June 2023 Letter from the Provost

Everyday language inevitably fails us when it comes to expressing the Mysteries of our holy Catholic Faith. The first sign that we are beginning to penetrate more deeply into the truths of Divine Revelation is when words fail us and we are left speechless in wonder before the Majesty of Almighty God. 

When this happens, it is time to let the Church’s Sacred Liturgy take over. Never is this more true than on the great Feast of Corpus Christi. The flowers strewn in the path of the Blessed Sacrament, the incense and genuflections that accompany the procession, and the solemn enthronement of the Sacred Host in a monstrance over the altar all testify more poignantly than any words to our firm belief that the King of Kings is present. 

But how is He present? And how can we possibly justify lavishing what appears to be the adoration reserved for God alone on something that seems to onlookers to be at best a humble symbol of the Body of Christ?  

In order to explain why it is appropriate to offer the highest level of worship to the Blessed Sacrament – adoration, or latria – we have no choice but to resort to human language. The most basic answer we can offer must be something like this: “We offer the adoration due to God alone to the Sacred Host because we believe that the Sacred Host is God.”   

In describing how God is present on earth we cannot do any better than revisiting what has been said already, by saints, Doctors, and the Church in Her own solemn definitions. Theologians talk about the Blessed Sacrament in terms of the “Real Presence”. This distinguishes Our Lord’s Presence on the Altar from all those other ways in which He is truly present. As The Second Person of the Trinity, He is of course everywhere at all times. He is also present in the Church which is His own Mystical Body, and He lives in the heart of anyone who is in a state of grace. When we talk about His Real Presence in the tabernacle, however, we mean that He is actually with us in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.   

This Real Presence is also referred to as a “Sacramental Presence”. This tells us that Christ’s Presence on the Altar is realised and remains hidden under the signs of bread and wine. It is only through faith that we know He is there: He has said “This is my Body”, and we take Him at His word. 

The Church offers us an expression, one that actually describes the process by which Our Lord’s Real and Sacramental Presence comes about: Transubstantiation. 

The doctrine of Transubstantiation describes how the substances of bread and wine are actually transformed into Our Lord’s Living Body and Blood. Only the “accidents” – the taste, smell, colour and texture – of bread and wine remain. This means that in the Blessed Sacrament there is not only a Real Presence, but also a real absence. The substances of bread and wine are no longer there. The little white wafer has given way to the Sacred Host. The liquid in the chalice has become the Precious Blood. 

This is why we are able to offer to the Blessed Sacrament the worship due only to our Creator. To adore bread, however solemnly that bread had been blessed, would be idolatry; but we can, and must, adore the Host because the Host is the Living God. 

Our Lord comes to the altar in this way primarily to feed us, so that we can enjoy a union with Him that is more complete and intimate than any other union this side of the Beatific Vision in Heaven. He also remains on the Altar outside of the Mass so that He may be carried to the sick and dying; and He abides on the altar so that we may worship Him. 

We have Our Lord’s assurance that there is nothing demeaning about Christian worship: “I do not call you servants,” He says in the Gospel of St John; “I call you friends.” (Jn 15:15) This friendship with Christ is made possible because He shares His own Divine Life with us in the Sacrament of Baptism. The glory that we praise in God is a Glory in which we ourselves have been called to participate, and to be transformed by, in Heaven. The Blessed Sacrament is the token par excellence of Our Saviour’s friendship. 

No friendship can survive for very long without communication.  For this reason, the Church provides many beautiful prayers for us to use in front of the Blessed Sacrament. We need never be afraid, however, of using our own poor words, telling our Friend in the Blessed Sacrament what is on our minds. If we are afraid, ask His protection. If there is some recurring temptation that seems impossible to resist, ask Him to reach into our hearts to break the chains of bad habits with the invincible solvent of Divine Grace. 

While there is a time for speaking, however, there must also be time for silence. The need for constant chatter in any relationship is a sign of insecurity. The ability to rest in the presence of the other indicates that our friendship has reached greater maturity. 

These days we are blessed to have churches, in London at least, that are open during the day. Catholics who suffered during the centuries of persecution would have rejoiced to know that this would once again be possible. At Tyburn Convent near Marble Arch, close to the spot where so many of them were martyred, the Blessed Sacrament is even exposed for adoration throughout the night. Our forebears in the Faith surely plead with us now from Heaven never to take any of this for granted. When we see the open door of a Catholic Church and a light flickering before the Tabernacle, we should always go in, if only for a few moments. Open our hearts before our Friend in the Blessed Sacrament and allow Him to refresh us with His peace, His joy, His love. 

Father Julian Large

May 2023 Letter from the Provost

It is surely a grace of Divine Providence that the feast of our holy father St Philip falls within the month that is so sweetly fragranced by its dedication to Our Blessed Lady. Saint Philip’s whole life and apostolate was lived under Her mantle. His disciples recounted him conversing with Her from his bed during periods of sickness with such affection and familiarity that it seemed as if She were actually present in his room. Indeed, he was blessed with visits from the Blessed Virgin, as when She appeared one night to show him that She was holding up a dislodged beam in the roof of the church which was likely to crash down on to the congregation below. On another occasion She appeared to him when he was ill with a severe fever and seemed to be nearing the point of death. Immediately cured, he sat up and was amazed that no-one else in the room seemed to have seen Her whom he was wont to call ‘Mamma Mia’.

