warned us to expect the appearance of hireling shepherds among the flock, then this is to prepare us in order that our faith might be tested and purified. We do not need to be drawn into fruitless controversies. Let the dead bury the dead. We, meanwhile, must look for our salvation and sanctification in living and sharing the Faith that has been taught with constancy and clarity down the centuries, turning our backs on anything that is in contradiction with the Deposit of Faith as received and lived by countless generations of saints. May the Holy Ghost guide, protect and purify the Church Militant, and keep us true to the Faith of our fathers; the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith, undiluted and uncontaminated by ambiguity and error.

Father Julian Large

May 2022 Letter from the Provost

May 2022 Letter from the Provost

Trying to imagine what Heaven is like must ultimately turn out to be a frustrating exercise. The utter perfection of Heaven and the nature of existence there necessarily transcend all earthly experience. The Holy Scriptures inform us that no mortal man can look upon the face of God and live. To enjoy directly the vision of Almighty God – and this is the essence of life in Heaven – a soul must be elevated to a new level of existence. In Baptism we have already been raised supernaturally to the state of Grace, so that we are able to participate in the life of the Blessed Trinity. And in Our Saviour, Who is God made man, the divine is communicated to us through the medium of His perfect human nature. But to see God face to face in His divine essence we need not only to be in a state of Grace, but to be lifted further again to a new and higher plane altogether – to the state of Glory. This is something that can happen only after we have died and been purified of all remaining effects of sin on our souls.

The Beatific Vision, then, is not really possible for us to visualise with any effectiveness. The Ascension of Our Lord, which we celebrate this month, does however make a great difference to our limited perception of Heaven. It brings Heaven much closer to us. When Christ ascended there, He did not leave His humanity behind. He ascended in His Body, taking His full humanity with Him. This means that human flesh is now enthroned at the right hand of the Father. The marks of the wounds from His Passion may have been glorified as a sign of His triumph over suffering and death, but those wounds are still present, as an everlasting testimony of His tender love for each one of us.

As a Mystery of the Faith, the Ascension serves to humble our human reason. When philosophers deign to acknowledge the existence of God, they consider it more ‘rational’ to suppose that, being a spirit, God is in every place, and in no one place more than any other. As Christians we can answer yes, maybe, but on a certain day in the history of our world, this pure supreme Spirit adopted our human nature and united Himself with our human flesh in the Incarnation, and since His glorious Ascension, He reigns in that flesh in Heaven. If we were left in any doubt about the implications of this for our own bodies, then the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin body and soul into Heaven at the end of Her earthly life is our guarantee that our bodies as well as our souls have been created for everlasting life. A body does not exist in just a ‘state’ but in a place, and so the presence of at least two bodies in Heaven makes it a real place for us, albeit a place in which our bodies are to be perfected, ‘spiritualised’ and glorified forever.

Since Our Lord’s Ascension, the Church has lived in eager expectation of His return in Glory. It is at this ‘Second Coming’ that our mortal remains will be raised from the dust to be reunited with our souls in eternity (we pray, in Heaven). Meanwhile, we must carry on our earthly lives in a realm of light and shadows. Look at the world today. Of course, there are great opportunities that never existed before, including opportunities for doing good that never existed before. But there is also much anxiety at the present time, and fear about what the future holds. In this fallen world, earthbound solutions to human problems often take us to the abyss of conflict and all the miseries which attend it. Many live in terror of death and injury from war and terrorism. And if our vision, as Christians, is allowed to become earthbound, then we shall easily end up disheartened, debilitated, and of little use in building the Kingdom of God in the here-and-now.

Meditating on Our Lord’s Ascension liberates us from this earthbound mentality. When injustice and hubris seem to be gaining the upper hand down here, we raise our eyes to Heaven and we receive hope and courage from the knowledge that justice, humility and charity will ultimately prevail. In sickness we are sustained by the knowledge that in Heaven these broken and worn-out bodies will be renewed and made whole, released from earthly frailties forever. In the pain of bereavement, we live in the hope of reunion, in Christ, with those whom we have loved and lost for a while. In conflict, we receive the courage to fight for a just peace, in the knowledge that even if the odds seem stacked against us, the ultimate victory must be on the side of justice.

At the Roman Oratory, a Father who died a few years ago used to tell the congregation that if they wanted to imagine what Heaven is like they should look up at the interior of the dome in the Chiesa Nuova to the magnificent frescoes depicting Our Lord, Our Lady and St Philip surrounded by a host of angels and saints. This masterpiece by Pietro da Cortona is probably as close as we shall come in this life to a vision of what awaits those who die in God’s friendship. The artworks in the sanctuary of the London Oratory church are not quite in the same league, but surely only the most stringent aesthete would deny they possess devotional value. Next time you come into our church, please make time to meditate on the images of the angels and saints in the presence of Almighty God, and allow your hearts to be lifted heavenwards.

Father Julian Large

April 2022 Letter from the Provost

April 2022 Letter from the Provost

Insofar as it is an excessive exultation of human achievements and capabilities, triumphalism can only ever be an impediment to the Church’s mission. Any deviation from the path of humility exemplified in the life and ministry of Our Saviour inevitably takes us into a dead end in which we cannot expect Him to bless our efforts. Being members of the Church Militant on earth involves struggling, with God’s grace, against our own frailties, and allows no quarter to any sense of self-sufficiency. Convincing ourselves of our own invincibility is a hubris that inevitably carries us to the precipice of failure.

