The Feast of our noble and blessed Founder, in the 900th year of his heavenly nativity, was celebrated with considerable splendour at Saint James's Church, Spanish Place. This was the first big event for the Order since the coronavirus disruptions, and was the occasion for the delayed Investitures of eight new Members of the Order, who are to be warmly welcomed and congratulated. Our thanks for hospitality of the altar to the Rector, our chaplain Fr Colven.*
The Choir of Saint James's, under the direction of Ed Tambling, excelled itself in joyful beauty in Byrd's Mass for Five Voices, to the starved delight of the large congregation. They also sang Justus ut palma by Palestrina, and Tallis's O salutaris.
The Celebrant and Preacher was our learned chaplain Father John Hemer MHM. Father Hemer preached upon Truth and Obedience, and opened with particular reference to the Pachamama episode of a year ago, which we covered on this Blog HERE and HERE, and praised our doughty and influvating Austrian confrère, who may be seen in video HERE, who brought it to a watery end.
Father Hemer's illuminating and uplifting text follows below. We are, as ever, extremely grateful to him.
Feast of Blessed Gerard
EXACTLY a year ago some of us held our breath, some of us looked on in horror as the events of the Amazon synod unfolded, October 6th – 27th I could scarcely believe what I was seeing when a pagan idol, the so-called Pachamama was, evidently, venerated in the Vatican gardens, and later brought in procession to the Basilica where the first vicar of Christ, prince of the apostles lies buried. And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse it did. Several copies of that lifeless idol were enshrined in front of an altar in the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina while the living and life-giving body of Christ was reserved on another altar in the same church, the whole thing presided over by a lady Anglican minister who was out and proud lesbian. You can’t make it up!
I don’t know about you but my heart rejoiced when I saw the film on YouTube of those young Austrian men removing those vile pagan images from the church and dumping them in the River Tiber where they most definitely belonged. And my heart leapt for joy when I first looked over the readings for this evening and saw those words of St. Peter in the first reading:
For of all the names in the world given to men, this is the only one by which we can be saved.
If I could I’d be tempted to cartwheel across the sanctuary on hearing those words a few moments ago. Don’t worry, I can’t even run for a bus any more, so anything more energetic would be out of the question.
Pope Benedict, the morning after his election spoke at Mass warning us about “the dictatorship of relativism.” And I remember thinking how true, but assuming that the relativism he spoke of was something outside the Church, something post-modernists were engaged in, but not us Catholics. How naïve I was! That relativism is there at the heart of the Church and it’s been around a lot longer than last year’s synod. And we are, I believe, engaged in a fierce struggle to preserve, uphold and proclaim the integrity of the Catholic Faith. Part of the mission of each one of us here, in different ways, is to hold before the world the absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
And that’s the first thing I would want to say to all of you tonight, but especially those who have their investiture and are formally entering the Order. Our Order is massively involved in charitable work all over the world and that’s wonderful. But if we are not carefulwe can easily ‘undersell’ our vocation by suggesting that what we do is all about feeding starving children, housing the homeless, clothing the naked etc. Don’t get me wrong; a great deal of what we do is what you might call human uplift or development. We do that not in order to win people over but simply because Christ told us to: I was hungry and you gave me to eatetc. We have, on the whole, a fine record in this regard, and remember the Catholic Church is out and away the largest charity in the world. However, especially in our post-modern “all-religions-are-basically-the-same” sort of culture we can avoid a lot of awkward questions and be pretty sure of people’s admiration and support if we confine our talk to helping people materially. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people who thought it was wonderful that I was in Pakistan helping the poor etc, but at the same time thought I had no business whatsoever trying to preach the gospel to them. No, through our personal search for holiness, our reverent celebration of the liturgy and our following of the order’s rule, we must try to bear continual witness to Christ our Lord. We’re not do gooders, we are do Goders! Here is a slightly different translation of the gradual we’ve just heard:
The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks justice. The law of his God is in his heart; his steps do not slip.
Let’s live and work and pray in such a way that this be an accurate description of each one of us.
