Releasing the Arrow

The 13th-century Dominican friar and Cardinal, Hugh of St Cher, once said "First the bow is bent in study, then the arrow is released in preaching..." These are the sermons and reflections of Fr Lawrence Lew O.P., a Friar Preacher (Dominican) of the Province of England, which are illustrated with some of his photographs.

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HOMILY for 16th Mon per annum (II)

Mic 6:1-4. 6-8; Ps 49; Matt 12:38-42

“This is what the Lord asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) We like things in threes, so when we see a famous sentence like this, my mind tends to relate these three actions to the three theological virtues, or to God, the neighbour, and the self, or to the mind, the body, and the spirit. 

However, I want instead to concentrate on just this phrase: we’re called “to love tenderly”, according to this translation. The adverb suggests how we are to love, ie, the quality of our love, presumably for other people as well as for God, and we’re called to love tenderly, that is with warmth, affection, and gentle kindness. When I hear the word, I think of my grandmother crooning the Elvis Presley song, ‘Love me tender’, which she used to sing to me as a lullaby!

But if we look at other translations, it’s not so obvious that we’re being called to love in this way. For the most well-regarded translations would say that we’re to “love mercy”, or to “love faithfulness”, or to “love kindness”, so we’re not being told about the quality of our love but what we are to love. So, delving into the Hebrew, I realised that the translators are trying to translate the word hesed which is one of the key attributes of God –it is used 249 times in the Old Testament. It’s meaning encompasses all those things: mercy, faithfulness, and kindness. It is also steadfast love, loyalty, and covenantal resilience. It speaks of a God who is always there for us, whose love, as St Paul would say, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor 13:7)

So in fact we’re not being called to just love others tenderly with warmth and affection, although this is certainly still very important. After all, genuine love, I think, has to be tender, perhaps in the way that my grandmother would love me. But this comes from a genuine familial relationship. So, it’s challenging us to see others as our own family, our own kin, indeed, as our own flesh even. And this, of course, is how God loves us. 

In Christ God has become our kin, sharing in our humanity, and he loves us as his own flesh, just as the Bridegroom loves his Bride. Indeed, by giving us his own Body and Blood in the Eucharist, Christ unites us to himself in an intimate bond of love. Grounded in this reality which changes us, we are thus called to act not only as justice requires but rather with hesed, with the steadfast, faithful, kind, loyal, merciful love of God. Our realisation of the scope and richness of this love would rightly humble us so that we can but walk humbly with God and, with contrite hearts, seek his transforming grace, as we do at the start of every Mass. 

For truly there is “something greater than Jonah here”!

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Set Apart for Charity

HOMILY for 15th Sat per annum  (II)

Micah 2:1-5; Ps 10; Matt 12:14-21

The word perishayya in Aramaic means ‘those who are set apart’, and from this we get the term Pharisee. The Pharisees, then, are those who are separated from the Gentiles and other less religiously rigorous Jews in order to pursue holiness, according to the strict observance of the Law, with greater intent. I suppose if one were to give them a Latinate name, we might even, perhaps, call them ‘consecrated ones’? 

For what does it mean to become holy? What is it for us Christians to be called a consecrated people, and indeed, why are we, Dominicans and other religious who take vows of religion, said to live the ‘consecrated life’? Are we to be set apart from the sinful world like the pharisees? The temptation I think, which is both contemporary and historically recurrent, is to flee the world; to form intentional communities, indeed, strongholds, that can keep us safely apart from those others who we might consider more sinful than us; and to be set apart and left in peace to follow God’s Law and those of our institutions. Certainly, this is how many in the world would view us. 

But the Law of God, of course, is charity. And charity, in practice, is never safe. Hence the Evangelist quotes the first servant song of Isaiah, recalling the Beloved Servant of God, anointed with divine charity. But, as we know, as this servant song develops in the prophecy of Isaiah, it culminates in the fourth song, that of the Suffering Servant, the one who, out of charity, suffers and dies for humanity, and so, by his sacrificial love, consecrates the world to God.  

Thus Christ shows us that holiness and consecration doesn’t mean being set apart from the encumbrances nor contagions of our sinful world. But rather, he who is the Holy One and thus by nature distinct from his creation, enters into the world; is born of an immaculate mother but from a genealogy of sinful men and women; dwells and dines with sinners; and then, he “was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.” (Isa 53:12) Christ enters our broken world precisely so as to heal it and make it whole again. And the world is in need of men and women, consecrated in Christ, who are generous enough to do likewise, empowered entirely by God’s grace. 

One mistake the pharisees (and their contemporary heirs) make, I think, is to focus on sin, and to be myopically intent on avoiding it by being set apart from it. But sin, metaphysically speaking, is nothing and one cannot build a life focussed on nothing. Rather, we must be consecrated, that is to say, reserved for God, for his purposes, and for his service. Such a life is focused on Christ, and we build our lives on him and his example: “He will not brawl or shout, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. He will not break the crushed reed, nor put out the smouldering wick”. Many consecrated religious, therefore, have fittingly lived a hidden life, engaged in prayer, in quietly ministering to souls and bodies, and in educating and sanctifying the intellect. 

As for us Christians in general, I recall the 2nd-century Epistle to Diognetus which doesn’t call for us to be set apart from the sinful world but to be in it, like the soul, giving life to the body by pursuing lives of charity and Christ-like virtue: “Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life… And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives… Christians love all men, but all men persecute them… It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world isheld together… Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.” 

So, each Christian, consecrated to Christ by Baptism, by which each of us is now a Beloved Servant of God’s, shall in his own quiet way, contribute to the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: We are called to lead the truth to victory, and so to give Christ-focussed hope to the nations. We are called, therefore, to a life shaped by charity. As the Catechism says: “To follow and imitate Christ more nearly and to manifest more clearly his self-emptying is to be more deeply present to one's contemporaries, in the heart of Christ.” (CCC 945) 

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Healed by the God who Speaks

HOMILY for the 15th Sunday per annum (A)

Isaiah 55:10-11; Ps 64; Rom 18:18-23; Matt 12:1-23

Today’s readings invite us to pause and marvel at something that perhaps we take for granted: God speaks to us! So, in Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict XVI observed that “The novelty of biblical revelation consists in the fact that God becomes known through the dialogue which he desires to have with us.” For God’s word has been sent into the world, and indeed, even into our hearts as today’s Gospel tells us. And God’s word, precisely because it is God’s is creative and causes things to be. The Hebrew word dabar encompasses this Scriptural idea that God’s word is always both word and deed. “The word of God always accomplishes something”, Herbert McCabe would say, and so it is never futile, never mere words like some kind of divine filibuster nor merely sentimental words meant to bring comfort. Rather, the Word of God acts and speaks divine truth and thus imparts divine life into our world, into our personal human situations. Our reading of Scripture and the cultivation of a life of prayer in silence helps us to hear that life-giving Word, so that it will be fruitful.

Our notion of the Word of God can be problematic if we think of it merely as a one-sided communication, as if God merely gives his commands and instructions that come to us from on high, and we simply have to discern and obey. But that isn’t how God works, and certainly not how we Christians understand divine revelation and the gift of grace. As McCabe says, God’s word is “not merely something that is listened to and understood, it is creative and life-giving… [it] is compared to the bread by which a man lives.” Indeed,  as the Gospel reveals, God’s Word has been planted in the soil of our human hearts precisely so as to give us life, and not just natural life but divine life. I like how McCabe explains this: “This share in divinity is first of all expressed by the fact that we are not merely things created, we are creatures who are on speaking terms with God. Because of the divine life in us, the Spirit of God in us, we are able to listen to what God says–this is what we call faith. Because of the divine life in us we are able to speak back to God.” The life of grace, the authentic life of the Christian, is thus marked by our dialogue with God, with the One who speaks, who is the eternal Word. 

In fact our Christian life is to be caught up in the eternal dialogue of love that is the Blessed Trinity. As Pope Benedict said: “the Word, who from the beginning is with God and is God, reveals God himself in the dialogue of love between the divine persons, and invites us to share in that love.” To share in that divine love is a work of a lifetime, and it involves all the pain and labour of being freed from our slavery to sin, of learning to suffer for the sake of the good and the true, of becoming able to sacrifice, for there is no love without the sorrow of sacrifice, which is a share in Christ’s Cross. For the seed that is sown in the ground must die if it is to have life (cf John 12:24). Hence the central image of the parable today is one of sacrificial love, like seed sown in our hearts. If our hearts are open to being ploughed, it will open up to this divine word that is imparted to us from within by an act of grace, teaching us the costliness of love, the sacrifice needed for fruitful and life-giving Christian discipleship.  