The Church’s celebration of Easter, however, is exceedingly and unabashedly triumphal. At the Easter Vigil the organ thunders loud and clear and an explosion of bells fills the church at the intonation of the Gloria, while altars decked with reliquaries and ornaments are made to resemble ancient Roman trophy monuments. This is exactly how it should be. The threefold Alleluia sung before the Gospel, and all the liturgical accoutrements which make the solemn paschal liturgy unique and beautiful, are not meant to extol any achievement of man. We are rejoicing, with as much splendour as we can muster on earth, in the definitive triumph of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ over sin and death. What is there not to celebrate?

Nevertheless, an observer from outside our religion might well question our sanity. What, he might ask two thousand years after the event, do we have to show today for Our Lord’s conquest over evil in the tomb? Renewed conflict in Europe, with reports of appalling cruelty and suffering, must surely cast a shadow over our celebrations? Meanwhile, the anticipation with which we have been looking forward to Easter will, for Christians in some parts of the world, have been marred by a severe sense of trepidation. In recent years they have become used to the fact that terrorists launch their most deadly attacks on churches during great feasts while large crowds are worshipping together. And within the Church, it sometimes seems as if a political culture of spin and prevarication is in danger of derailing the proclamation of the Gospel and the credibility that only comes through transparency and clarity. Perhaps this indicates a curiously modern form of triumphalism, which attempts to exercise power by means of worldly wiles rather than trusting in the power of the Incarnate Truth.

Despite appearances, however, the triumph of the Resurrection is definitive. It means that the outcome of the final conflict between good and evil, which will reach its denouement when Our Lord returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, is already decided. The devil and his angels are to be cast into hell forever. Every battle which occurs between now and then is a skirmish. Yes, Satan and his legions continue to wage ferocious guerrilla warfare against the reign of the King of Kings, and at times it looks as if we are losing ground. What matters in eternity, however, is not that we have been seen by the world to be victorious, but rather that we ally ourselves with the side to which we know the ultimate victory has already been granted. God does not tell us we have to be successful, but He does require that we remain faithful. The Resurrection of Our Lord, and His Ascension Body and Soul into Heaven where He has prepared a place for us, assure us where that final triumph lays.

At the beginning of Lent, Our Lord went into the wilderness, inspired by the Holy Ghost. There the devil promised Him success if he only He would impress Jerusalem by turning stones into bread and throwing Himself off the roof of the Temple into the arms of angels, and even offered Him all the kingdoms of the earth on condition that he bow down and worship him. God the Son, however, had not come to snatch possession of this world by means of novelties and gestures, or to conduct backdoor diplomacy with the enemy of mankind. Rather, He came to purchase humanity back by paying the price of our sins in an offering of perfect love on the Cross. His Resurrection, and His promise to us that we may participate eternally in the life of this Resurrection, are the guarantee that the Sacrifice on Calvary was effective and that we are able to be saved.

If triumphalism is incompatible with the meekness personified in Our Lord, defeatism is equally detrimental to the Church’s mission. We become defeatist when we recognise our own propensity to sin, the evils embedded in our society, or the wickedness of a godless regime, and tell ourselves that these evils are here to stay and so we might as well accommodate them. The Resurrection means that evil has a very definite sell-by date. With God’s assistance, we must combat it at all costs if we wish to be part of the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

Fr Julian Large

March 2022 Letter from the Provost

March 2022 Letter from the Provost

Our holy father St Philip liked to tell anyone who tried to praise him that they would one day see him hanged in Rome. Those hearing this who outlived him for long enough would have seen this strange prophecy come true on 12th March 1622, when his effigy was emblazoned on a banner suspended from the interior of the dome of St Peter's Basilica for his canonisation. This ceremony has been described as the most impressive event of its kind in the history of the Church. Canonisations at this time were few and far between. Only three saints had been raised to the altars between 1492 and 1587, each at separate ceremonies. In March 1622, St Philip's banner was accompanied by those of St Ignatius Loyola, St Francis Xavier, St Teresa of Ávila and St Isidore Agricola. Afterwards, the Romans quipped with characteristic chauvinism that Pope Gregory XV had canonised four Spaniards and a saint.

This month, we celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of this magnificent occasion in the life of the Church and of the Oratory. The Oratory Parish Magazine from April 1922 contains detailed information of the tercentenary celebrations when 'the children of St Philip gathered in their thousands' in the church. The author of the account writes that finding the Oratory in such a festal mode on a Sunday in Lent, strangers coming into the church 'may well have thought that we had all gone mad'. Even those visitors who did not question the sanity of the Fathers may have been a little startled to hear the Alleluia being sung at the High Mass during the penitential season. 1922 was a particularly significant anniversary, being marked in Rome by the transference of St Philip's body to a new crystal casket, which was carried in solemn procession through the quarters of Rome most associated with the saint, before being placed under the altar in St Philip's chapel at the Chiesa Nuova.

Three of the Spaniards canonised with St. Philip were his contemporaries: St Teresa of Ávila, St Ignatius Loyola and St Francis Xavier. While still a layman in Rome in the 1540s, Philip made the acquaintance of St Ignatius, whose face he described as 'resplendent', and who nicknamed him 'the bell'. St Ignatius seems to have meant by this that just as a church bell summons others into church while remaining in the belfry, so St Philip directed men into the religious life (including a good number into the Society of Jesus), while remaining outside himself. The Society of Jesus had been formally established in 1540, and St Francis Xavier, the Church's greatest missionary since St Paul, had been hard at work evangelising heathens in the east for a good decade by the time St Philip was ordained to the priesthood in 1551. As the first Oratory crystallised around him in his rooms at the church of San Girolamo Della Carità, where his disciples came for confession, prayer and meditation on the word of God, the reading out loud of letters sent back to Rome from the Jesuit missionaries in the East became a staple part of the early exercises of the Oratory.

