As Cardinal Mercier said : "When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere."                                                                                  From Cardinal Sarah : "In order to avoid hearing God's music, we have chosen to use all the devices of this world. But heaven's instruments will not stop playing just because some people are deaf."                                                                                              Saint John-Paul II wrote: "The fact that one can die for the faith shows that other demands of the faith can also be met."                                                 Cardinal Müller says, “For the real danger to today’s humanity is the greenhouse gases of sin and the global warming of unbelief and the decay of morality when no one knows and teaches the difference between good and evil.”                                                  St Catherine of Siena said, “We've had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence.”                                                  Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”                                                Brethren, Wake up!

CHRIST THE KING - THE KINGSHIP OF OUR BAPTISM

We are greatly honoured that our friend Dr Michael Cullinan has allowed us to reproduce his homily for the Feast of Christ the King, delivered at St James's Spanish Place last Sunday.
For those members of the Order and Companions who seek to ennoble their immortal souls though the service of Our Lords the Poor and Sick within the traditions of our Order, this homily will have most fruitful resonance. In the light of the present battles which many face within the Order and the Church, we can only benefit, in our journey to Heaven, from Dr Cullinan's prophetic words.
Holy words are often rather worn-out. Tired, faded words. Like an old, once beautiful piece of furniture, they have knocked around for so long that the shine has worn off. Once they were bright, vivid, and striking. Now they’re just part of the furniture, unnoticed for most of the time.

Most of the words we use in the Mass have become worn, tired, and faded, because we hear them so often that we take them completely for granted. It’s only when you have to try to explain some of these holy words to a stranger that you realise just how worn they have become.

When I explain the liturgy of christening, I always feel a bit awkward about the anointing with chrism. It’s done because every Christian is called to be prophet, priest, and king. The oil of chrism is still used to anoint priests and kings, as it was in Israel three thousand years ago. Aaron was anointed high priest. Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king. The word Christ and the word Messiah both mean the anointed one. So we anoint tiny babies with chrism and tell their parents that they are now prophets, priests, and kings.

The trouble is that we have forgotten what real prophets, priests, and kings are. There aren’t many prophets around today. Catholic priests aren’t at all like the priests of Our Lord’s day. And there are very few real kings around today. Figureheads and tyrants, but few kings. Sometimes I wonder whether if I changed ‘prophet, priest, and king’ to ‘ace, jack, and king’ would anyone really notice? Tired words, worn away by years of sanctity and over-use.

Today is the feast of Christ the King. In some ways it’s a bit like Ascension Day. It would be easy to celebrate it as something that honours Our Lord but has nothing to do with us. Just as we believe that he ascended to the Father a long time ago, so we believe that he will come back to rule the universe, a long time in the future. Very nice, very holy, and totally unrelated to where we are now. A feast day for him, not for us.

Ascension Day must have left the disciples living in the past, reminiscing about the Lord they had known, lost, found again, and who had now left them, this time for ever. Living in the past. Reliving old glories. Longing for the good old days. Hating the future. Despising the present. No hope or confidence in the here and now. Just like many people today. Longing for the old days, the old ways, the old order. Until Pentecost came.

Christ the King could also make us do the opposite. Go to the other extreme. Live entirely in the future. Long for the day when it will all come right. When the new world will come. Put all our hopes in heaven. Worship all change and everything new, whether it’s any better or not. Long for the new age. Hate the past. Despise the present. Have no hope or confidence in the here and now. Just like many other people today. Longing for new days, new ways, a new order.

But we don’t celebrate feasts because we want to live in the past or in the future. We celebrate them to make us live more in the present. Christ the King is about how to live in today’s world. We celebrate today to give us strength, hope, and confidence to live as followers of Christ in today’s world. Not just in private life, but in public life too. Not just as individuals but as a people. A Church. Part of His glorified body. Christened, anointed to be prophets, priests, and kings.  Those words again. Holy words, tired words. What on earth do they mean?

I think they mean freedom. Freedom from depending on others to do your praying for you. Freedom from depending on others to do your thinking for you. Freedom from depending on others to do your deciding for you. 