Christ himself explains the things that hinder this growth: superficial understanding, trials and persecutions, worldly attachments and the cares of this life. But his word invites us to dig deeper and reach higher. As McCabe says, “grace does not make man a better kind of creature, it raises him beyond creaturehood, it makes him share in divinity.” Christ’s word, therefore, invites us to have faith, to receive his Word with joy, with trust, with openness to heaven’s possibilities. And the one Word that is spoken into our world, into our hearts and lives is both word and deed, which means it not only reveals God’s truth but also elicits the act of belief within us. McCabe thus says: “The response to the Word is a part of the coming of the Word, it is the Word in us.” Thus, in faith, we become part of the divine dialogue of love, the dialogue of the Son and the Father, in the Holy Spirit. 

This is why, in order for God’s Word to germinate and flourish in us, we help our hearts to become good soil through humble and faithful prayer. Prayer is nourished by silence, fertilised by an intelligent understanding of the Scriptures, and moistened by our the sweat and tears of our lives. Indeed, McCabe calls this theology, which is (like St Dominic’s own example) speaking to God or about God; living the Christian life authentically. As McCabe says: “In this sense faith refers to a particular aspect of our response to Christ, our reliance on the Word of God for insight into God’s plan. In this aspect our abandonment to Christ means that we do not reply on our own intellectually powers, but, confronted by God’s plan, we (literally) take his Word for it.” We learn, in humility, to trust in God’s goodness and the assurance of Isaiah, for example, that God’s word does not return empty without accomplishing God’s will. Or as St Paul says, even in suffering and sorrow, we hope and wait “for our bodies to be set free.” 

Ultimately, then, to ponder God’s word is to turn our gaze on the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Hence Benedict XVI said: “Here the word finds expression not primarily in discourse, concepts or rules. Here we are set before the very person of Jesus. His unique and singular history is the definitive word which God speaks to humanity. We can see, then, why ‘being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a definitive direction’.” 

For united with Christ the Word, who is sown in our very hearts, we shall now “understand with [our] heart, and be converted and be healed” by the God who is speaking to us today. 

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Our True Foundation

HOMILY for the 12th Thu per annum (II)

2 Kings 24:8-17; Ps 78; Matt 7:21-29

Anecdotally and statistically, it would appear that there is a recent upsurge of interest, especially among young men, in Catholicism; many dioceses in Europe and in North America have reported a rise in numbers entering into full communion with the Catholic Church, and here in Blackfriars we have lately rejoiced in being part of this trend as well. 

However, when people began asking me about this phenomenon, I reflected: This is good as long as people are being drawn to the person of Jesus Christ, and they are being converted to him, and not to Catholicism or the Church predominantly because we are thought to espouse moral and social positions which are deemed “anti-woke” or seen as a counterfoil to the political Left. 

Now, I grant that our reasons for converting can be complex. When I think back to my own teenage years when I became a Catholic, I was attracted by many things apart from Christ himself, such as the history and traditions and culture of the Catholic Church; the example of the De La Salle brothers who taught me and patiently answered my questions, and of the course, the philosophical and theological writings of Joseph Ratzinger which formed my young mind and attracted me. All these are good things, indeed, which can draw us to the Catholic Church, and God uses these genuine manifestations of the good and true and beautiful to draw us to himself. 

But, ultimately, as a wise priest in Leeds once told me, we must also learn to move beyond these things which first attracted us, and encounter Christ himself. “Do you love me, more than these others do?”, as Jesus asked Peter. Indeed, do we love Christ more than these other things – more than the podcast gurus and political positions and online social posturing that seem to accompany all-too-many Catholic converts today? For one might think one is doing mighty works in Christ’s name, and we might congratulate ourselves on that! But the Mighty One doesn’t necessarily need us to convert the world or the Church for him – God is perfectly capable of doing that, and he determines the time and means in his Providence. 

Rather, for each of us individually what he desires is that we humbly and steadfastly keep his law, which is the law of love – charity – a sacrificial love for God and for one another, especially the most vulnerable and excluded. He desires that we do the Father’s will which is to be conformed to Christ Crucified, so that when he looks upon us he will know us for he sees that we have been transformed by his grace to bear his Son's own image and likeness. 

So, in confronting the Cross of Christ, there is a radical detachment that is required of us, a daily letting go of the consolations that God has given us, so that we can purify our intentions and have nothing but God. “Solo Dios basta”, as St Teresa of Avila said. Or as a wise Dominican sister told me during my novitiate, we must learn to love the God of all consolations more than the consolations of God. For our Christian lives must be founded on God, the solid rock, so that when the consolations fade away (as they must), and when the political wheel turns (as it will), and when all material realities corrupt and change (as is their nature) we will be left standing with and on Christ. As the Carthusians say: “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis”, the Cross stands steady while the world turns.

Only by clinging to Christ shall we not fall, even when the rains and floods come, as surely they will – for surely this heatwave will also end, and the sooner the better for me! 

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HOMILY for the 11th Sunday(A)

Ex 19:2-6a; Ps 99; Rom 5:6-11; Matthew 9:36-10:8

J. R. R. Tolkien coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’ which literally means a good turn around. It refers to a sudden and unexpected rescue or “joyous turn” towards the good in the face of an absolutely dire situation; a catastrophe is reversed from bad to good, from death to life. Hence Tolkien said that the Gospel contains “the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe… The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.” 

This sudden turn around in the story is well illustrated in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, and many will have read the book or, at least, seen the movie various scenes in which the Great Eagles swoop in and save Gandalf from the top of Orthanc, or carry off Frodo and Samwise from Mount Doom, or turn around the final battle in the ‘Return of the King’. The eagle, then, becomes the instrument of the eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s writing; they are a symbol of divine grace, of God acting to save us from sin and destruction, as he has by Christ’s Incarnation and Rising from the dead. 

The reason Tolkien chooses an eagle as, effectively, the instrument of saving grace and a sign of divine providence may come down to the verse we read today from Exodus in which God declares to Moses: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” (Ex 19:4) Indeed, the eagle has long been considered the most noble of birds, and closest to the divine – it is rich in symbolism. In ancient Babylon, for example, the eagle was believed to carry souls to heaven, and the Phoenicians believed the eagle to be a sign of a god who conquered death. The eagle was believed by the Greeks and Romans to fly close to the sun and it was able to look directly into its light, and if it were burnt by the sun, it could dive into the waters to regenerate itself. Christians thus said the eagle was a symbol of St John whose Gospel opens by soaring to the heights of the divine nature of the eternal Word, or of the Christian soul regenerated by the waters of Baptism. Indeed, as the eagle was king of the birds and associated with new life, so some also likened it to Christ himself. 

But if we consider what it means for God to say that he bore us up on eagle’s wings, or that he would refresh us such that we can “mount up with wings like eagles” (Isa 40:31), the imagery speaks of power and swiftness. As such, God’s providence coming to rescue us in our direst need is both strong to save and swift to act when we most need it. We are invited, then, to believe and trust that in the end there will be a eucatastrophe for us who, as St Paul says, “have been justified by [Christ’s] blood”. For by Christ’s resurrection, by his life, we shall be saved, and can “rejoice in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” (Rom 5:11) Thus in the book of the Apocalypse, the woman who gives birth to the male child, who is a symbol of the Church, is “given the two wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness” (Apoc 12:14) to be nourished by God. And then in Matthew 24:28, Christ says that “Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together”, a tantalising image, perhaps, of the Eucharist, his Body, nourishing the eagle-winged members of the Church who have been rescued from sin by God’s mighty grace, brought away into the wilderness so as to be taught and fed by God as his “treasured possession”. So, just as God’s People first received the covenant and learnt God’s ways in the wilderness, so has God rescued us from the snares of sin by his grace, so that we can in the wilderness of this our present life become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:6).