For St Philip and his companions, the hardships endured by the Jesuit missionaries were reminiscent of the trials faced by the early Christian martyrs whose relics were being excavated in the Roman Catacombs at this time to be distributed around Christendom for the veneration of the faithful. So inspired were the members of the embryonic Oratory that they resolved to offer themselves for missionary service overseas, where they prayed that God would give them the grace to shed their blood in the service of the Gospel. This was not to be. A Cistercian mystic informed St Philip that his Indies would be Rome, where his mission was to contribute to the renewal of holiness within the eternal city. As the Oratory became a force within its own right in the glorious revival in the Church's life which came to be called the Counter-Reformation, St Philip faced many tribulations, misunderstandings, calumnies and, on occasion, downright persecution at the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities. Throughout these challenges, the trials endured by St Francis Xavier and the agonies which the Jesuit missionaries faced on their missions always remained a source of inspiration and encouragement to St Philip and the early Oratorians.

On Saturday 12th March, we shall celebrate a Solemn High Mass at 11am to mark the quatercentenary of the canonisation of St Philip, in gratitude especially for all of the blessings which the intercession our holy father has gained for us at the London Oratory. We share our joy with the Society of Jesus, remembering the significant, if indirect, contribution the missionary efforts of Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier made to the formation of our own institute; and with the Carmelites, as we all give thanks for St Teresa of Ávila and the extraordinary enrichment of the Church's spiritual life which God achieved through her. In these troubled times, we beg the intercession of Our Lady, St Philip and all the four Spaniards canonised with him, especially for peace in the world. By the grace of God, may the Oratory still be ministering to the faithful in Brompton in 2122 for the 500th anniversary, and beyond.

Father Julian Large

February 2022 Letter from the Provost

February 2022 Letter from the Provost

We have been given various images of the Church which help us to understand what it means to be Christian and Catholic. One such image is that of the Church as the Barque of Peter, in which we are carried through the choppy waters of this world with the assurance that, as long as we hold tight and remain on board, then we shall never be shipwrecked, fiercely though the waves and storms might crash.

Another image is that of the Church as the Bride of Christ. This emphasises the indissolubility of the union between Our Lord and His Church, which was born mystically from the wound in His side on the Cross, just as Eve was formed from the side of Adam in Genesis.

But perhaps the most informative image of the Church, and the one that gives us the deepest understanding of how we are made members of the Church and how we live in the Church, is to be found in the Epistles of St Paul, who tells us that the Church is the Body of Christ. We are incorporated into that Body as living members in our Baptism.

This divinely inspired analogy furnishes us with rich material for reflection. The human body is made of a finely balanced concoction of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus, with smaller amounts of potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium. Break us down into our basic physical components and separate us into test tubes and we each end up resembling one of those chemistry sets that as children we all asked for at Christmas so that we could construct home-made explosives in our parents’ attics.

What binds all of those chemicals and minerals into a single functioning organism is that principle of life which we call the soul. And what makes us a human person is a rational, soul, which not only gives us physical life, but which is spiritual and immortal.

When Saint Paul says that we are members of the Body of Christ, he means that we are incorporated into Christ just as completely as our heart, our brain and our eyes are incorporated into us, by the principle of life which makes us not just a pile of chemicals but a unified living organism. The principle of life that binds the members of the Church into one Body is supernatural. It is Sanctifying Grace – the Life of Our Risen Saviour Himself, poured into our hearts in Baptism. Our Lord is the Head of this Mystical Body to which we belong. This Mystical Body of Christ and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing.

If you want to read more about this, there is a magnificent encyclical called Mystici Corporis Christi which was published in 1943, during the Second World War, by His Holiness Pope Pius XII. It is written with great clarity and coherence, and is freely available online, including on the Vatican website (Vatican.va).

This teaching that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ has wonderful implications. In a human body, our cells are constantly dying and being replaced, so that by the end of a long life, most of our cells will have died and been replaced several times; yet we remain the same person because, although the physical material of our body might have changed, we retain a continuity of identity and memory.

Likewise in the Church, the Faithful come and they go, and all the while the Church retains Her own identity and Her own memory. There have been roughly fifty generations of the human race since the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Our Lord. And yet the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are as fresh in the Church's memory as if they happened within the last week. Indeed, at Holy Mass, the Sacrifice of Calvary is made present on the altar during the words of Consecration, and Our Lord feeds us with His Risen Living Body in Holy Communion. We are fed with His Body so that we might be made ever-stronger members of His Mystical Body, the Church. He transforms bread into His own Flesh so that when we consume that Flesh, we are in turn transformed more perfectly into His likeness. It is through this sanctification that the Church on earth is made strong and holy.

This is a supernatural reality of which we must never lose sight. When we look at the Church, we see that She has many problems and wounds. Witnessing this, and living through these problems – especially when so many of them seem to be self-inflicted – it is easy to become hypercritical. But the spirit of hypercriticism soon dissipates our energy, so that we end up becoming a part of the problem, rather than a solution to the malaise. This can only be a victory for the devil, who aims to neutralise our evangelical zeal by dragging us down into bitterness, apathy and despair. Let us not give him any satisfaction. There is actually something very practical and positive that we can all do for the Church, and this is to say yes, in the depth of our hearts, to the call to discipleship and to sanctification that we all received in our Baptism.

A body is only as strong and healthy as its individual organs, limbs and cells. If we really want to help the Church, then we should look to our own spiritual health. So yes, in many ways the Church on earth is in a frightful mess. But if we make sure that we are healthy, functioning cells in the Mystical Body of Christ, then we shall do all in our power, by God's grace, to contribute to the restoration and the healing of this body. And we shall then participate in the full glory of the Mystical Body of Christ forever in Heaven, where the Church Militant on earth and the Church Suffering in Purgatory will one day be subsumed into the Church Triumphant for eternity.