If we are at all familiar with 16thC. English church music we will know Thomas Tallis’s lovely setting of some of today’s gospel. But there is a subtle and important difference between the two texts. Tallis’s version says:
If ye love me keep my commandments
So an imperative, a command. What we read tonight however was:
If you love me, you will keep my commandments,
No command, just a future indicative, a future statement of fact. The explanation for this difference is fairly simple; there are manuscripts which have the imperative, and probably the translation which Tallis was working with had just such a command.
The problem with the text Tallis uses is that it can, in the wrong hands, be made to sound moralistic and controlling. As a priest, more than once I’ve come across a passive-aggressive controlling parent saying to a child: “If you love me you will do what I want, and if you don’t do what I want, then you don’t love me.” Now I’m not even raising the possibility that Jesus might be doing this, just that people with their own hang-ups could use this to portray Jesus as a moralising control freak.
That’s why I’m so glad that the text we use today has the simple future indicative,
you will keep my commandments,
and so do most of our modern translations. In other words, keeping the Lord’s commandments isn’t a condition of loving him, it’s a consequence of it. If we love him, then, fairly naturally, we will do what he asks of us without too much complaining. We have all experienced in our own lives what this means, especially I think earlier on. When we start to take our faith seriously, when the Lord moves in on us, we start to love him, to be attracted by him, to be drawn to him. The things of God delight us, we can’t get enough and living the Christian life gives us joy and energy. Now it’s not that this initial ardour cools off – although it can of course – but rather it matures into healthy habits, a life style that is naturally Christian. So when we get up in the morning none of us here has to make the big decision “shall I pray or not today?” or shall I tell the truth, shall I be honest in my use of money? Shall I be kind to people or shall I be horrible? etc?” All that flows quite naturally from our often humdrum and unspectacular efforts to love the Lord. That’ why Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yokeis easy, and my burden is light."(Mt. 11:29-30)
We know though that despite the truth of that we sometimes struggle to be the people we are called to be. That’s why Jesus promises to send another Counsellor, helper; the word of course is Paraclete, and here, somewhat unusually, Jesus defines that word a bit more precisely:
The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.
The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, is the one who helps us see things as they really are. In my teens and twenties, we were very aware of the Eastern Block as a set of societies who tried systematically to supress the truth in all sorts of ways. George Orwell in his novel 1984 which satirised totalitarianism wrote about the ‘mutability of the truth’ – basically the idea that the truth was whatever the ruling party said it was. We were rightly indignant about that, living as we did in a society where free speech was an inalienable right. Well the Communist block’s gone but we find our ability to speak the truth is curtailed in all sorts of ways in our western world. And it’s precisely the Catholic Church that’s getting into trouble increasingly for speaking the truth about the basics of humanity, gender, when life begins and ends and many more things.
When John talks about ‘the world’, he doesn’t just mean ‘the planet’. He means human society organised in a way which excludes God. So once a society starts to do that, it simply can’t receive the Holy Spirit because it can’t stand the truth. There’s a scene in Acts at the trial of Stephen where Stephen preaches with great eloquence and if you like tells an alternative history of the Jewish people and shows that they had resisted God all the way along. (That was nothing new; all the prophets had been saying the same things for hundreds of years, sometimes in much saltier language.) Then they all stop their ears and rush at him. In other words they know that Stephen is telling the truth, and once you hear that, you either change your ways, repent, or you silence the truth and attack the one who is telling it too you. And we see that happening in all sorts of ways today. But Jesus promised that the Spirit of Truth would be with us forever
I will not leave you orphans –
We are not just people who have to stoically try to keep Jesus’ commandments, we have someone who will help us do it, the Paraclete.
We celebrate the 900thcentenary of our founder. We ask that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete give us the grace to continue the example he set, to continue keeping the Lord’s commandments because we love him. Finally we pray for those who take this important step tonight that they will truly be able to show the world that:
of all the names in the world given to men, the Holy name of Jesus is the only one by which we can be saved.
Blessed Gerard, pray for us.
* For those who wish to be awkward, and there's always one, we can confirm that full social-distancing measures, in accordance with H M Government regulations, were in place throughout.
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