Hence Tolkien observes that in this life “the Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed.” Living in this fallen world but with the hope of the resurrection, of the great eucatastrophe, we thus “proclaim as you go, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”” (Matt 10:7)    

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Mary and the Holy Trinity

HOMILY for Trinity Sunday (A)

Exodus 34:4-6,8-9; Daniel 3:52-55; 2 Cor 13:11-13; John 3:16-18

preached at Our Lady’s Shrine Basilica in Walsingham

For almost 1000 years people have come to Walsingham. Initially people came because in 1061 Our Lady had appeared to Richeldis in a dream, and she had shown her where to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth, that house in which the Annunciation had taken place; that house which had been moved to Loreto by the angels; that house in which the eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And even though that Holy House in Walsingham is no more, pilgrims still come to Walsingham. But we come here today not to remember a past event nor a historical curiosity. Rather we come to rejoice in the cosmos-changing fact of the Incarnation, which forever changed our own relationships with God and one another. 

As the Byzantine liturgy declares, “Let the heavens be glad and earth rejoice: for the Son who is co-eternal with the Father… in his compassion and merciful love for mankind has [emptied himself] and he has gone to dwell in a Virgin’s womb that was sanctified beforehand by the Holy Spirit”. For in that Holy House, forever commemorated here in England’s Nazareth, in that instant when Mary gave her Fiat, our human nature was united to the divine nature. So all creation is renewed and raised up from sin and its effects; so all creation rejoiced. Thus the angel had heralded the moment, saying to Mary, Chaire kekharitomene, “Rejoice! be glad!”. Rightly then do we, in coming to our National Marian Shrine, recall with gratitude that Mary is called in the Litany of Loreto,  ‘Cause of our Joy’. For because of her Fiat, the joy of salvation, of God’s drawing near to Mankind, has filled every human heart. 

This divine act of the Incarnation is the work of the Holy Trinity, and divine love sets in motion the work of redemption. The pattern of this divine movement of love, for those of us familiar with St Thomas’s Summa theologiæ, is that of the exitus and reditus, as the Son proceeds from the Father to save the world which itself comes from God, and then all creation, redeemed by Christ and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, returns with the Son to the Father, to eternal life in the Blessed Trinity. And this movement of grace, of coming from God and returning to God, passes through every human heart and mind so that “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Heart, we behold the triumph of God’s grace and love, which culminates in her freely-given assent to God’s will. Mary’s Fiat, given in Nazareth, is the express sign that she believes, she adores, she hopes, and she trusts in God. Hence the Second Vatican Council reflects upon Mary’s Trinitarian relationship as she is said to be “endowed with the high office and dignity of the Mother of the Son of God, and therefore she is also the beloved daughter of the Father and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (LG 53). 

Given to us by Christ to be our mother, Mary thus mediates the grace of God to us so that we too will become true children of the Father, and temples of the Holy Spirit, and conformed to the beauty and dignity of the Son of God, with whom we are co-heirs to the heavenly kingdom. By coming here on pilgrimage, and walking in procession with her statue, we manifest now our desire to follow our Blessed Mother, to receive the divine graces she dispenses to us, and to share her joy both in this world and in the life to come.

As Pope Benedict XVI has said: “Mary Immaculate speaks to us: she speaks to us of joy, of that authentic joy that fills the heart freed from sin. Sin carries a sadness with it that leads us to close ourselves up within ourselves. Grace brings with it the true joy that does not depend on having things but is rather rooted in the most intimate, deepest part of the person, and that nothing and nobody can take away. Christianity is essentially a “gospel,” “glad tidings,” although some think that it is an obstacle to joy, because they see in it a collection of prohibitions and rules. In reality, Christianity is the proclamation of the victory of grace over sin, of life over death.” 

So when we come to this Shrine, and when we process in song, and with the Rosary, to its medieval ruins, we are joyfully proclaiming this faith in the victory of life over death. For although the replica of the Holy House is gone, our presence here today shows that something more enduring, and which no earthly or demonic power can destroy, perdures and will not perish: Our living relationship with the one true God; our Christian faith rooted in the love of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit whose grace makes each of us to be a holy house in which God dwells. To this end may the Blessed Virgin Mary pray for us and journey with us until we find our eternal home in the Triune God.

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Heaven is not a space

HOMILY for 5th Sun after Easter (A)

Acts 6:1-7; Ps 32; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

Often we find ourselves speaking or thinking about heaven (or, indeed, the other place) as places. After all, Jesus begins by saying he will “prepare a place” for us, in his “Father’s house”. This would appear to justify our thinking of heaven as a location, some where that we shall also go to when Jesus comes to take us there to be with him. All this, it would seem, is the plain sense of today’s Gospel. And yet, if so, where is heaven to be found? Does talk of ‘going to heaven’ or even of Christ ascending into heaven, mean that one becomes a sort of spiritual astronaut? This kind of simplistic idea of heaven seems to lie behind the Soviet leader Khrushchev’s remark that “Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god up there”. 

Hence Jesus begins at the close of this passage from St John’s Gospel (and one would need to read on beyond this chapter) to lead his apostles into the mystery of heaven, or rather, of where it is that Jesus wants to take us; what kind of place he prepares for us, even as, already on Easter Sunday morning he had said to St Mary Magdalene: “Do not hold me… but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. So, in the final verse of today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us:“I am going to the Father”, to his Father who is now also our Father; to his God who is our God. This beautiful phrasing reminds us of the promise of the Covenant that one finds, like a refrain of love, throughout the Scriptures: “I shall be their God and they shall be My people.” Except now, Jesus adds the essential relationship which tells us how God is our God: He is our Father, Abba, and he has made known his friendship and personal love for us in and through Jesus Christ himself. Thus, Jesus says: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” Henceforth, we can and are to know God relationally, through the Son and in the Son and with the Son, who shares his Son-ship with us. And the Father and the Son give us the Holy Spirit so that we might know God by loving him, for the Spirit is the personal love of the Father and the Son. So, Christ has come to prepare our hearts so that we might have a place in the heart of God. The Song of Songs thus has this beautiful refrain: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”, which reveals where it is that Christ wants to take us.

Heaven, therefore, is not a location, and although it can be called a place, it is not a space as such, and so is not to be found in outer space as Gagarin observed. Rather, it is to be found in the expansiveness of God who is a Triune communion of love, who is relational, and who calls us into friendship with him, who calls us to love him. Thus Jesus says at the end of this chapter of St John’s Gospel: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (Jn 14:23)

The Catechism therefore says that when we speak of heaven, and of “Our Father who art in heaven”, in fact “this biblical expression does not mean a place ("space"), but a way of being…” and then the Catechism cites St Augustine, saying, “God is in the hearts of the just, as in his holy temple. At the same time, it means that those who pray should desire the one they invoke to dwell in them”, in other words, we should desire to be just, righteous, freed from sin. Indeed, we desire, by grace, to become like Jesus himself. Thus he tells us that he is “the way, the truth, and the life”. So, to the human person who, by his God-given nature, seeks to know, and to love, and so to live, Jesus is the all-encompassing answer to the deepest desires of the human heart. This means that our minds, which naturally seek truth and seek to know, will come to rest at last in Christ the Truth; our wills, which naturally desire to do the good and to act well morally, will come to rest only in Christ’s Way; and our lives if they are to have purpose and meaning and dignity, will find it in Christ who, by his Incarnation and work of Redemption, has raised up Mankind to the dignity of the sons and daughters of God.

Hence St Peter reminds us: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession”. Indeed, because of Christ and what he has done for humanity, we now belong to God, we are his beloved, and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts, through the Sacraments of his Church, to sanctify us, so that we shall henceforth belong to him: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.” 

Therefore the late and great Pope Benedict XVI once said in a homily for the Ascension: “This word, Heaven, does not indicate a place above the stars but something far more daring and sublime: it indicates Christ himself, the divine Person who welcomes humanity fully and for ever, the One in whom God and man are inseparably united for ever. Man's being in God, this is Heaven. And we draw close to Heaven, indeed, we enter Heaven to the extent that we draw close to Jesus and enter into communion with him.” For “In Christ, ascended into Heaven, the human being has entered into intimacy with God in a new and unheard-of way; man henceforth finds room in God for ever.” 