For St Philip, it was a special blessing that the church given to the Congregation in Rome had been dedicated since the 12th century to Santa Maria in Vallicella (St Mary in the Little Valley), and it was at his insistence during the rebuilding that every chapel should contain an image of Our Lady over the altar. His personal favourite was Federico Barocci’s rendering of the embrace between the Blessed Virgin and Elizabeth, for the altar of the Visitation, before which he was seen to be in ecstasy. And so, when the Roman Oratory fathers constructed a shrine after his death to contain his mortal remains, they made sure that the beautiful painting of our saint by Guido Reni over the altar depicted him on his knees, in Mass vestments, in front of a vision of the Madonna and Child.

It is a nineteenth century copy of this Guido Reni that was placed above St Philip’s altar in the first church of the London Oratory off the Strand, and which came with us to Brompton, where it was eventually placed in a magnificent carved and gilded surround sponsored by Father Ralph Kerr. One of the attractions of St Philip for the first English Oratorians was his profound devotion to the Blessed Virgin. After his reception into the One True Fold of the Redeemer in 1845, St John Henry Newman was given a house at Old Oscott by Cardinal Wiseman. He renamed it “Maryvale”. Father Faber would point out the similarity of this name to “Santa Maria in Vallicella” when, in 1848, the first Oratorian community in England was canonically erected there.

Our own church in London contains many images of Our Blessed Lady, from the poignant Pietà in the war memorial near the Baptistry, to the Nazarene School painting of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Dolours Chapel, the altar to Our Lady of Good Counsel and the nearby painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe in St Wilfrid’s Chapel, to our magnificent Lady Altar with its statue of Our Lady of Victories. This last chapel, flanked by statues of Dominican saints, is a monument to the Church’s victories throughout history over the cancer of heresy from within, and at times of menace from the infidel without. Above the High Altar, meanwhile, we see a large red heart pierced with thorns. This represents the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to which our church is dedicated and which Our Lady has promised will have the final triumph over all evil.

Our May devotions include daily recitation of the Holy Rosary followed by the Litany of Loreto at Our Lady’s altar twenty minutes before the evening Mass, throughout the month (to be on the safe side, arrive twenty-five minutes before the Mass, as some of the fathers tend to be a bit quick off the mark). A plenary indulgence may be gained by this public participation of the Rosary, under the usual conditions. In these days of heightened international tensions, which coincide with an unprecedented crisis of credibility in the leadership of our governments, it is only normal that there should be great anxiety among decent people who feel helpless as they witness policies being pursued which seem to guarantee escalation. As children of the Mother of God, however, we are not helpless. The Rosary is our secret weapon, both against the forces of evil at work in the secular realm, and against the heretics who work to wreak so much havoc within the Church. Let us pray it with great trust and faith, remembering the countless occasions on which Our Lady has intervened to rescue Christian civilisation in response to this devotion which She has so often commended to Her children.

As the nation prepares to celebrate the Coronation, we must pray for our new King, Charles III, asking God to guide him, bless him, and give him the gumption to resist the zeitgeist of these days of all-pervading “wokery”. Ultimately the criteria by which the success of this new reign will be judged will be the extent to which it conforms to and extends the reign of our divine Sovereign, Christ the King. With that in mind, let us entrust our earthly King to the care and the constant intercession of our heavenly Mother Who has been crowned Queen of the Angels and Saints.

Father Julian Large

April 2023 Letter from the Provost

This year the feast of the Annunciation fell on a Saturday. A family from the north of England that worships at the Oratory on visits to London attended the High Mass in the morning. Afterwards, they marched around to the house and the parents explained that their twin daughters had a question. “Where are the ghosts?” asked Twin Number One, somewhat indignantly. “Yes,” chipped in Twin Number Two, with a doleful expression: “We came to see the ghosts.” A brief investigation revealed that the last occasion on which this demanding duo had been here was during Passiontide last year. On hearing this, the Provost finally realised what must have caused such grievance and advised them to return to the church the following day, when they would be greeted by ghosts galore.

The veiling of the images that takes place on Passion Sunday, and especially of the statues of the Twelve Apostles that line the nave and flank the sanctuary, certainly gives a spectral appearance to the church. The shrouded figures serve as a memento mori, a reminder of death. This is a subject that most of us probably have a tendency to avoid. Our own death, and especially the death of our loved ones, is something that we naturally fear. Bereavement can be one of the most painful and traumatic experiences we ever have to endure.