Father Julian Large

January 2022 Letter from the Provost

January 2022 Letter from the Provost

An elderly Catholic prelate was recently asked what he believes to be the secret of a peaceful retirement. After a few moments of reflection, His Lordship replied: ‘Try not to watch television. And if you do, never watch the news’.

The Provost must admit that he has a singular weakness for television. Were it not for the difficulty of negotiating the plethora of remote control devices required to switch on a modern set and find a watchable channel, and for his sacerdotal duties, he could happily spend days on end engrossed in re-runs of It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Are You Being Served?, The Good Life and, best of all, The Les Dawson Show. He has, however, no temptation at all to the watch the news, and made a conscious decision to avoid it altogether at the beginning of the Coronavirus panic when the mainstream news services, and one broadcasting corporation in particular, eschewed reasoned caution and common sense in favour of a frenzied panic-mongering that seemed positively calculated to induce mass psychosis and hysteria.

It has been said that we live in a ‘post truth society’. Last month, on Gaudete Sunday, we had the great joy of welcoming a dear friend back to the Oratory after what had been a considerable hiatus, when His Eminence George Cardinal Pell returned to celebrate a Pontifical High Mass. Anyone who followed the trial of His Eminence in 2018 in Melbourne, a travesty of justice which led to a good man approaching his 80th birthday languishing in jail in solitary confinement for 404 days, will, or should, have realised just how pervasive and pernicious the bias, not to say the diabolical mendacity, of the media can be. The good Cardinal was to a large extent the victim of trial by media, which, with one or two honourable exceptions, treated the grotesque allegations against ‘the defendant’ as if their veracity were a foregone conclusion. One painful aspect of the saga was witnessing how many decent and intelligent, but it has to be said foolish, people were taken in by a media narrative which, even at its most bombastically vitriolic, could not disguise the inconsistencies and absence of substantial evidence presented by the prosecution. One can only hope and pray that, realising how misled they allowed themselves to be in this case, those who were bamboozled by what they read and listened to will now have learnt never to allow the propaganda and dishonesty of a generally biased media to form their world view, or indeed to colour their opinions on any important issue of the day. All too often, if we read about something in the newspapers, hear it on the wireless, or watch it on the television, and it concerns something about which we happen to know the ins and outs, we soon realise that what we are being told is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth.

If we wish to make a good New Year's resolution, perhaps we should consider taking the advice of the venerable prelate mentioned at the beginning of this letter, and boycotting the news – and especially those news sources that stoke social anxieties and would have us living in a constant state of fear and suspicion of our neighbours. As Catholics, we have a source of news that is infallibly trustworthy, and this is the Good News of the Gospel. On the Feast of the Epiphany, we have great cause for celebration, as we commemorate the manifestation of our Incarnate God to the Gentiles in the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Our Lord in the Jordan, which is His promise to us of our participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity, and the marriage at Cana at which water is transformed into wine in a sign of Transubstantiation.

Perhaps, despite all of this, at the beginning of this new year we find it hard to summon up much joy. Restrictions which we were told twenty months ago would only last for two weeks seem to have evolved into an endless cycle, and to have become the occasion for the roll-out of a surveillance structure which Herod and Chairman Mao might both have envied. Meanwhile, in a Church whose mission and credibility in modern times have been hobbled by abuses of power and betrayals of trust, many Catholics struggling to be faithful to the Gospel feel beleaguered and despised by the very shepherds from whom they might have hoped to find encouragement and fatherly solicitude. We must not, however, allow any of this to disturb our peace unduly, or to spoil our rejoicing in the Mysteries of the Epiphany which so luminously announce the salvation that is in our midst. If God is allowing His faithful to be sifted, and permitting His Mystical Body to suffer, then this can only be for a purpose known to the Divine Mind. We must trust in His Providence and unite whatever ills we must endure with the Passion of Our Lord. The fake news that has so much of the world in its grip must ultimately be destroyed in the light of the Gospel, just as surely as the Resurrection followed the Crucifixion. At the beginning of this new year, let us immerse ourselves in the Good News which strengthens us for whatever battles lie ahead.

Father Julian Large

December 2021 Letter from the Provost

December 2021 Letter from the Provost

After a highly publicised “private visit” to the Vatican, the current incumbent of the White House told the press he had been assured on the highest authority that he was “a good Catholic” and should continue receiving Holy Communion. In view of this same professional politician's famous declaration during his election campaign that “We choose truth over facts”, and in the absence of any confirmation of his recent statements regarding Holy Communion from the relevant Roman authorities, we can probably be forgiven for wondering if this man's understanding of what constitutes reality coincides to any meaningful extent with that of most ordinary mortals. However, his claim on its own provides a useful lesson insofar as it illustrates an error which is common among the poorly catechised: the notion that Holy Communion is a reward for being good.

St John the Evangelist warns us that “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity” (1 Jn 1:8). When we talk about "worthy reception" of Holy Communion, we cannot mean any intrinsic worthiness of our own, but rather the supernatural Sanctifying Grace that animates the soul of someone in a state of grace and is a gift from God. It is hard to imagine even a saint as near-perfect as our own St Philip calling himself, or allowing anyone else to describe him as, “a good Catholic”. When St Philip beat his breast at the triple “Domine non sum dignus” before consuming the Sacred Host during his own celebration of Holy Mass, the trembling of his body reverberated around the whole church.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaias, God remonstrates wearily with the rulers of Israel: “I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats...incense is an abomination to me” (Is 1:11,13). When we consider that it was God Himself who had required these oblations in the first place, we realise that it is not the sacrifices themselves but rather the spirit in which they are offered that is sickening to God. The hands of those publicly going through the motions of offering sacrifice are, in fact, stained with the blood of the innocent, the poor and the vulnerable. Ostentatious observance of religion without inward conversion of heart is something of which we should all be wary, and the instrumentalisation of religious practice for political advantage is an abomination in the sight of God. The only sacrifice acceptable before the Throne of Grace, we are told, is offered with repentance: “a contrite and humble heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps 50:19).