This is how we can understand Jesus’s promise that he goes to prepare a place for us, that there are many rooms in our Father’s house, for it means that by his ascension into heaven, which we will celebrate liturgically in under a fortnight, Christ will take us with him into the intimacy of the divine love that is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This, the Catechism says, “this perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity – this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed – is called ‘heaven.’” and precisely because it is life in the eternal and loving God himself, so the Catechism says, it is “the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness. To live in heaven is “to be with Christ.” (CCC 1025)

Thus Jesus promises us in today’s Gospel: “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” Let all who believe in Christ and who have received the Holy Spirit therefore place all our hope in this promise, no matter what befalls us in this life, even if we should fall into death. For Christ has called you and me “out of darkness into his marvellous light” and, by his resurrection, God’s “merciful love” is evermore upon us. So, as we hear in the Song of Songs, the beloved Soul has rightly spoken to God her Bridegroom of her longing for heaven: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death”. (Sgs 8:6) In heaven, we shall at last hold on to Christ and be one with him for ever. 

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Pope of the Rosary

HOMILY for the memorial of Pope St Pius V

Acts 13:13-25; Ps 88; John 13:16-20

The Dominican pope and saint we celebrate today has a special place in my heart, not only because of the ancient Liturgy of the Roman rite that is attributed to his reforms, but moreover because he is truly “the pope of the Rosary”. It was St Pius V who established the Hail Mary in the form we now know as the universal norm; it was he who first wrote about the form of the Rosary that we all know and love, and he promoted it universally in 1569, and finally it was he in 1571 who led the city of Rome and the Rosary Confraternity members in prayer when the Christian world was under attack by the Muslim Ottoman naval forces, and he subsequently established the feast of the Holy Rosary to be celebrated on the 7th of October in thanksgiving for the victory won on that day by the Holy League, which he had personally financed for the defence of the Christian people in Europe. 

Concerning the form of the Rosary, he asserted that “St Dominic invented this method of prayer, which is easy and suitable to everyone and which is called the Rosary or the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It consists of venerating this Blessed Virgin by reciting 150 Angelic Salutations, the same number as the psalms of David, interrupting them at each decade by the Lord’s Prayer, meanwhile meditating on the mysteries which recall the entire life of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

According to his biographer, “Pius always turned to prayer when faced with serious matters and never neglected anything that pertained to his office. For he considered it the Pontiff’s special duty to intercede before God for the sins and the needs of his people.” Thus he gathered the people of Rome in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva to pray the Rosary in 1571, and he encouraged people to join the Rosary Confraternity, which continues to this day, as a great spiritual army gathered in prayer under the banner of Our Lady; indeed, it is my privilege as Promoter General of the Rosary to oversee the growth of this Confraternity. Like him, we should always turn to prayer and have prayer as the foundation of all our actions and considerations. 

Hence St Pius, we’re told, “was so devoted to the Most Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, that he prayed the rosary every day, even though as pontiff he was occupied with many concerns.” This suggests that in the 16th-century it was still unusual to pray the Rosary daily, but Pius V clearly meant to give us an example to follow, which Our Lady of the Rosary would confirm in 1917 when she said in each of her six apparitions at Fatima: “Pray the Rosary every day to obtain peace”. 

In our own time, we are acutely aware of the lack of peace among nations, which stems from a fundamental unrest in the human heart. Our Lady, therefore, prescribed a daily Rosary, that is to say, daily prayer which would lead us to rest in Jesus through Mary, and to receive from Christ the peace which the world cannot give, the peace that comes from God alone, and from knowing and loving him as St Pius V did so ardently. 

It is certainly still necessary, in extreme situations, to defend oneself when one is under direct attack, and this is true both for individual persons and for a people – St Pius V shows us this by his saintly example, as he draws on the ever-valid ‘just war’ principles enunciated by his Dominican brother, Francisco de Vitoria, and others. However, at the same time, and following the example of Christ and the requests from heaven of Our Lady, it is always necessary, every day, that we should pray for the gift of peace, and strive to be peace-makers; our first impulse as Christians is not to live by the sword, but by prayer. As Our Lord says in today’s Gospel: “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.“ Indeed, blessed as the peace-makers, and blessed are those who commit to praying the Rosary every day for true peace, even as St Pius V had done. Thus, he said that “By the Rosary the darkness of heresy has been dispelled, and the light of the Catholic Faith shines out in all its brilliance”.  

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What Is This?

HOMILY for 3rd Wed of Easter

Acts 7:51-8:1a; Ps 30; John 6:30-35

The word manna literally means ‘What is this?’ for the Jews in the wilderness marvelled and wondered at the substance that appeared every morning, a gift from heaven, to sustain the people of God on their journey through the desert. But Christ is the true Bread from Heaven, that is to say the heavenly manna. For as St Thomas Aquinas rightly says, “Nothing is more a source of wonder than the Son of God made man, so that everyone can fittingly ask, “What is this?” That is, how can the Son of God be the Son of Man? How can Christ be one person with two natures?… It is also a cause for wonder how Christ can be present in the sacrament.”

So every Eastertide we read once more the 6th chapter of St John, and we are brought year after year before the wonder of the Eucharist. What is this? Or rather, Who is this? It is, surely, Love alone who does such things, giving all of himself to us, and for us. And only divine Love can do this, satisfying the deepest hunger and thirst of the human heart, which is a desire for life, for goodness, for beauty and truth. Only God can give himself so completely without thereby exhausting himself for God is infinite and pure spirit. Hence St Thomas says that “When material bread is eaten, it does not permanently take away our hunger, since it must be destroyed in order to build us up; and this is necessary if we are to be nourished. But spiritual bread, which gives life of itself, is never destroyed… nor do [spiritual goods] run out; and consequently the fulness they produce remains forever.” 

So What is this that we receive? It is the down payment of eternal life, that fullness of life that is found in a loving union with God forever; it is the seed of immortality, as Tertullian calls the Eucharist. For Who is it that gives himself to us? St Augustine answers, “I seemed to hear God’s voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the mature; grow then, and you will eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me’”. But what does it mean that the Eucharist is the food of the mature? 

It seems that those who are immature in their faith, like the crowd in the Gospel, seek visible signs and marvels like the manna that fell from heaven. But the Eucharist, as St Thomas says, “cannot be detected by the senses, nor by intellectual understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon divine authority.” In other words, this Sacrament, this  mysterium fidei calls for true faith, which is to trust in the word of Christ who, as God, “can neither deceive nor be deceived”. So, when asking ‘What is this?’, we have our answer from the Lord: “This is My Body; this is My Blood”. And we are invited daily to place our trust in his goodness and love which will not fail us. 

The dramatic account of St Stephen’s martyrdom reminds us of what this kind of mature faith entails: a fortitude to follow Christ to the end, even in sharing in his kind of death. Thus the martyrs commend themselves to the Father knowing that, having been changed into Christ through grace and the Eucharist, so they will also be partakers in divine life. 

“Lord, give us this bread always”, give us your daily bread, so that we who believe and come before your altar now shall also have heaven opened for us!

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Are We Worthy to Suffer for Christ?

HOMILY for the 2nd Friday of Easter

Acts 5:34-42; Ps 26; John 6:1-15

Today we’re faced with one of the most challenging responses of the apostles: they rejoiced “that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name” (Acts 5:41). Can we say the same? Would we rejoice to suffer insults, shame, humiliation etc for the sake of Jesus? Or do we try our best to avoid even being known as Christians, unwilling to suffer the ridicule and awkward questions that this could bring down upon us? For us friars, for example, is it not easier to walk the streets in cognito rather than in our white habits which draw the attention of onlookers? 

But, on a less trivial note, we know that so many of our brothers and sisters around the world do indeed suffer immensely for bearing the name of Christ, whether in Algeria and Cameroon – as the Pope has highlighted through his apostolic visit – or in Lebanon, Gaza, and Nigeria to name just a few hotspots. Yet, despite persecutions and violence, it seems that they bear their suffering with profound faith and resilience, rooted always in the hope of the Resurrection, our final vindication. 

But why is there such persecution, such antagonism between the world and the Christian disciple? Chesterton once reflected that: “The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need”.  

What our world needs is a witness to the Truth – not an absolute truth that controls and that is used as a weapon, an excuse for fundamentalist violence, or even retaliatory force, which some Christians seem to think is the right way for us to respond to persecution and martyrdom. Rather, the Truth we Christians believe in is a person, the God-Man who suffered and died for us, and his Cross is the antidote to the powers and violence of this world. To the worldly-minded this looks like failure and a capitulation to the powerful. Judas certainly rejected the way of the Cross, and the others fled from it. But what about us, especially we who stand now in the light of the Risen Lord? 