Rather than skirting around the reality of mortality with banalities and euphemisms, the Church confronts death head on, with Requiem Masses and daily intercessions for the Holy Souls. She calls us to mourn with the grieving, as Our Lord wept with Martha over the death of His friend Lazarus. At the same time, St Paul enjoins us not to be sorrowful like those who have no hope. The truth is that, through Baptism, death has been transformed for us. We have, in fact, already died, and been buried, and been born again to eternal life in the waters of the Sacrament of regeneration. Through Baptism, we are all “born again” Christians. For those who depart this life in the state of grace, death has become the threshold over which the soul must pass on the last stage of its journey into everlasting life in all its glorious fullness.

Liturgically, the Church’s ultimate confrontation with death occurs on Good Friday, when we enter a building stripped bare of altar linens and even the Blessed Sacrament, and contemplate the horror of God the Son, the King of all creation, being scourged, stripped of His garments, nailed to a Cross and exhaling His last breath in agony. The unbreathable atmosphere of this most sombre of days would be unbearable were it not for the assurance of Easter Sunday, when we know that we shall celebrate the definitive victory over suffering and death that took place near Golgotha on a fresh spring morning in a cultivated garden. It is the triumph of the Resurrection that puts the “good” into Good Friday.

“Father, what will it be like when we die?” This is a question with which most priests are probably familiar. And the answer is that it depends. What it depends on is how much we have been used to dying to ourselves in this life. If we are unduly attached to the created goods and comforts of this world then we can only expect to find it difficult to loosen our grip and repeat those words of Our Lord as He reached the consummation of His Passion- “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46) – as we leave this earth stripped of everything to face our Particular Judgment.

Lent and Passiontide are a great gift that helps us to prepare for that moment. Through self-denial, and through the giving of ourselves to others by means of alms giving and the Corporal Works of Mercy, the aim is to put self-centredness to death and to enthrone God at the centre of our lives by worshipping Him in spirit and in truth and ministering to Him in our neighbour. This is where those Oratory “ghosts” come into play. Most of us have probably lapsed in our Lenten observances to some degree during the last weeks. How conceited we should sound if we told ourselves we had kept the penitential season perfectly. The veiled statues are a stark reminder that the season has shifted into top gear. Now is the time to renew our good resolutions, and to strive to keep them well - and especially to make a real effort in the area of charity, without which our fasting and devotions are worthless. The more effort we make to die to ourselves during the days leading to the Sacred Triduum, the better prepared we shall be to participate most fully in the joy of Easter Sunday. Let us pray for the grace of living in conformity with the death of Jesus, to arrive at the glory of the Resurrection.

Father Julian Large

March 2023 Letter from the Provost

On the first Sunday of Lent, we accompanied Our Lord into the desert where the devil tempted him. If we examine the temptations that Our Lord endured, we shall see that they bear an uncanny resemblance to the temptations that the Church on earth seems to be experiencing in our day.

“Command that these stones be made bread”, the devil suggests (Mt 4:3). Just imagine the popularity the Church might enjoy and the influence She might exert if only She gave up insisting on all of that preaching about conversion from sin and devoted Her every resource to social activism; how much more authentic we should look to our contemporaries if only we were to auction off our precious chalices and to make a grand gesture of handing over the proceeds to the homeless. The media would perhaps hail us as the “Church of the poor”.

Our Lord's answer to Satan is masterful: “It is written, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). The truth is that the Messiah could easily have produced enough bread and resources to feed and clothe and house humanity for the rest of history. But in itself, such a magnificent miracle would have done nothing to combat the self-centredness that has been the blight of human nature since the Fall. Instead, He has come to do something far more wonderful than turning stones into bread. He has come into the world to transform human hearts from hearts of stone into hearts that are alive and overflowing with divine love, in order that we might be moved to share the bread that we have with others, in charity. At Mass He does something far more marvellous than turning stones into bread when He transforms bread into His living Body and Blood. This is so that in consuming the Blessed Sacrament, we might be transformed more perfectly into His likeness.

When we are dismissed from the church at the end of Mass, we are sent into the world to build the Kingdom of God around us. If we come to Mass in humility, with a recognition of our own neediness for God, if we bring with us our contrition for sins committed and ask for God's forgiveness, then we leave the celebration of Holy Mass renewed, refreshed, and energised by the encounter we have with our Risen Lord at the Altar in in Holy Communion.

We are all poor and in need of God’s forgiveness, and during Lent we are called to rend our hearts and return to God wholeheartedly. It is this aspect of conversion and repentance that the devil finds so irksome. He knows that if we devote our whole lives to philanthropy and humanitarian endeavour, we are still his if only he can persuade us to remain in our sins. The easiest way he achieves this is by persuading us that there is no sin, that the very concept of sin has no place in a church of the twenty-first century.

The second temptation is also painfully familiar: “If Thou art the Son of Man, cast thyself down from this Temple, and let us see the angels come to your rescue” (Mt 4:6). What an amazing spectacle that would have been, to be witnessed by the whole of Jerusalem. However, we know from experience how quickly novelty wears off. The Word was not made flesh in order to dazzle the fickle crowds with displays of celestial acrobatics. He came rather to win and transform our hearts through friendship, and to manifest the depth of God's love for us by embracing the world in His open arms on the Cross. Even when He is hanging on that throne of agony, we hear the devil’s voice in the mocking of the chief priests who say: “If He is the King of Israel let Him come down from the cross, then we will believe him” (Mt 27:42). May God save us from the Sadducees of today who would have the world saved by crowd-pleasing gestures, gimmicks and soundbites, rather than preaching the Gospel of salvation through repentance, and sanctification through self-denial.