Applied to our experience as Catholics today, this means that we must first have repented of our sins before approaching the altar rails for Holy Communion. This is not to insist that we must be in a state of “perfection” (who would claim that?); but it does require that any mortal sins first be confessed and absolved in the Sacrament of Penance, which must always be accompanied by a purpose of amendment. Mortal sins, which extinguish Sanctifying Grace in the soul, involve grave matter, and to qualify as mortal must have been committed with freedom of action and full knowledge of the gravity of the sin. Voting in favour of barbaric laws that facilitate the slaughter of innocent children, and prioritising policies to repeal legal protections for the unborn, undeniably constitute grave matter. It might be argued that the other two criteria could, in a particular instance, be mitigated to the point of absence on the grounds of mental incapacity caused by cerebral decline, but even if this were the case then it would clearly be highly inappropriate for someone of high profile who had committed such crimes against the Divine Law to be seen receiving Holy Communion without having first made a public statement of repentance. To receive the Blessed Sacrament in a state of mortal sin is to commit an additional sin of sacrilege, earning further punishment in hell. A pastor who, out of human respect, failed to warn a member of his flock against this dreadful peril to his soul in such circumstances would obviously endanger his own salvation, as well as that of his feted victim.

As Christmas, approaches, we prepare to celebrate the sublime event of the Incarnation, when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Son, became man in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. The King of all creation chose to be born into the humblest of circumstances for a purpose. He might have come in splendour, but it was ordained that this would only happen at His Second Coming when He is to return in majesty, in the company of legions of angels, to judge the living and the dead. On that first coming He arrived in poverty and was laid in a manger. This was so that we might be moved to offer Him a home in our hearts. Bethlehem means ‘House of Bread’. That manger was a feeding trough. On the Altar the Word becomes Flesh once again so that we may adore Him and consume Him. To participate most fully in the joy of Christmas, we should prepare ourselves during Advent, in spite of all our unworthiness, to make the best possible Holy Communion. Adorned with the practice of the virtues and supernaturally enlivened with Sanctifying Grace, may our contrite, shriven and charitable hearts become the beautiful palace that was denied to the King of Kings in His Nativity. Wishing you a peaceful, prayerful Advent, and a very blessed Christmas.

Father Julian Large

November 2021 Letter from the Provost

November 2021 Letter from the Provost

The sardonic observation that nothing in this world is certain except for death and taxes is usually attributed to the eighteenth-century polymath, Freemason and American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. Some of those rich enough to afford expensive accountants actually do quite an impressive job of avoiding taxation. The pursuit of immortality, meanwhile, has apparently become a popular subject of conversation among the sort of billionaire “philanthropists” and their star-struck groupies who annually descend on the Swiss canton of Graubünden in fleets of private jets to bemoan the evils of carbon emissions and inequality. Not long before the Coronavirus struck, a lifestyle feature appeared in the Guardian with the fascinating title “How to live forever: meet the extreme life extensionists”. The article introduced its readers to James Strole, a businessman from Arizona and founder of something called the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, which promotes initiatives aimed at prolonging human life “not by days and weeks, but by decades and even centuries, to the degree that mortality becomes optional – an end to The End”. The Coalition's promotional literature is bullish: “The deathist paradigm has to go... It's time to look beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited living”. It describes its supporters as “early adopting advocates, numbering in the thousands”. The Guardian article informs us that the community of life-extensionists “includes venture capitalists and Silicon Valley billionaires [...] who consider death undesirable and appear to have made so much money they require infinite life to spend it”.

We should pray that it will not be long before Christian missionaries penetrate into the darkest depths of Silicon Valley to proclaim to its indigenous tribes the Good News that “the deathist paradigm” has in fact already been long dead and buried. It was conquered definitively between the first Good Friday and the Easter Sunday that followed it, two millennia ago in Jerusalem. And while immortality does not come cheaply – it was paid for in a currency of infinite value, the Precious Blood of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus on the Cross – it is offered freely to all to seek it with a contrite and humble heart. The Catholic Church has been in the business of offering the world the option of “unlimited living” ever since that first Easter Sunday. In the Sacrament of Baptism, we die with Christ and are buried with Him. Emerging from the waters of regeneration, we are raised from the tomb with Our Lord, and filled with everlasting life. At the font, we receive the vocation to keep dying to ourselves in this life so that the Life of the Resurrection might take ever greater possession of our souls. At the Altar we are able to unite ourselves daily with the Death of Our Lord in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and to partake of His Living Risen Body in Holy Communion. Thanks to the Resurrection, and to our participation in the Resurrection through the Sacraments, life has the last word over death for eternity.

Those looking for a solution for the problem of death would do well to examine how death became a reality in the first place. Never intended for us by our Creator, death entered the human story only after our first parents allowed themselves to be beguiled by the false promises of the Father of Lies. Tempting Eve to take the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Serpent assured her that she and Adam would be like God and never die. The opposite was true. Owing to the breach of faith occasioned by that first sin, the immortality and supernatural likeness with which our first parents had been endowed were forfeited for humanity. The consequences included suffering, sickness and, most radical of all, the separation of body and soul which is death. We need to learn our lesson that when men try to usurp the place of God, the outcome is never pretty.