Are we “worthy” of suffering and dying with Christ, of co-operating with him in the healing of our world, of being what the people need, an antidote to the poison of our world which has a zeal for war and a lust for dominance? If we consider today’s Gospel, we see that God chooses the little boy, and the little that he has to offer, and it is from the small gestures that the world overlooks and even despises that God, invisibly, does great miracles. The Eucharist itself, which this miracle points towards, is such a great but invisible marvel of God’s presence, known only by faith.

So, too, the martyr; the Christian who quietly suffers and offers up his sufferings; the persecuted Christian who prays for his persecutors, and still continues to cling to the one true Faith in Christ, all bear witness to their deep faith in the Resurrection. For as they bear witness to Jesus’s sacrificial love, suffering with him, and offering up prayer and entreaty for their enemies, they know that “a servant is not greater than the Master” (John 15:20b). As the world crucified him, so they will do to us. But, if we hold firm and steadfastly “speak in the name of Jesus” as the apostles do, then we can also be confident that we shall share in his glory. For Jesus promises: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you…Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Mt 5:11f). Thus St Thomas called the Eucharist our "pledge of future glory”, a promise and down-payment of our own Resurrection with and in Christ. 

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Renew the Face of the Earth: Homily for 2nd Monday of Easter

Acts 4:23-31; Ps 2; John 3:1-8

Numerous reports have indicated that this Easter thousands of young people in the USA and across Europe and beyond have received the Sacraments of initiation. Parish priests on both sides of the Atlantic have largely agreed that this phenomenon is nothing we could have anticipated, nor is it immediately due to any diocesan programmes or pastoral plans as such. Rather, it is an evident sign of the vitality of Christ’s mystical Body, in whom the Holy Spirit is moving and working in ways beyond our human imagining, to bring new life, to convert souls, to renew the Church. As Our Lord says in today’s Gospel: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’”

Commenting on this passage, St Thomas Aquinas observes that the wind, the spiritus that blows where it wishes, is the Spirit of God who, “by the free use of his power… breathes where he wills and when he wills, by instructing hearts”. As such, it is the Holy Spirit, the active agent of God’s mercy, who speaks in the heart of sinners to lead them to repentance, and who, St Thomas says, “speaks in the Scriptures or through those who preach” to lead unbelievers to faith, to come to the Church, and so to seek the Sacraments of salvation. In our time, it seems that the Holy Spirit speaks also through the many podcasts, and videos, and even prayer apps that have been credited by the younger generations with having brought them to the Catholic Faith, an effect that has surprised even the creators of these apps. or indeed, it surprised me when I was at the football match on Saturday and one of the Bournemouth fans recognised me from this daily live-streamed Mass! But the Spirit blows where it wishes, into the hearts and minds of those who long for the true and living God! 

However, there is a beautiful movement of God’s mercy and grace that necessarily moves the merely curious listener to become a believer – a believer, not merely in the Church and her moral teachings as if she were an anti-‘woke’ social movement – but rather, the Holy Spirit must instruct us and move us, we pray, into a living faith in the person of Jesus Christ, towards a boldness in overcoming sin in our own lives and so to living like new persons, reborn in grace. And before we can be reborn, there must be a dying, a mortification, an end to sin and ideas which are not of God. 

St Basil the Great explained it well: “The Lord who gave us life also gave us the Baptismal covenant, which contains an image of both death and life. The image of death is fulfilled in the water, and the Spirit gives us the pledge of life. Therefore it is clear why water is associated with the Spirit [in today’s Gospel passage] because of Baptism’s dual purpose. On the one hand, the body of sin is destroyed, that it may never bear fruit for death. On the other hand, we are made to live by the Spirit, and bear fruit in holiness. The water receives our body as a tomb, and so becomes the image of death, while the Spirit pours in life-giving power, renewing in souls which were dead in sin the life they first possessed… We must be determined to acquire in this life all the qualities of the life to come”, such as “gentleness, endurance, freedom from [a disordered] love of pleasure, and from covetousness.”

Let us pray, then, for all our thousands of neophytes this year, and indeed for all of us who are not-so-new in our Christian discipleship. May the Holy Spirit renew our lives, especially when we have become complacent and self-righteous, and may the Holy Spirit renew the face of the earth, scarred by bombs, and ravaged by war blasphemously wrought in God’s name. As Pope Leo prayed on Saturday as the Rosary for Peace: “Send forth your Spirit, the Breath that gives life and reconciles, that turns adversaries and enemies into brothers and sisters.” Let us, reborn in the Spirit, be emboldened to proclaim to the world both by word and by deed what this really means: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9). 

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Resurrexi: Homily for Easter Sunday

HOMILY for Easter Sunday (2026)

Acts 10:34a. 37-43; Ps 118; Col 3:1-4; Jn 20:1-9

Nobody witnessed the resurrection, nobody saw it happening, still less gave a scientific or historical written account of it. Indeed the instant of the resurrection is shrouded in darkness and mystery, a wonder so intimate to the very life of the Blessed Trinity, that it can be known only to God but which is marvellously disclosed to us in faith. Hence Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb “while it was still dark” (Jn 20:1) but nevertheless she has come, though she does not at first realise what she has discovered: An empty tomb with the monumental stone taken away, and the body of the Lord missing, she exclaims. This note of fear and bewilderment characterises the apostles’ reaction on that first Easter morning. St Mark plainly says: “They went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mk 16:8)  

But as we heard last night at the Easter Vigil, the Risen Christ reassures his fearful disciples, “Do not be afraid”. These are the first words of Jesus, newly-born from the dead, to us and to the world: “Do not be afraid”. And this Easter morning, to us and to a world that is gripped by many fears due to the personal tragedies and sorrows that  might beset us, and the socio-political chaos and evils that surround us, the Risen Lord Jesus says today: “Do not be afraid.” 

For “this is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” Let us rejoice, then, for Christ is risen – death has no power over him. Let us be glad, for “your life is hidden with Christ in God”, St Paul says (Col 3:3), and so we live always in the today of Easter. For having died with Christ through Baptism and penance, our true life is now hidden in God – hidden in the empty tomb in which faith sheds a light to dispel the darkness; hidden in the intimacy of God’s own Trinitarian life which love understands; hidden in God who is the eternal Now; in Christ, the “one Morning Star who never sets” in whom we anchor our hope.

So, now, on this day that the Lord has made, Jesus shall share his secrets with us; it is here, now, in the Mass, that Jesus leads us more deeply in to the life of God so that we will be hidden in him. Just a couple of nights ago, before he was handed over by a friend, he had handed himself over to us by instituting the Eucharist and ordaining the first priests, and he had said: “I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you”. (Jn 15:15) So in the Mass and through the Sacred Liturgy of the Church, Jesus reveals to us – those who have been Baptised and so initiated into the depths of the Trinitarian life – the hidden wisdom of God, things which “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined” (1 Cor 2:9), the “things that are above”. (cf Col 3:1,2)

Therefore, in the Mass this Easter morning, there is a beautiful little mysterious detail which is often overlooked but which I believe allows us, Christ’s friends, to witness the moment of the Resurrection. The entrance antiphon of the Mass cites psalm 139, but in fact the Latin text is ancient and survived St Jerome’s first revision of the Old Roman psalter. Whereas Jerome’s version begins, “Exsurrexi”, which, like the Hebrew and Septuagint Greek, means ‘I awoke’, the Liturgy has preserved an older, more mystical translation: “Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum…” The Fathers of the Church understood these to have been the words of the risen Son to the eternal Father, his first words spoken after Jesus took in the first breath of his resurrected life: “I have risen and am still with you, alleluia; you have placed your hand upon me”. As the great Pope Benedict XVI explained: “The hand of the Father upheld him even on that night [of death], and thus he could rise again.” 

But the Gregorian chant that animates this text is also mysterious, expressing the mood of the Church, the apostles, who give colour to the Risen Lord’s words to his Father. Sung in the 4th mode, the melody is grave in tone and sounds hesitant and sombre –  hidden here, musicologists suggest, is the fear and bewilderment of the disciples on that first Easter day. However, as the ‘alleluias’ are sung, Bishop Erik Varden rightly observes that “this liturgical composition proclaims the resurrection with quiet wonder. It lifts the Church’s praise before the empty tomb into the eternal embrace of the Trinity.”Through this chant, we are lifted up into the hidden life of God, now disclosed to us in faith.