Mercifully for us, our Saviour did not come down from the Cross until He had breathed His last breath and the nails had been pulled from the dead flesh of His hands and feet. To be true to Her founder and Her Spouse, the Church must resist the temptation to replace the preaching of Christ Crucified with novelties and gestures calculated to win the approval of the media.

During Lent, each one of us is invited to defy Satan by confessing our sins and doing penance. We unite ourselves with the Cross through confession, penance, fasting and self-denial. We renew and refresh our relationship with God in our resolution to pray without ceasing. We make sacrifices from our own resources for the poor. We go into the desert with Our Lord so that we may follow Him to Calvary, so that at Easter we shall be well prepared to participate in the joy and the glory of the Resurrection.

Father Julian Large

February 2023 Letter from the Provost

In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St Paul makes an impassioned plea for unity (1 Cor 1: 10-17). Dissension has arisen among the fledgling Church there, with some declaring themselves as followers of Apollos, some of Peter, and others as disciples of St Paul himself. With no desire at all to be the leader of his own party, St Paul makes it clear that factionalism has no place whatsoever in the Church, which is the one and undivided Mystical Body of Christ on earth.

Reading the Catholic press these days, it is to be lamented that we see a good deal of discord within the Church, and a resulting dissipation of energies which can only impede Her mission. Categories which might have a place in the secular realm are applied to us as Catholics, so that we find ourselves being labelled conservatives or liberals, progressives or traditionalists. As in the world of contemporary politics, these divisions are the cause of increasing polarisation. When we reach a point at which our disagreements are irreconcilable, then we find our beloved Church teetering on the brink of schism.

So where must we look for saving truth when all around us we hear a cacophony of voices conflicted on quite fundamental doctrines concerning marriage, the Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, among other subjects better not mentioned in polite society? A clue to the answer is to be found in the Nicene Creed which we say or sing together at Holy Mass every Sunday, and in which we profess our belief in a Church which is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. True faith – genuine soul-saving doctrine – is to be found in teaching and belief which is in continuity and consistent with the Deposit of Faith which was entrusted by Our Lord to His Apostles, with nothing added and nothing omitted. The successors of the Apostles are, of course, the bishops, whose mission is to unpack and proclaim that Deposit of Faith in all its fullness, and to guard it against all contamination of error.

Some readers might be saying that this is all very well, but in our own times we cannot escape the fact that there are disagreements among bishops on quite basic teachings. Many of the German bishops, for instance, seem to be lobbying hard for what would be a radical overturning of many truths that have been believed and professed by the Church in every generation. The answer to this must be that we should beware of everything that savours of novelty. Anything that obviously contradicts and is inconsistent with what has been clearly taught and believed down the centuries is foreign to the Deposit of Faith and to be avoided like poison.

In a fallen world, every society governed by men is prone to division and dissension. The only solution to this is to have someone in authority with whom the buck stops. And so Our Lord appointed St Peter as the chief shepherd, and the rock on which He built His Church. The buck stopped with Peter, as it stops with his successors in every age. In order to assist our popes in this mission of adjudication, Our Lord has invested the office of the papacy with papal infallibility.

Our Oratorian saint and cardinal, John Henry Newman, was actually rather opposed to the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility that took place in 1870. It was not that he did not believe in it. He certainly did. His concern was that it would be easily misunderstood and abused. The key to understanding papal infallibility correctly seems to be the realisation that it is a negative guarantee, which prevents a pope from positively teaching error whenever, addressing the whole Church, he invokes the authority of his office as successor of Peter and makes it explicitly clear that what is being pronounced on a matter of faith or morals is henceforth universally binding on the faithful. On the practical level, infallibility means that if time travel were possible, we could visit planet earth at any time between now and Our Lord’s return in glory and we would find the same Church, with the same hierarchical structure of (an exclusively male) episcopacy and presbyterate, the same seven Sacraments, and doctrine on faith and morals in perfect continuity with the faith of the Apostles.

Infallibility certainly does not mean that any pope is necessarily inspired by the Holy Ghost, or incapable of error in his own theological opinions or personal reflections. Historically, some popes have been renowned teachers, while others have been better known for aggrandising their families or leading the armies of the Papal States into battle. One or two have even made such a mess in the area of doctrine that they have had to be corrected by their successors. This means that we Catholics need to pray for our popes, to assist them in their mission. In our own time, with dissensions in the Church simmering towards boiling point, we should probably accompany these prayers with fasting and penance, as we ask God to bless and guide the Successor of St Peter in his task of unifying and governing the Church. Something to keep in mind as we prepare for our Lenten observances.

Father Julian Large

January 2023 Letter from the Provost

The restoration of the feast of the Epiphany to its proper day in this country is to be welcomed. Keeping the 6th January as one of the holiest of days is a tradition of the greatest antiquity. The sanctification of that date since the earliest centuries of the Church's existence meant that the 6th January remained a holy day in the hearts of the faithful even if, for one whole decade, it was not recognised officially as such in the liturgical calendar of this land.