During this month of November, our minds are lifted to contemplate the reality of everlasting life, first of all on the great feast of All the Saints, those who have died in Sanctifying Grace and whose souls are already in Heaven, enjoying the Beatific Vision and awaiting the restoration of their bodies at the end of time. They have such a capacity for love that they are granted an eternity to share it and to participate in God's glory. They intercede for us at the Throne of Grace, and invite us to friendship with them so that they might provide us with particular assistance in our needs. The following day, we commemorate the Souls of the Faithful Departed. We call them the Holy Souls, because they died in the State of Grace and their place in Heaven is assured. In this sense they are better off than us, because on earth we must work out our salvation in fear and trembling. But they are also the Poor Souls, because they suffer in Purgatory until they are perfectly purified for entry into Heaven. The Church teaches that we may speed them on this journey, with celebrations of the Holy Mass, by our sacrifices and prayers and through the gaining and application of Holy Indulgences, and that this is a great act of charity. The black vestments and unbleached candles of All Souls really set the tone for this month. Let us remember to pray for the Holy Souls, in the assurance that the Saints are interceding for us, and give thanks that death has been conquered by love.

Father Julian Large

October 2021 Letter from the Provost

October 2021 Letter from the Provost

If we had to sum up our Holy Catholic Faith in two words, we would probably have to say “Jesus Christ”. This is because everything about our religion must ultimately have its beginning and its end in Him. The theological discipline concerned specifically with the study of Who and What Christ is called Christology. Since roughly the 1960s, a certain school of Christology has tended to be nurtured in some of the trendier theology faculties. The “Jesus” whom we encounter here ends up resembling a rather drippy singer-songwriter of a none-too-memorable psychedelic band. This figment of the imagination of mid-century theologians is so eminently insipid that his message is platitudinous to a fault, and invariably inoffensive.

What a different Jesus we find if we open the Holy Scriptures. In the Gospels, not a single banality ever passes His lips. And when it serves the cause of the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and the salvation of souls, Our Lord is ready and able to say things that are clearly intended to be stingingly offensive to those whom He addresses. Think of when He says to the Scribes and the Pharisees: “Woe unto you hypocrites! You are like whitened sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but within are full of dead men's bones and all filthiness!”; or the occasion on which He tells the Pharisees that they can go and tell Herod that he is a devious old fox. If we consider that Our Lord's cousin John the Baptist called the Sadducees a brood of vipers to their faces, then we might well wonder if this facility for vituperation is something that ran in the family, at least among the men.

It is notable, of course, that these insults are never aimed at the little people – the poor or the sick, or repentant sinners looking for forgiveness. They are reserved exclusively for the great and the good, the rulers and especially the religious hierarchy of this world. The most devastating reproach of all is by no means an exception to this rule. When Our Lord outlines what He must suffer in Jerusalem, and Peter takes Him aside to remonstrate with Him, Our Lord upbraids Peter with the shocking words “Get behind me, Satan.”

This terrible rebuke looks all the more extraordinary when we see it in its full context. The Holy Gospel of St Matthew informs us that it comes just moments after Our Lord has declared Simon to be Peter, the rock on which He will build His Church, and granted to Peter the keys of the Kingdom. And then, almost in the same breath, there He is calling His newly minted first-ever Pope “Satan.”

Peter's fault is that, at this stage, he still has his eye on a beautiful jewelled crown and a gleaming gilded throne for Our Lord. His keenness to deflect his Master from His mission to die for our sins is all too reminiscent of the temptations which the devil dangled before Our Lord during His fasting in the wilderness:  “Turn these stones into bread – feed the masses and you will have them in your pocket! Throw yourself off this Temple, let the populace gaze in amazement as the Angels catch you in their arms...hypnotise the media with novelties and sensational gestures. Bow down and worship me, kowtow to the politburos and steering committees of this world, and I shall give you all the kingdoms of the earth. Peter did not yet see – would not allow himself to understand – that Our Lord's throne on this earth had to be a rough-hewn Cross; that His crown, at least until His return in Glory to judge the living and the dead, must be made of thorns bejewelled with clots of blood.

So what does this teach us? Most obviously, that popes are not ready-made saints. We need to pray for them, that they always make supernatural realities and salvation a priority; that God will assist them in teaching and governing the Church, so that She is aided to the full in Her mission of saving souls for everlasting life. In Peter, Our Lord would eventually make one of His most glorious and lovable saints out of what might have looked at the beginning like rather unpromising material. But if we flick through any respectable history of the Church for more than five minutes, we shall soon discover that some of Peter's successors have been utter scoundrels who inflicted a good deal of harm on the Mystical Body of Christ on earth during their tenures. In modern times we have come to expect clean-living popes as a matter of course, but only a fool would take them for granted.

Pray also for your bishops, and pray very much for us priests. The temptation to tone down the more stringent demands of the Gospel in favour of a comfortable life and a cosy relationship with the authorities of this world and the Zeitgeist to which these powers are in thrall is always a temptation to all us – of course it is. Pray that worn down by the desire for respectability, and intimidated by the tyranny of relativism that threatens to “cancel” anyone who steps out of line, we do not turn our faces away from the Cross and leave our flocks to the wolves.

Pray, also, for the grace and the strength that you will need yourselves to remain faithful, to be steadfast in holding to the Faith in all its full-bloodedness, to be patient and painstakingly thorough in countering the Woke brainwashing to which your children are quite likely being subjected at school. We might end up being crowned with the thorns of ridicule and crucified for daring to sing a different tune in this world. You might find the social services battering at the door if your children are found to be too well-versed in the Catechism. But we can be sure that, if we are willing to make sacrifices and suffer a little for our Holy Catholic Faith in this life, then there is a golden crown of everlasting life awaiting us in the life to come.