The Lord has another ‘Easter egg’ (so-called) for us: Knowing our human nature, with our need to see and touch, and with our rational need to satisfy our natural curiosity, Jesus had not in fact left the tomb completely empty. For though he is not there, he left “linen cloths” and the “napkin, which had been on his head… rolled up” (Jn 20:6,7). Many overlook these details, and many more apparently suppose that the apostles just ran away and went home, and left these cloths behind to moulder in the darkness. But that would be absurd. St John is careful to record that it is precisely on seeing these cloths that the apostles fully believed in that which they had only until then dared to hope in and latently believe in. As St Thomas Aquinas comments: “By hope we enter in to see what we believe” (ST IIa IIæ 17, 7 ad 1). And so, Peter and the other disciple have run to the tomb in hope, having heard from Mary that the body of Jesus was not inside, and what they see confirms their flickering faith that Christ is, indeed, the Resurrection and the Life, who conquers even death. 

For the linen cloth that is left behind, not folded up, was wound around the body of Jesus. Lazarus had to be unbound, but Jesus, in his rising moment, just passes through the cloth, with a radioactive energy that surpasses any that we humans can manufacture, leaving behind the imprint of himself asleep in death – we now call this the Shroud of Turin. And the folded-away napkin, matching the image of Jesus on the Shroud, is another mysterious cloth, also unexplained by science, and now venerated in Manoppello about 200km from Rome in Abruzzo (shown above). It bears the miraculous imprint of the Lord’s face with his eyes open and his lips parted, taking his first breath upon rising from the dead, and with that breath he says to the Father, and to us today: “I have risen and am still with you, alleluia.” How wonderful to us, this knowledge!

You and I, this morning have thus been “chosen by God as witnesses”, as St Peter says – chosen to befriend again the risen Jesus here in the Mass. Today, we are those “who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead”. Therefore, let us rejoice and be glad; like the apostles let us no longer be afraid, nor hidden from the world. Rather, to a fearful and cynical world, let us proclaim: "Christ is risen, and he is with us still, alleluia, alleluia!" 

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Greater attentiveness to God & the Least among us.

HOMILY for Thursday in Week 2 of Lent

Jer 17:5-10; Ps 1; Luke 16:19-31

The Gospels are full of little details, and none are superfluous but reveal something important. Today, for example, we’re told that “even the dogs came and licked [Lazarus’s] sores.” I used to think this was meant to emphasise the wretchedness of the poor man’s condition, which it certainly does. However, the point is that even dogs had pity on Lazarus, and they licked his sores in order to bring him some relief and comfort. The rich man, therefore, behaves worse than a beast because he doesn’t even have regard for a fellow human being. By ignoring the poor man, the rich man shows himself to be inhuman, loving only himself and his luxuries, and this same self-serving love is evident even after death, as he continues to think of Lazarus as someone to be ordered around to serve him. Ultimately, this is the danger of trusting in one’s wealth: Like all sin, it turns one in on oneself, such that we no longer care nor love others as persons, fellow human beings.  

The Holy Father, in his message for Lent, thus reminds us that this holy season is meant to prevent this kind of sinful isolationism, by first of all opening ourselves to God through a prayerful listening to the Gospel; we must let the Word of God convict us and convert our hearts. Indeed, through the poor men and women who are with us always, we are challenged to see and to listen and to respond with love. As Pope Leo says: “In the midst of the many voices present in our personal lives and in society, Sacred Scripture helps us to recognize and respond to the cry of those who are anguished and suffering. In order to foster this inner openness to listening, we must allow God to teach us how to listen as he does. We must recognize that “the condition of the poor is a cry that, throughout human history, constantly challenges our lives, societies, political and economic systems, and, not least, the Church”.” 

Of all the Church’s social teachings, the foundation and perhaps the most challenging is that of the Universal Destination of Goods. This teaches that every human person has a right to use the goods of the earth, given by God ultimately, so that he can “feed himself, grow, communicate, associate with others, and attain the highest purposes to which he is called”, namely, holiness of life. The Church calls on economic systems and governments, with due regard for private property and the enjoyment of goods acquired through labour and inheritance, to nevertheless serve this fundamental right and so to “contribute to making a more humane world.” This is the point made in St Luke’s Gospel, that the rich man clearly had more than he needed to live well and was living excessively – one purple garment, for example, was equivalent to several year’s wages for an ordinary labourer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church thus insists that “those who hold goods for use and consumption should use them with moderation, reserving the better part for guests, for the sick and the poor.” (CCC 2406)

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, citing today’s Gospel, therefore warns that “Owners who heedlessly idolize their goods (cf. Mt 6:24, 19:21-26; Lk 16:13) become owned and enslaved by them. Only by recognizing that these goods are dependent on God the Creator and then directing their use to the common good, is it possible to give material goods their proper function as useful tools for the growth of individuals and peoples.” (CSD §181)

Today’s Gospel is thus a salutary challenge that prompts us to examine our consciences concerning God’s Providence of material goods, and how we use them, and how we regard the poor. Thus Pope Leo prayed that this Lent we would have the grace of “greater attentiveness to God and to the least among us.” Amen. 

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Homily for the 1st Sat of Lent

Deut 26:16-19; Ps 118; Matt 5:43-48

What was I made for? For some this is the title of a popular Billie Eilish song, but for us today it  is the finale of this section of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. For when he calls us to “be perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect”, the Greek word being used is teleios, which perhaps may also be translated to give the sense of completion, maturity, or even purposefulness, being directed to an end, a goal. Derived from telos, meaning the goal or purpose or end of a thing, we might say that Christ, having pointed to the indiscriminate love of the Father for both the evil and the good, the just and the unjust, now points out the reason for our being made. What are we made for? St Therese of Lisieux answers, in a letter to her cousin: “Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else”. For God is Love, and we are made for him, so the more we love, then the more we become like our heavenly Father, and thus more complete, more mature in our being. 

But until we become fully mature in Christ, there is always a sense of incompleteness in our lives; we experience daily the terrible lack or emptiness and restlessness that is our sinful condition. St Irenaeus suggests that Mankind was created in an infantile state, and so was not yet perfected or really complete because “Man could not possibly have received it, or even if he had received it, could [not] have contained it, or containing it, could [not] have retained it.” Rather, we must experience first our profound human imperfection and thus our fundamental need for Christ the perfect Man, in whom we shall at last find rest, as St Augustine famously said. St Irenaeus laid out our changeable human condition thus: “For the Uncreated is perfect, that is, God. Now it was necessary that man should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth, should be strengthened; and having been strengthened, should abound; and having abounded, should recover [from the disease of sin]; and having recovered, should be glorified; and being glorified, should see his Lord.” (Contra haereses, IV, 38) 

This time of Lent, then, is perhaps best seen as our recovery period, giving us respite from sin; and this lifetime is one of convalescence whereby the Church is our hospital as St John Chrysostom has said. This time of Lent is also our time to be strengthened so that we might abound. We’re strengthened through penance which makes us more aware of our distance from God our goal; through prayer which stirs us up to long for God and to desire our true end; and through works of charity, learning to love others including those who are unlovable. For that is how God regards us whether we are just or not.

For he sees and knows the reason why he has made us. For God is love, and he has made us for himself – he has made us for love. So let us develop and grow and mature into our telos and purpose: I need to learn to love even as God loves, which Christ demonstrates, principally by loving me who I know all too well to be so unlovable! The goal of Christ’s work of grace, perfecting us, we might say, or making us fit for purpose, is again summed up by St Irenaeus. He says: “Jesus Christ, in His infinite love, has become what we are, in order that He may make us entirely what He is.” Or as St Athanasius put it, God became Man so that Man might become God – this, incidentally, is precisely the central mystery of our Faith that is the focus of the Holy Rosary. The Rosary preaches, simply, to quote Billie Eilish “how to be happy – something I'm not, but something I can be.” For that is why God made us: “To be happy with Him for ever in heaven.”