The rehabilitation of 6th January to something of its proper glory, then, is a gift which should make us appreciate all the more the treasures contained in the Feast of the Epiphany – treasures which are unpacked as the month of January progresses. In his The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Guéranger explains the time-honoured belief that three great events all occurred on 6th January. Although, in the western Church, the 6th January is primarily associated with the arrival of the Magi carrying their precious gifts, the Epiphany also encompasses Our Lord's Baptism and the Marriage at Cana, each of which is commemorated separately at Holy Mass this month.

These days, we hear a lot about “Dry January”. Those of us who find the intrusion of publicly-funded busybodies into our personal lives tiresome can find refreshment in the Church's celebration of Our Lord's first known miracle, at Cana, in which He changed water into an impressive quantity of top-class wine. Of course, we understand that this miracle signifies much more than the facilitation of prolonged festivities at a wedding breakfast. Its meaning is profoundly Eucharistic: the transformation of water into wine points towards the more wondrous transformation of wine into Our Lord’s most Precious Blood on the altar. In working this miracle within the context of marriage, Christ reveals Himself to us as the Bridegroom, and the Church as His Bride. As members of the Church, we await the return of the Bridegroom, and so we pray “Thy Kingdom Come” with deep conviction at Mass. We long for the Bridegroom to return in glory and establish His Kingdom in its fullness when the Church Militant on earth is subsumed, perfected and glorified in the Church Triumphant, where we are invited to participate in the eternal marriage banquet which is life in Heaven.

In the epiphanic event of Our Lord's Baptism, the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity is made manifest like an icon, in which God the Holy Ghost appears over the head of God the Son, and the voice of God the Father is heard announcing from heaven “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”. It is significant that this manifestation takes place within the context of Baptism, because it is in the Christian Sacrament of Baptism that God the Son is enthroned in our hearts, in our Baptism that we become living temples of the Holy Ghost, and in our Baptism that God the Father adopts us as His beloved children. In Baptism we are swept up into the very life of the Trinity.

The work of transformation that takes place within us at Baptism, and the transformation of bread and wine into Our Lord’s living Body and Blood, is certainly not the end of the story. With God’s divine life infused into our souls, and nourished by the Blessed Sacrament, we are invited to participate in transforming and healing this broken world around us. With our vertical relationship with God established and nurtured supernaturally, we may then set about the serious work on the horizontal plane of building His Kingdom on this earth, and especially within that small part of creation which has been entrusted to our influence – our home, place of work and parish. The Sanctifying Grace we receive in the Sacraments renders our good works pleasing to God and meritorious for Heaven.

The revelation of the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity tells us much about God’s love for us, and how we must strive to love our neighbour. The love that flows eternally between Father, Son and Holy Ghost is infinite and eternal. This means that God has no real need for us. He created us in an act of pure generosity, so that we might participate in His divine life in this world and in His glory in the life to come. The “disinterestedness” of God’s love towards us, which means that He gains nothing but only gives, means that to be true to the divine love infused into us in Baptism, we are called to practise a charity towards our neighbour which is disinterested and generous. We Christians are called to give of ourselves to those who seem to have nothing to offer in return. This is a challenge because it involves including those whom we find dull and disagreeable into what we consider to be the sacred space of our lives.

As we contemplate the value of gifts during this Epiphanytide - the precious gifts of the Magi to our infant Saviour, and the priceless gifts bestowed on us from God, we should pray that gratitude will be the father of generosity in our lives throughout this coming year.

Father Julian Large

December 2022 Letter from the Provost

A 4th-century Egyptian observed that “the Son of God became man so that we might become God”. Such words might sound audacious to the point of blasphemy, until we realise that the author of this extraordinary statement was none other than the great saint, bishop and champion of Catholic orthodoxy, Athanasius of Alexandria.

St Athanasius has provided us with what is probably the most succinct explanation we possess for the Incarnation. In taking on our human flesh, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity has been born on earth not merely to teach us how to live and to love, but to transform us supernaturally so that we are able to participate in the very life of God.

This “divinisation” of the human race was part of God’s plan from the very beginning, and He declared it on the sixth day of Creation with the words: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). His image is to be found in our mind and will and belongs to us by nature, but His likeness is a supernatural gift by which He shares his own life with us and elevates us to the level of divine friendship. Alas, this gift was forfeited by our first parents through the spite and envy of the Devil, who enticed them to disobey their Creator’s word.

Mercifully for us, however, the suffering, strife and death that were the consequences of that catastrophic rebellion were not to be the end of the story. While the third chapter of Genesis presents us 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 human comprehension, with the God of all transcendence uniting Himself to our frail human flesh and being born as a baby in Bethlehem.