A priest can pray to God directly. He is free from false religion. He isn’t a slave to money, power, or sex. He makes himself holy by developing his conscience and following it, by God’s grace. He doesn’t need a Temple. He criticises corrupt religion. Even within the Church. Even when that leads him to Annas and Caiaphas.

A prophet speaks God’s message. He is free from falsehood and propaganda. From conventional wisdom and from fashionable ideas and from political correctness. He tries to find out the truth. By God’s grace. He doesn’t take his opinions in packages from the media or the blogosphere. He doesn’t depend on experts to do all his thinking for him. Even when other people don’t like what he says. Even people within the Church. Even when it leads him to Pilate.

A king is free from being forced to do things. A king isn’t a tyrant or a figurehead. He has dignity and honour. He decides what to do and takes full responsibility for it. He does and says what he thinks right. By God’s grace. He isn’t cowed by others. By peer group pressure. By the powers that be. Even by spiritual powers. Even when that leads to the Cross.

Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the Prophet, Priest, and King. And remember that we too are christened. As prophets, priests, and kings. Called to be kings. Called to find the truth. To bear witness to the truth in the world out there and in the Church. Wherever it leads us. Even as far as Annas and Caiaphas. Even as far as Pilate. Even as far as the Cross.

SALVE SANCTA PARENS


SAINTS JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

A week ago today the Church and the world celebrated the raising to our altars of a great English saint, the first post-Reformation English confessor, a saint not a martyr, to be canonised.  This is a joy for England, and an honour for the English Church.

The day of the canonisation was the feast of another great English saint, and a very significant anniversary, which passed almost unnoticed. It was the feast of St Edward the Confessor, the last of the great Anglo-Saxon kings, and the 750th anniversary of the translation of his holy relics to Westminster Abbey, and the dedication of his shrine behind the high altar on 13th October 1269, at which time King Henry III’s rebuilding of Edward’s Abbey was also consecrated.

The feast is kept as a solemnity by the Catholic Church within the City of Westminster, and this replaced the Sunday Mass in these parishes.  

Edward had build the Abbey, dedicated then, as now, to Saint Peter, and lived to see it consecrated, lying in the church on his deathbed for the long (but in the circumstances necessarily truncated) ceremonies on 28th December 1065, two days before he went to his eternal reward.  Little did he know that two centuries later it would become his shrine, and remains to this day one of the few shrines in Britain which has not been desecrated, but retains his hallowed remains in the original feretory, still greatly venerated.  Indeed few such shrines survive intact in Europe.

St Edward was responsible most particularly for encouraging Marian devotion of this Land, gaining special privileges from the Pope for Her veneration in his Abbey at Westminster, a work continued by many kings, most notably Edward III and Richard II, who formally dedicated England as Our Lady's Dowry at Her shrine in this very abbey church, within sight of St Edward's relics. At his conversion Newman said that at last he was free to honour Mary – he was restored fully to the birthright of every Englishman.

Newman cannot have imagined, when he left Rome for England as a newly ordained priest in 1847, having sacrificed all his worldly goods and status, that one day he too would be raised so gloriously to our altars, nor can such an idea have seemed even possible as he celebrated his First Mass in England at the former Bavarian Embassy chapel of the Assumption Warwick Street at the close of that year, the church now in the care of the Ordinariate, under his patronage.
Most certainly he could not have known that he would follow so closely in the footsteps of St Edward and that the great church and Oratory he was to found in the Hagley Road Birmingham would one day become his shrine. At a worldly level it was indeed sad that Saint John Henry did not live to see the rebuilding and dedication of his beautiful church around the first smaller Oratory church which he had himself built, again so uncannily redolent of the architectural history of Westminster Abbey (albeit on a much shorter timescale), but none of that matters now. He is a saint for all Eternity.

Let England rejoice in her two great saints, both of whom spent their lives serving the spiritual needs of this people beneath Our Lady's mantle, and who between them span the whole modern era of our country. Let us never cease to implore their powerful intercession for our land and our Church. In the words of HRH Charles Prince of Wales, a kinsman of St Edward, following last week's canonisation, "(Newman) gave the Catholic Church renewed confidence as it reestablished itself in a land in which it had once been uprooted." Amen to that.

Saint Edward the Confessor, pray for us.
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us.