Father Julian Large

September 2021 Letter from the Provost

September 2021 Letter from the Provost

Our holy father St Philip had a knack for winning souls in a manner which could be simultaneously gentle and discomfiting. Francesco Zazzara was one of the jeunesse dorée of his day in Rome, a talented student of law with a circle of fashionable friends and a promising future at court. On one of his visits to the Oratory, he found himself lavished with compliments by our saint. “Oh happy you!” said St Philip, “now you are studying, then you shall be a doctor and begin to make money, and to advance your family; you will become an advocate and perhaps someday be raised to be a prelate...” As St Philip continued to list the honours and riches that young Zazzara could look forward to, he repeated “Oh happy you!” Zazzara's eyes widened in excitement as his spiritual father reached a crescendo in this panoply of praises with the exclamation: “Oh happy you! Then you will look for nothing more.” St Philip then pressed the boy's head close to his chest and whispered in his ear, “And then?” Those two words made such a searing impact on Zazzara that he could not sleep. Recalling all of the prospects that Philip had lain before him, he found himself asking himself over and over again “and then?” Unable to banish these words from his heart, he resolved to turn all of his thoughts and plans to God, and eventually entered the Congregation of the Oratory, in which he persevered until death and played an invaluable role in securing the canonisation of St Philip.

Most disciples of Our Lord are not called to the consecrated life. The majority of Christians must make a living in order to shelter and feed themselves and their loved ones. Commerce and the professions have their proper place within the dynamics of civilised society. Saint Philip, however, was acutely aware of the spiritual perils of disordered ambition and acquisitiveness, which can easily derail the sanctification and ultimately the salvation of the best of men. Our Lord Himself warns us that we cannot serve God and mammon. Some theologians have personified Mammon as a ferocious demon, to whom we enslave ourselves when we give in to the temptation of making worldly gain, and especially money, a priority in our lives. Mammon certainly becomes an idol when we allow it to topple Our Lord from the throne which He occupies in our hearts through Baptism. An expanding bank account might give us the impression that we are secure and prosperous, while all the time our soul is becoming ever more desiccated, malnourished and shrivelled.

The Gospel makes it clear to us where true riches are to be found: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice,” Our Lord teaches us, “and all these things shall be added unto you.” We reap in eternity what is sown in this life. We know from what has been revealed to us that Heaven is a hierarchy, where Our Lord reigns as King, and His Mother is Queen over the Angels and Saints. In contrast to earthly societies, however, the hierarchy to be found in Heaven is one of holiness. It is those saints whose hearts have been expanded most by the exercise of the supernatural virtue of Charity who are most like God and closest to His Throne. Whether we are able to enter the glory of Heaven will depend on whether our souls are found to be in a state of grace at our particular judgment. If, pray God, that judgment is favourable, then we must be purified in Purgatory of any undue attachments that we have retained towards earthly possessions. Our eventual capacity for participating in the glory of Heaven will depend on how much we have loved God and our neighbour in this life. Now, then, is the time for us to be earning treasures for ourselves in eternity. Saint Philip, who was vouchsafed extraordinary glimpses of heavenly realities during his life, and who enjoyed a profound peace and joy made possible by a detachment from created things, to which we are all called, used to say, “He who desires anything other than God deceives himself, and he who loves anything but God errs miserably.” To be truly and magnificently rich in eternity, we must cultivate poverty in spirit and detachment from worldly gain in the here and now. The more we give, now, for the love of God, the more we shall receive in the way of imperishable treasures.

Our Lord's warning about mammon is issued in His Sermon on the Mount, soon after He has taught us to petition God for “our daily bread” in the Our Father. The Douay Rheims version of Holy Scripture renders “daily bread” in St Matthew's Gospel as “supersubstantial bread”. The two translations are beautifully complementary and mutually illuminative. Praying for our daily sustenance saves us from habits of hoarding and avarice which create spiritual starvation. In the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord feeds us with His very Self so that we are truly rich and well-nourished beyond imagination.

Like young Francesco Zazzara, we should learn to ask ourselves often the question “and then?”, with an eye on that eternally-defining moment when our souls depart from our bodies and we find ourselves naked, with no earthly possessions to hide behind, at our particular judgment. We ask our holy father St Philip to intercede for us, so that like him we may be blessed with a spirit of detachment from worldly goods which liberates us to love God and our neighbour with the greatest possible generosity.

Father Julian Large

August 2021 Letter from the Provost

August 2021 Letter from the Provost

A cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker some decades ago depicted a weary looking angel sitting on a cloud, a harp lying at his feet. The caption underneath read something along the lines of: "If I'd known Heaven would go on for this long, I'd have brought some magazines."

The difficulty with trying to imagine what Heaven might be like is that it transcends all earthly experience. We might be tempted to think that Hell is not so difficult to visualise, because attempts during the last century to create earthly utopias without regard for the laws which God has written into human nature have gone some way to creating it on this planet. However, even within the most ghastly socialist gulag or death camp, we still find glimpses of heroism and sacrificial generosity which remind us that in this life redemption (and with it the attainment of everlasting life in Heaven) always remains possible if only hearts are opened to the working of God's grace. The utter and irreversible desolation of Hell is only possible when we have stubbornly closed ourselves to God's promptings through to the moment when our bodies and souls are finally separated, and mercifully that is something that no-one reading this has ever experienced, nor ever need to.

This month, we celebrate the great feast of Our Lady's magnificent Assumption into Heaven. Rather than taking the Blessed Virgin away from us, this glorious mystery and event actually brings Heaven closer to us. In His Ascension, Our Lord took His humanity along with His divinity (and including His flesh) into heavenly Glory. In the Assumption, He received His Blessed Mother, body and soul, into the Heavenly Court, where She would take Her place by His throne as Queen Mother. While the other saints await their reunification with their bodies at the end of time when Our Lord returns to judge the living and the dead, Our Lady's body is already in Heaven. This explains why, while we honour the relics of many saints here on earth, we find no mortal remains of Our Lady to venerate. The presence of at least two bodies in Heaven, through the Ascension and the Assumption, makes Heaven a real place, because bodies exist in places, not merely in "states".