Jesus, then, is truly Emmanuel, God with us. When we contemplate the Creator of the universe and the King of Kings lying on straw in a manger, and protected from the cold night air only by a wrapping of swaddling bands, we soon begin to realise the absurdity of all human efforts at self-aggrandisement and worldly ambition. The only true and lasting aggrandisement we can ever hope to experience is given to us when we divest ourselves of every delusion of self-importance, and come meekly to the manger, to accept the Christ Child’s invitation to be partakers of his divine life. Bethlehem teaches us that to become like God, we must make ourselves small, and that God’s gift of Himself and our humility in receiving Him are the beginnings of genuine human greatness. Where the haughtiness of Satan has brought death and destruction, the meekness of the Infant Jesus promises everlasting glory in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

Our participation in God’s life can only reach perfection in eternity when “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 Jn 3:2). But we begin to share in His divinity on this earth when sanctifying grace is infused into our hearts in baptism, making us living temples of the Holy Spirit. During the Offertory at Holy Mass, meanwhile, the priest prays that by the mystery of a drop of water mingled into the wine in the chalice we may be made partakers of His divinity who humbled himself to share in our humanity. At Mass we find ourselves in Bethlehem, the “house of bread”, as the Word is made flesh once again on the altar, and the God who made himself tiny enough to be laid in a feeding trough makes himself small again in the Sacred Host so that we might dare to approach and consume him.

If we really wish to offer the Infant Jesus a home in our hearts this Christmas, we should prepare ourselves to make a good Holy Communion, going to Confession and receiving sacramental absolution. We need to ask for the grace to forgive anyone who has offended us, and to pray for the gift of humility. The Word made Flesh whom we receive at the altar will work His divinising wonders in us in proportion to our meekness and our charity.

This year, the Oratory Fathers will greatly miss the dry humour of our own dear Father Charles Dilke, which has enlivened Christmas Day lunches in Oratory House for over six decades. His not always such sotto voce commentaries on the Monarch’s Christmas speeches will no doubt be remembered within the community for many years to come. Father Charles died in his room at the Oratory on the morning of 14th November, at the age of 85, having persevered in the Oratorian habit for 61 years and in the Sacred Priesthood for 56. He was a faithful priest and a true son of our holy father St Philip. He would have asked you, in your charity, to say a prayer for the repose of his immortal soul.

Father Julian Large

November 2022 Letter from the Provost

One of the most moving verses in Holy Scripture is also the shortest: “Jesus wept.” This appears in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St John, after Our Lord has arrived in Bethany to be told the news of the death of Lazarus. At first Our Lord’s reaction might seem puzzling. After all, moments later, He will raise Lazarus from the dead and call him from his tomb. It is, however, a striking testimony to the reality of Our Lord’s humanity. Seeing Mary, Martha and their companions grief stricken, He shares their sorrow. This teaches us that mourning is an appropriate and a Christian response to the loss of someone we love. Our tears have been sanctified by the tears of the Word Made Flesh.

There is also another reason for Our Lord’s grief, however, which has more to do with His divinity. As the Eternal Logos, through Whom the universe was created, He well knows that death was never part of God’s original plan for humanity. Rather it is the consequence of the devil persuading Eve that if only she would take the forbidden fruit, she and Adam would “not die the death” and would “be like gods”. Forgetting that she had already been given a supernatural likeness to God, along with the preternatural gift of immortality, Eve succumbed. Seeing His friends in such profound grief outside Lazarus’s tomb, Our Lord surely “groaned in the spirit, and troubled himself” in the face of the whole history of human suffering and sorrow, which was the result of that original deception by the enemy of God and man, the father of lies.

Death was the most fitting and terrible punishment for sin. Adam, whom God had formed from the dust of the earth, and into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, would suffer separation of his soul and body, the latter returning to the soil from which it had been created. Mercifully for us this was not to be the end of the story. If the third chapter of Genesis details the tragedy of the fall and all its dreadful consequences, the whole of the remainder of Holy Scripture is an account of God’s rescue plan for His creation, culminating in Our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven, and the mission of the Church to bring all nations to salvation through the proclamation of the Gospel and Baptism. In this sacrament, we die with Christ and are buried with Him, ascending from the waters of regeneration unto everlasting life. Our Catholic funeral rites bear witness to this, in the honouring of the mortal remains of the deceased with holy water and incense. This reminds us that the corpse on the catafalque was once a living temple of the Holy Ghost, and that the bodies of those who die in Sanctifying Grace will one day be reunited with their souls in eternity, incorruptible and glorified. Meanwhile, we mourn with and comfort one another in times of bereavement, just as Our Lord grieved, even though He knew He would soon raise Lazarus from the tomb. But our grief is tempered by hope, and the knowledge that life has triumphed over death.

In this month of November, the Church invites us to meditate on mortality. On the first day of the month, we celebrate the feast of all the saints, whose souls share in God’s glory at the Throne of Grace. Even for them, the best is yet to come, when they are reunited with their bodies at the end of time. Meanwhile, we venerate their holy relics, the earthly remains in which they cooperated with divine grace in the achievement of sanctity. We take courage from their intercession for us, in full knowledge of the difficulties and temptations that beset us in this life. Monsignor Knox said that we should think of the saints as the scouts who have been sent on ahead on a gruelling expedition. They turn around and assure us that our destination, the promised land, is in sight and well within our reach. They stretch out their hands to lift and steady us when we falter and fall. Cultivating their friendship gives us a great advantage in this earthly pilgrimage.