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HOMILY for St Paul Miki and Companion Martyrs

Sirach 47:2-11; Ps 17; Mark 6:14-29

The Fifth of February, 1597: On that day, on a hill overlooking Nagasaki began the centuries-long Passion of the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body, in Japan. This country, for me, stands for all of Asia because the so-called ‘Apostle to the Far East’, St Francis Xavier, had set foot here, on Asian soil on Assumption day in 1549. From an island on the southernmost tip of the Japanese archipelago, he headed north towards the imperial capital of Kyoto, and by 1551 when he departed for China (which had always been his goal) there were a thousand Christian converts in Japan. Although a few local lords (daimyos) would convert over the next few decades, there were always sporadic persecutions as the Japanese warlords (instigated by Buddhist priests) vacillated between suspicion of Western ways and a craving for Portuguese armaments to aid their feudal wars; the Jesuit mission centres in these decades would be attacked and driven underground repeatedly. Even so, by 1597 there were almost 100,000 Christians, mainly centred around Nagasaki which was a port opened for trade with the Portuguese. But this was a small number in a country with 20 million inhabitants. And yet, God works best with the small and humble, for even a little yeast can leaven the dough. (cf Matt 13:33)

In 1587, the warlord Hideyoshi had unified Japan, having defeated all the lesser feudal lords, and he eventually decided that the Christians disrupted the social harmony of his newly-unified country. Hence he ordered the expulsion of all Christian missionaries. The Jesuits, used to the volatility of warlords, handed over control of Nagasaki, with its lucrative tax income from Portuguese merchants, and closed a few Catholic institutions but most of the missionaries went underground or fled to north to friendlier regions. And the numbers of converts continued on an upward trend as Hideyoshi became distracted by preparations to invade Korea and China with the help of Portuguese weapons and ships. 

So, ten years later, in 1597, when twenty six men and boys were executed by being tied to crosses and then pierced with a lance, on Nishizaka Hill overlooking Nagasaki, it came as a shock to the Japanese Christians. Just as the death of St John the Baptist was a shock that foretold the coming execution of Christ, so the martyrdoms we honour today would be the first of many. The active persecutions continued for 276 years, and over 650 martyrs would shed their blood for Christ on Nishizaka Hill or in the vicinity, including the Saint after whom I am named, Lorenzo Ruiz from Manila, and another from Br Giovanni’s hometown in Sicily, Giordano Ansaloni. For the Martyrs who died at Nagasaki came from all over the world, but today we remember especially the first twenty six: 19 were Japanese converts, and the rest from Spain or Mexico. 

Just thirteen months ago, I stood in front of a beautiful monument on Nishizaka Hill, in which each of these twenty six saints is represented in bronze with their hands held together in prayer, or raised in supplication, and all with their lips open as they sang the psalm Laudate pueri Dominum. Standing there that morning when I made my pilgrimage to Nagasaki, I sang these words of praise with them, and I prayed the Rosary, as many of the martyrs did, as I looked upon the scene before us: the first rays of the rising sun bringing a warm glow to the buildings and surrounding hills of Nagasaki. Fittingly, in this Land of the Rising Sun, the blood of these martyrs testified to their undying Faith in the true Son who has Risen and never sets. As St Paul Miki, aged 33, and the first Japanese-born Martyr said in his final sermon, while hanging on the cross at Nishizaka: ““Like my Master, I shall die upon the cross. Like him, a lance will pierce my heart so that my blood and my love can flow out upon the land and sanctify it to his name.” And so the youngest martyr would cry out repeatedly: “Paradise, paradise… Jesus, Mary.”

But each of these companion Martyrs, I believe, deserves to be better known, and it was only when I visited Nagasaki that I realised how young and diverse they were. Please permit me some time to name them, in the order in which they were crucified, as depicted on the Martyrs’ Monument, beginning on the left: St Francis, a carpenter from Kyoto; St Cosmas Takeya, a sword-maker from Owari; St Peter Sukejiro, a youth from Kyoto; St Michael Kozari, a 46-year old bow-maker from Ice; St James Kisal, a Jesuit lay brother from Okayama; St Paul Miki, son of a soldier from Tsunokuni; St Paul Ibaraki, born in Owari of a samurai family; St John of Goto, a teenage catechist and musician; St Louis Ibaraki, the youngest aged 12; St Anthony, aged 13 from Nagasaki; St Peter Baptist, from Avila in Spain and superior of the Franciscans; St Martin of the Ascension, a Franciscan from Spain; St Philip of Jesus, a Franciscan from Mexico, aged 24 and the first to die among these martyrs; St Gonzalo Garcia, a Franciscan from India; St Francis Blanco, a Spanish Franciscan; St Francis of St Michael, likewise a Franciscan lay brother from Spain who had lived many years in the Philippines; St Matthias who had offered himself in place of another Matthias who could not be found; St Leo Karasumaru, from Owari; St Bonaventure, from Kyoto; St Thomas Kozaki, aged 14 from Ise; St Joachim Sakakibara, aged 40 from Osaka; St Francis, aged 48 and a physician from Kyoto; St Thomas Daggi, a pharmacist from Kyoto; St John Kinuya, a 28-year-old silk weaver and trader from Kyoto; St Gabriel, aged 19 and served as a catechist, from Ise; and finally St Paul Suzuki, aged 49 from Owari who had charge of St Joseph’s Hospital in Kyoto. 

Nishizaka Hill became a place of pilgrimage from that moment, and even when the Japanese Christians were driven into hiding and recusancy, and their was faith sustained principally by the Rosary, still the red camellias they had planted on this hill bloomed every year in memory of the Martyrs’ sacrifice: “I hope my blood will fall on my fellow men as a fruitful rain”, said Paul Miki. But the Church in Nagasaki would offer one further sacrifice in 1945. Just 80 years after the Christians had emerged from hiding and rebuilt their cathedral in Nagasaki, an atomic bomb, which had been meant for another location, would be denoted right over the Catholic heart of Japan. 

How to make sense of this? Dr Takashi Nagai, who survived the bomb and whose cause for canonisation is ongoing, offered a striking (and very challenging) theological perspective which completes our survey of the Passion of the Church in Japan. Nagai believed that Providence chose Nagasaki with its large Christian population to be “a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War.” The Christians of Japan were thus united to our Crucified Lord; martyrs for peace.

Pope Leo XIV has lamented that in our time “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.” May Nagasaki always be a reminder of the horror of war and persecution, especially as the Treaty for strategic nuclear disarmament expired yesterday. And my prayer, particularly when I return on pilgrimage to Nagasaki this September, is that all the Martyrs of Nagasaki, and especially St Paul Miki and his twenty five companions, will intercede for us: that peace will prevail among nations; that the Church in Japan and across Asia may be salt to the earth; and that true Christians will work together as peacemakers, bearing witness as the Martyrs did, to the Gospel of forgiveness, love, and final salvation in Christ.     

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 4th Sun per annum (A)

Zeph 2:3, 33:12-13; 1 Cor 1:26-31; Matt 5:1-12

I began the new year by breaking an unspoken resolution of mine: Not to devote much attention to the news and especially to politics! But the year began with an explosion of global political manoeuvres and power plays that were hard to ignore. Indeed, I began to perceive that to ignore the noise of global imperialism and domination, and the shocking use of violence and militaristic force by ‘law enforcement officers’ against citizens standing up for justice in their own countries, might lead to a willful neglect of the injustice being done, which would be sinful. Now, it would be easy to say that we should mind our own business and focus on the injustice being done at home, or in our own country, or even in our own hearts. But as is often the case for us Catholics, it’s not either-or but both-and: we need to look at both the tendency towards sin in our hearts, but also guard against sin being done in the world, and to speak against it as a people who have been anointed to be priests, kings, and indeed, prophets.

So we hear the prophet Zephaniah declare that we, who are God’s creatures, must all live before God in humility, conscious, as human beings, of our common mortality and equal dependence on God, and we are thereby commanded to “do no injustice and speak no lies”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in her teaching on social justice, thus states that the respect for the fundamental human dignity of all people, is foundational: “Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. These rights are prior to society and must be recognized by it. They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy. If it does not respect them, authority can rely only on force or violence to obtain obedience from its subjects. It is the Church's role to remind men of good will of these rights and to distinguish them from unwarranted or false claims.” (CCC 1930)

Hence Pope Leo XIV, on the 9th of January, gave a brilliant speech to the Diplomatic Corps of the world who are assigned to the Holy See. Drawing on the writings of St Augustine, he reminded all Christians that “Christians are called by God to dwell in the earthly city with their hearts and minds turned towards the heavenly city, their true homeland. At the same time, Christians living in the earthly city are not strangers to the political world, and, guided by the Scriptures, seek to apply Christian ethics to civil government.” He then pointed out that “Augustine also warns of the grave dangers to political life arising from false representations of history, excessive nationalism and the distortion of the ideal of the political leader”, all of which we were then beginning to confront as 2026 began. 