The Blessed Virgin's Assumption is our assurance that our bodies as well as our souls have been created to participate in everlasting glory. Death was never a part of God's intention for the human race, and only became a feature of our human story thanks to sin. The Assumption demonstrates par excellence that Our Lord's victory over sin in His Passion and Resurrection is complete and definitive. Monsignor Ronald Knox described the Assumption as Our Lord's "first step to reconciling all things in heaven and on earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new". With all the trouble our bodies give us now, some might wish that salvation meant being liberated from them forever. But God is no Platonist, and when He surveyed His work at the end of the sixth day of creation, with Adam and Eve at the apex of that creation and mankind as the hinge that fused the material realm with the spiritual, and saw "that it was very good", it was His plan that this most wondrous and unique of His creatures should be raised to participate in His glory in the fullness of being in Heaven, matter as well as spirit.

So what about that harp, and those magazines? We need not worry about ever wearying of the marvels of Heaven. God is infinite in all of His perfections. Eternity is beyond and outside of time, but to use a temporal analogy it may be said that we could behold the Beatific Vision for a thousand trillion years and yet hardly should we have begun to scratch the surface of His majesty or to fathom the depths of that dynamic of love which flows eternally between Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and into which we have already been inserted in our Baptism. Even though the best we can do now is to see through a glass darkly, meditating on the infinite marvels and blessedness of Heaven helps to put our earthly troubles into perspective. Our Lady participated in Our Lord's Passion in a unique manner as a sword of anguish pierced Her Immaculate Heart, and now She participates to the highest possible degree in His glory in eternity. As we survey the Church on earth wounded by scandals, division and dissent, we can take heart in the truth that Our Lady's Assumption prefigures the moment when the Church Militant on earth will be subsumed and glorified in the Church Triumphant in Heaven. During this month of the Assumption, let us fix our gaze on eternity and ask the Queen of the Angels to intercede for us in our efforts to build the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now.

Father Julian Large

July 2021 Letter from the Provost

July 2021 Letter from the Provost

Preaching on the feast of Pentecost in 2012, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI described Pentecost as the feast of “union, comprehension and communion.” He also lamented how the revolution in communications which we have witnessed in recent decades, and which might have been expected to bring people together, has too often been accompanied by increasing divisions and hostility: “We witness daily events in which it seems people are becoming more aggressive and belligerent; understanding each other becomes too demanding so they prefer to remain closed in on themselves, in their own interests.” His Holiness proceeded to compare our modern society with the account we read in the Old Testament, in Genesis chapter 11, of the inhabitants of Babel who thought that they could use their technological expertise to build a tower that would reach to Heaven, in order to open the gates of eternity and usurp the place of God. Suddenly they found that they were building against each other, they all began talking in strange tongues so that they could no longer comprehend each other, and the whole project ended in chaos and ruins. “While endeavouring to be like God,” explained Pope Benedict XVI, “they even risk no long being human because they have lost a fundamental element of being human – the ability to agree, to understand and to work together.”

In the wake of the immeasurable suffering caused during the last year and a half by the disruption that has accompanied the Coronavirus contagion, there has been much talk of “building back better.” This might give us hope. The Christian life is all about “building back better”, because the Gospel is God's rescue plan for a mankind enslaved to sin and mortality by the consequences of the Fall. Saved from spiritual death in Baptism and elevated to the life of Grace, it is our task as Christians to build the Kingdom of God on earth in the here and now, as well as looking forward to that perfect blessedness in Heaven that awaits those who depart this life in a state of grace. Conflict, injustice and every manner of suffering can all be traced to that primeval rebellion against God when our first parents disobeyed our Creator. As Christians we know that there can only be true peace and justice where Our Lord is recognised and honoured as Sovereign ruler in all aspects of human life and society.

Alas, if we investigate some of those who talk most enthusiastically about “building back better”, we soon find that their vision for our future has little or no place for God, and that some of the solutions that are being offered are creepily reminiscent of ideologies that created so much misery, destruction and death in the last century. Too often, the “philanthropists” who speak euphorically of the opportunities the Coronavirus crisis has created for building a brave new world turn out to be keen proponents of population control, abortion and contraception. The biblical account of what happened in Babel should serve as a perennial reminder that when man determines to build back better on his own terms, without regard for the laws which God has written into human nature, and which He gave to Moses on Mount Sinai amid thunder and lightning, it is the Almighty Whose finger rests on the great reset button that has the power to reduce our most audacious plans to chaos.

During this period of the Church's calendar traditionally known as time “after Pentecost”, we should reflect on how that wondrous event in Jerusalem in which the Holy Ghost descended on Our Lady and the Apostles marked the launch of the Church as the one true vessel of a unity which is supernatural and far more substantial and profound than any other type of union that can exist between human beings on this earth. The Holy Ghost binds the Church together as a single living organism, of which we are all members, with Christ at our head. Pentecost was really the absolute opposite of Babel. Yes, the disciples began talking in strange tongues. But the effect was that those from foreign nations were able to understand them in their own languages, and the result was the incorporation of many thousands into the Mystical Body of Christ as the Church began to spread into every corner of the globe.

If “Build Back Better” is to be anything other than a vacuous slogan or, even worse, a cover for something sinister, we cannot hope to succeed without the co-operation of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. During this time “after Pentecost”, let us pray for the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and for the infusion of His gifts into our hearts and the flourishing of His fruits within our lives, in order that we may play our part in building back better God's way. May our Holy Father St Philip, whose heart was inhabited by the Holy Ghost in a most miraculous way, intercede for us.

Father Julian Large