On the second day of the month, our attention turns to the souls in Purgatory. We call them the Holy Souls because they are somewhat better off than us. They have died in the state of grace, and their eternal salvation is secure. But they are also the Poor Souls, because they must be purified of all attachments to sin which have disfigured them, and in this they are unable to help themselves. Just as the saints support us, so are we able to assist the Poor Souls with our prayers, the application of holy indulgences and, most powerful of all, offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in their behalf.

May Our Lady, St Philip and All the Saints pray for us. And may the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

Father Julian Large

October 2022 Letter from the Provost

We marked the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with a Solemn High Mass for the repose of the late monarch’s soul on Sunday 11th September. It attracted a full house of parishioners, in addition to visitors from all around the world. A good number were moved to tears when singing “God Save the King” – either for the first time ever, or, for some, the first time in over seventy years. The Provost missed out on this because he was away on the last leg of a summer holiday, but was back in London in good time to watch the obsequies on television. A staunch monarchist, he treasures the memory of his one and only personal encounter with Her late Majesty. It occurred in front of the Oratory Church not long before the dreaded lockdowns of 2020. Exiting from the main doors after listening to a sermon, he descended into an empty forecourt just in time to see a car slowing down on the Brompton Road and, inside, Her Majesty turning to look at the church. The Provost should probably have bowed, but in the excitement of the moment he at least remembered to remove his biretta which he waved enthusiastically, and he was thrilled when his Sovereign reciprocated with an indulgent smile and a rather more elegant wave of her own, before the car continued on its westward progress.

Queen Elizabeth II actually knew a thing or two about the London Oratory. She was once travelling home to Buckingham Palace in a helicopter in the company of a Catholic courtier whom she could not resist teasing. As they flew over South Kensington Her Majesty enquired about a sizeable patch of verdant lawn below. “That is the garden of the fathers of the Brompton Oratory, Ma’am,” explained the courtier. “The Oratory fathers?” asked the Queen, “Don’t they belong to your denomination?” The courtier answered in the affirmative, which elicited the response: “Trust THEM.” Mercifully the Oratory was not yet in existence when King Henry VIII grabbed a nearby patch of vegetation which would become Hyde Park from the possession of the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey.

All but the most obstinate sectarians will have recognised the late Queen to be a sincere Christian who gave testimony throughout her long reign to the centrality in her life of her faith, and of the Person of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. As queues of hundreds of thousands passed through the Lying-in-State in Westminster Hall, it was striking to note how many of those who paused to bow or to curtsy also made the sign of the cross, and among the mourners at the catafalque there were groups of religious in their habits. This was all a touching testimony to the loyalty of the Catholic subjects of this realm, and of the profound affection in which we held a monarch who at her Coronation had promised to uphold “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”. Various inhabitants of Oratory House made the pilgrimage to Westminster Hall. One of the fathers who had waited for eight and a half hours found himself turfed out of the queue at the doors, when he was found by the security team to be carrying an offensive weapon in the pocket of his cassock. He remains adamant that he did not intend any mischief. The menacing instrument was a miniature Swiss Army penknife on a key ring, which had been engraved by his parents as a gift for the tenth anniversary of his priestly ordination.

A wide spectrum of emotions was visible in the faces of those who filed past the late Queen’s mortal remains. Chief among them, naturally, were sorrow and grief. Some of those interviewed explained that Her Majesty had been a last living link with the generation of their grandparents and others who had lived through the War. A powerful sentiment that many of us experienced will have been a sense of immense gratitude for someone who had given her all without ever seeming to ask for anything in return. We see all too often how privilege and access to wealth can be a temptation to the life of self-indulgence and dissipation, which never brings happiness. The Queen, for whom wry self-effacing humour was a typical public response to trials which she sometimes had to endure in her own life, provided a great example of the dignity and inner serenity that are among the hard-earned fruits of self-sacrifice, restraint and service to the common good.

We Catholics are able to express our affection and thanks for our late Sovereign in a way that is positive and practical. It is a key tenet of our Catholic Faith that the prayers of the living are of great assistance to the souls of the faithful departed. Let us pray for Queen Elizabeth II, that in Heaven she may receive an incorruptible crown, and be merrily reunited with her beloved Prince Philip at the Throne of Grace. Let us pray also for our new King Charles III, who in the autumn of 2019 was the life and soul of the party at the celebrations in Rome for the canonisation of our own Oratorian saint John Henry Newman. May God comfort our earthly King as he mourns his mother, and through the intercession of the Queen of Heaven, of our holy father Saint Philip, and of Saint John Henry, may His Majesty and his reign be always blessed.

Goodbye, Ma’am, and thank you for everything.

God save the King!