So, while we still live in the earthly city, in this world which must, of necessity, engage in political action, then we Christians must examine what is being done, calling to mind the teaching of Christ and the lessons of holy Scripture. St Paul, for example, in today’s reading underscores Zephaniah’s call for us to “seek the Lord [and] seek humility”, by asserting that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world…” In other words, God shows a preference for that which the worldly look down upon, and he favours the lowly, he hears the humble and he blesses them with true riches from heaven; a blessedness that Jesus spells out in the Gospel today. 

Indeed, the Catechism devotes a whole section to the Church’s love for the poor and needy and the Jubilee Year that we have just completed was meant to remind us of the Scriptural injunction in Deuteronomy to “open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land” and to have a care for strangers and refugees. Thus God chose, in the person of Jesus Christ, to enter into solidarity with the needy and poor, to become one with those who endure the miseries and injustice of this world, to the extent that those who serve the poor and hungry and imprisoned and so on are in fact performing a service that is done for our divine Lord! (cf Mt 25:21-46)

Pope Leo, in his first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te thus said: “Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger and in the extreme humiliation of the cross, where he shared our radical poverty, which is death… Wanting to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favour of the weakest.” St Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote a beautiful little treatise in 1264 to explain the Christian Faith to non-believers, stated that God teaches us to choose the ways of lowliness and poverty and humility in this world so that God’s glory and power might be manifest and not ours. Hence, Christ “chose everything that was rejected and low in the world, a poor mother and a poor life, illiterate disciples and messengers, and allowed himself to be rebuked and condemned even to death by the magnates of this world”... because, for the sake of our salvation, “it was necessary for men to learn not to trust proudly in themselves, but in God.”

A profound reflection on the humility and weakness of Christ, and on God’s love for the poor and humble of the earth as taught by the prophets and the unified witness of the Scriptures, as well as the copious examples and writings of the Saints, to say nothing of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church itself, should lead us to affirm that the so-called ‘Gospel of Prosperity’ that asserts itself in some purportedly ‘Christian’ communities – among certain evangelical Christians, for example, and the so-called ‘Christian Right’ – is heretical. This heresy has, sadly, influenced many Catholics today, thanks in no small part to the penetration of social media into the lives and minds of many people. This heresy manifests itself in a certain lust for dominance, for strength, for power, and it despises any opposition as ‘weakness’. It is a heresy born of fear: fear of the loss of worldly success and riches and power. In St Augustine’s words, this fear originates from the worldly city and not the heavenly city, for as Pope Leo explained to the world’s ambassadors: “the earthly city is centred on pride and self-love (amor sui), on the thirst for worldly power and glory that leads to destruction.”

Christ, our loving Saviour, has come to save us from destruction – He has come that we might have life, and have it in abundance. For this reason, his holy Church proclaims the fullness of the Gospel of life, which calls all people, regardless of their position and state of life, to turn away from every sin both social and personal, and from destructive behaviours and mindsets; to embrace the heavenly vision set out for us by Christ in the Beatitudes. Today’s Gospel turns on its head the values of the world so that we must, of necessity, each examine our consciences and ask: Do I live according to the truth of the Gospel, as Jesus taught it, or am I following some heretical version that is warped by the mindset of the world and its politics and the chatter of social media? For today’s Gospel, as it has been lived out in the lives of the Saints, shows that from Christ comes the grace to live in weakness and lowliness, so that we might learn not to trust proudly in ourselves but in God. So psalm 146 – which I love to cite – warns us: “Put no trust in princes, in mortal men in whom there is no help… It is the Lord who keeps faith for ever, who is just to those who are oppressed. It is… the Lord, who protects the stranger and upholds the widow and orphan”.  Let us, as Christians, be mindful then to be "about the Lord's business" and to work with him, to "do his just commands".

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

Numbers 6:22-27; Ps 66; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

The coming of a new year always brings with it optimism, hope, and much promise. Although the Jubilee of Hope has now concluded, nevertheless that year-long celebration in Rome only served to remind us Christians that our hope is well founded. For, like Mary our Mother, we place our hope, ultimately, in God who we ask to “be gracious and bless us” (Ps 66:2). 

But this first day of the secular new year is for us Christians, the eighth day of Christmas, the octave day. And, as St Augustine says, the number eight is that of new beginnings coming after the completion of the week, and returning to the beginning, the origin. We return to the source of our hope, which is the Incarnation of Christ the Eternal Word of God who, “when the fullness of time had come”, was “born of woman”, and was found by poor shepherds “lying in a manger” at Bethlehem under the adoring gaze of Joseph and Mary. On this eighth day, therefore we return to that which is the origin of our Christian life and the source of our hope, namely, God-with-us, present in the Eucharist. For the Word who becomes flesh and is born of Mary is substantially with us in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar. Christ unites himself to our flesh, so as to make of our hearts and our lives a true Bethlehem, a living House for him, the living Bread that has come down from heaven. So, we Christians base our hope on the promises of Christ, indeed, on the promise that is Christ; with Mary our mother we silently and contemplatively “treasure up all these things, pondering them in our heart”. The Rosary, Mary’s gift to us, is still the most beautiful way to ponder the mysteries of our salvation, with the Incarnation at the very heart of them all. 

Today’s Gospel also leads us to ponder Christ’s saving mission, for this is why he is born for us, so as to redeem us in the flesh. Thus, on the eighth day, Christ is circumcised, and this initiated a new covenant between God and humanity. For at his circumcision, Christ first shed his blood for us, to redeem us, both Jews and Gentiles alike, and this becomes a pledge of his sacrifice on the Cross, where his precious Blood was shed for the salvation of all. St Thomas observes that “[Christ] took upon Himself circumcision… [in order] to accomplish a spiritual circumcision in us”. (ST IIIa, 37, 1 ad 3) Hence Christ was circumcised so that we are purified from our sins; so as to cut us off from our sins, setting us apart by his grace from all those things that hold us back from following God fully. This is the promise he makes to us year after year: that his precious Blood is sufficient to forgive us and convert us. So, our hope for a better new year is founded on this promise of God’s grace for without him we can do nothing. The acknowledgment of God’s grace and salvation is made manifest when the babe of Bethlehem is named ‘Jesus’ which means ‘God saves’. So, to call upon Jesus’s name, which we do repeatedly when we pray the Rosary, is to call on God to save us,  to be our salvation; to come to our aid in our weakness, and to sanctify us by making us become like Christ in his virtues. And in that same prayer we repeatedly seek the intercession of the Mother of God that we might become more like her divine Son. 

For Christ, by his Incarnation, has hypostatically united himself to our humanity; God is married to Man, and he has thus forever changed our human destiny. No longer shall we  called ‘Desolate’ and ‘Forsaken’, as Isaiah says, but we shall be called ‘Married’ and ‘God delights in us’. Artists and poets and theologians have all marvelled at how Our Lady exemplifies the delight that God has in a human person, she who is immaculate and thus the most beautiful creature he has ever made. And yet, today’s feast which gives to Our Lady the title Theotokos which was dogmatised at the Council of Ephesus in 431, doesn’t so much focus on Mary as it does on Jesus Christ. Specifically, it draws out the implication of the Incarnation, which is to say that from the moment the Word took flesh in the Virgin’s immaculate womb, the person of Jesus Christ was always both God and human because the human and divine natures were hypostatically united in him. As St Cyril of Alexandria said: “We must not think that the holy Virgin gave birth to some unspecified man, into whom the Word descended later; no, we must believe that there was one single reality from the first moment in his Mother’s womb… This is why we do not hesitate to call the holy virgin Theotókos, not in the sense that the divine nature of the Word took its origin from the holy Virgin, but in the sense that he took his holy body, gifted with a rational soul, from her. Yet, because the Word is hypostatically united to this body, one can say that he [the eternal Word] was truly born according to the flesh” And, indeed, as St Paul says, “born of woman, born under the law” in order to redeem us, and give us a share in his divine sonship. 

In the words of one of my favourite antiphons, sung at Vespers on this Octave day of Christmas: “O wonderful exchange! The Creator of human nature took on a human body and was born of the Virgin. He became man without having a human father and has bestowed on us his divine nature.” This miracle of grace is the source of our hope, and it comes to be, even now, in the wonderful exchange that takes place in this, in every, Holy Mass. O admirable commercium! O magnum mysterium! O venite adoremus!