Father Julian Large

September 2022 Letter from the Provost

“I am a very spiritual person Father, but I am not religious”. If only the Provost had received five pounds for every time he heard this old chestnut or some variation on it, he could by now have sponsored the long-overdue renovation of the Oratory Church’s lighting fixtures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Julian Large

August 2022 Letter from the Provost

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

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

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

On the surface, then, St John the Baptist and St Philip might look like chalk and cheese. But on a deeper interior level, there is a very strong bond that unites them. When St John is assuring his own disciples that he is not the Christ, but is rather the one who has been sent to proclaim the coming of the Messiah, he explains to them: “The friend of the bridegroom, who waits and listens for him, is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:29-30).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Julian Large

July 2022 Letter from the Provost

“I don’t need to confess my sins to a priest when I can communicate directly with God.” This used to be a classic Protestant objection to the Sacrament of Confession. Such is the state of catechetical formation today that you might well hear exactly the same sentiment being expressed by a Mass-going Catholic, unfortunately. It is based on the notion that in the confessional, the priest is somehow a hindrance to a direct relationship with God. And this is really to misunderstand the nature of the Christian religion quite seriously. An object can stand between two things in different ways. Yes, it can be an obstacle that separates them, but it can also be a bridge which unites. The highest priest in pagan Rome was called the Pontifex Maximus, “pontifex” meaning “bridge maker”. Our Lord and Saviour is the bridge builder supreme, because He unites divinity and humanity within His own sacred Person. The Incarnation is therefore the bridge by which we are able to be perfectly united with God.

The whole sacramental economy is rooted in the Mystery of the Incarnation. Other Christian denominations actually realise this in so far as they recognise Baptism as the divinely appointed means of rebirth into the life of the Resurrection. No Christian worthy of the name would suggest that the baptismal water is an obstacle between a Christian and God. It is a visible sign which actually brings about, supernaturally, the invisible grace that it signifies when it is applied in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, washing away our sins and inserting us into the very life of the Blessed Trinity.

The institution of the Sacrament of Penance is beautifully described in the Gospel of St John, in chapter twenty (vv.19 ff.). It occurs when Our Lord appears to His disciples in the upper room after His Resurrection. They are huddled together behind locked doors, in fear for their lives. Jesus appears and says “Peace be to you.” He shows them His wounds, and they are glad to see Him. He repeats: “Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you.” He then breathes on them, saying “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them: and whose sins you shall retain they are retained.” And so begins the extraordinary transformation of the disciples from terrified fugitives to tireless evangelists who will preach the Gospel with irrepressible zeal unto the shedding of their own blood.

It is of the greatest significance that the institution of the Sacrament of Penance took place on Easter Sunday. While in Baptism we are made dead and buried with Christ so that we might rise with Him to everlasting life, in Confession we are raised up from the death of sins committed after Baptism and restored to the state of Sanctifying Grace which is life in the Resurrection. Confessing our sins and receiving sacramental absolution, meanwhile, prepares us for the ultimate encounter with the Resurrection that we can ever experience in this life, the reception of Our living and risen Lord Jesus in the Sacred Host in Holy Communion.

It is a sign of Our Lord’s love and care for our souls that He calls us to Confession, not only to forgive our sins, but also to bless us and to give us the assurance of His enduring friendship and His assistance in our lives. Through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, that divine breath which Our Lord breathed on the Apostles in the upper room is transmitted throughout the Church in all ages so that it may be infused to this day into souls that are weary and heavy-laden. Like the breath that hovered over the waters at the beginning of the universe, and the breath that God breathed into Adam’s face as He formed the first human body from the slime of the earth, this breath is creative and life giving.

It is surely one of the greatest privileges and joys of his vocation for a priest to know that he has been called to participate in the transmission of that creative, life-giving, restorative breath of God, and that he, a sinner, has been appointed to forgive sins and to raise souls to life in persona Christi. Any priest who understands his calling enters the confessional eager to lift burdens, and never to impose them. Sometimes he will find himself hearing the confessions of penitents who for one reason or another are not sure how to make a confession, but who have had the courage to come to the Sacrament. He will be happy to guide and encourage them.

“I don’t need to confess my sins to a priest when I can communicate directly with God.” There is, actually, some truth to this annoying refrain. To paraphrase St Augustine, God binds us by His Sacraments but He himself is not bound by them. Just as there is a “Baptism of desire” and a “Baptism of blood” by which those who have not been sacramentally baptised with water may be saved, so the Church teaches that even the gravest of sins are forgiven by means of “perfect contrition” if we are somehow prevented from confessing to a priest. A perfect act of contrition requires the purest of motives, “sincere sorrow for having offended God, and hatred for the sins we have committed, with a firm purpose of sinning no more” [The Baltimore Catechism]. As it is difficult to discern our own motives thoroughly (only God has access to the hidden secrets of our hearts), the Church insists that we should confess our mortal sins anyway when the opportunity arises, and definitely before receiving Holy Communion. The Sacraments give us certainty. The Sacrament of Penance gives us the confident assurance that we are forgiven, blessed, restored, and ready for the mission of building the Kingdom of God on earth. If it’s a while since you have availed yourself of this wondrous Sacrament, please return.

Father Julian Large