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Monthly Archives: June 2012

Peter, Paul & Fulton

29 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Uncategorized

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communion, fulton sheen, joy, ordinariate, peace, ss peter & paul, unity

On Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI declared the American Archbishop and evangelist Fulton J. Sheen as a Venerable Servant of God – the first step towards (please God) his eventual canonisation.

I had the great privilege of proclaiming the gospel from a pulpit he used often and hearing confessions in his confessional in St Patrick’s, Soho Square. I’m also adopting him as the patron of my work as Communications Officer for the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Imagine how devastatingly effective he’d have been with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like… *shudders*.

On the great Solemnity of Ss Peter & Paul, though, I am particularly rejoicing in the communion that we in the Ordinariate now share with over two billion other Catholic Christians: the full communion of the Catholic Church. I always expected to be bowled over by the astonishing and profound impact of Catholic communion, but it’s the peace of that communion which has really been an unexpected but welcome gift after the turbulence of former years. Thank God.

And, this week, amidst a whole host of stuff going on that’s made it a more-than-usual challenge to keep my eye on the joy and hope and splendour of all that we have achieved together, it is the Venerable Servant of God who brings me back to what communion with St Peter is all about in these few words from his autobiography, Treasure in Clay:

On a train trip from New York to Boston, I sat next to an Episcopalian clergyman. We began a friendly discussion on the validity of Anglican Orders. He contended he was a priest as much as I was, that he could offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and that he could forgive sins. He was well versed in history and in theology and our discussion proved to be so interesting that many passengers gathered around us to listen to the friendly debate. He got off the train at Providence. He advanced several steps, then turned around and, facing the audience which we both enjoyed, thought he would give me the last telling challenge by saying, ‘Remember, Bishop Sheen, I can do anything you can do’. I just had time to answer : ‘No, you can’t. I can kiss your wife, but you can’t kiss mine’.

Venerable Servant of God, Fulton J. Sheen: pray for us.
St Peter, the Prince of the Apostles: pray for us.
St Paul the Apostle: pray for us.

Something For The Weekend

25 Monday Jun 2012

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buckfast, conference, new evangelisation, ordinariate, patrimony, tracey rowland

This Saturday the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham welcomes Professor Tracey Rowland to lead our thoughts on the New Evangelisation in the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, with a particular attention to the role we have in that important work from our unique place in the life of the Church.

Professor Rowland is the Dean and Permanent Fellow of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, Australia, and the author of numerous articles and several excellent books (including two works on Pope Benedict XVI). She is an engaging speaker and holds a passion for the New Evangelisation, and also for the Ordinariate project, about which she has spoken previously.

I had the good fortune to meet Professor Rowland over a Bloody Mary, no less, in Rome last year during the festivities surrounding the beatification of Pope John Paul II. We’ve stayed in touch since, and I’m looking forward to catching up with her in person on Saturday and hopefully getting a short interview about her hopes for the Ordinariates here and abroad.

Just to give you an example of her enjoyable style and humour, commenting on Edward Short’s excellent Newman and his contemporaries, Professor Rowland says:

Newman and His Contemporaries is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time, except the characters are all real historical figures. Social historians, Spectator readers, literate people in general, young BXVI generation Catholics and those old enough to finish the sentence Introibo ad Altare Dei… will love it. This is a book to be taken on a summer holiday and read under a palm tree with a gin and tonic. Social histories can be boring and sag in the middle, but this one isn’t. It’s a soufflé that doesn’t flop.

Let’s hope something similarly fantastic can be said about our work in the Ordinariate, and the efforts we make towards engaging with the New Evangelisation.

There are a few limited places left at the conference, which will be held at Buckfast Abbey in Devon. It’s a beautiful location and will be an excellent setting for the celebration of Mass by the Ordinary and Solemn Evensong & Benediction. If you’re interested in coming, drop me an email.

Heads Up: Promoting Priestly Vocations

23 Saturday Jun 2012

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press conference, priesthood, vocations

On Monday at 10.30 a.m. (BST) there will be a Press Conference held at the Sala Stampa of the Holy See at which a new document on the promotion of vocations to the priesthood will be presented. It will be live streamed via news.va. Those interested in encouraging vocations to the Sacred Priesthood might like to make a cup of coffee around then and tune in.

Social Communications & the Church

23 Saturday Jun 2012

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media, mgr paul tighe, new media, social communications, social media

Mgr Paul Tighe, the Secretary to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, speaks at a recent Media Congress in Sydney, Australia. Mgr Tighe was one of the primary organisers of the 2010 Bloggers Meeting in Rome which I was fortunate enough to attend, but has also been helpful in the establishment of our communications work for the Ordinariate:

A Question of Morality?

21 Thursday Jun 2012

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germain grisez, jimmy carr, morality, taxation

Last night I had a fairly robust interaction with a few people on Twitter about the Jimmy Carr tax controversy which has been in the news here the past few days. My point was that, whatever level of hypocrisy might have been exercise by the comedian, the moral question with regard to tax avoidance is one which (in this case) cannot be separated from the legal requirements placed on UK citizens.

What do I mean by that? Well, firstly a small example. Is it immoral to buy a bottle of gin in Duty Free shops? I sincerely hope not. This is because the government has, under certain circumstances, allowed a dispensation from paying a certain amount of taxation on a commodity. Is it immoral, then, to pay not one penny more than your annual tax bill requires? No. The government asks for X amount, and we respond to that in a way which fulfils Christ’s command – Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

So, then, is legitimate tax avoidance (not evasion, I hasten to add) immoral? Well how can it be? If there is a legal loophole which allows a person to say that they do not have to pay more than they have to, why would it be immoral for them to make use of it?

Whether or not it is desirable for the government to allow such loopholes to exist is, I think, a valid question. But if somebody legitimately and legally avoids paying more than they must, then this is surely not their error but their right and duty, especially if they have dependents (such as a family).

Now, I must add that this is not a defence of those who engender a smash and grab attitude. It is immoral, for example, for a person to have wealth and yet not give at least some of that wealth over to aid the poor and those less fortunate. But that’s not the question that is directly posed here. Rather, the act which is being described as ‘immoral’ (by the PM, no less), is in fact an example of a legitimate exercise of civil law. Whether or not that law should now be changed – well, that’s a different question altogether.

For those interested in reading more about the Catholic approach to taxation, I would heartily recommend the excellent writings of Germain Grisez, in his excellent and concise The Way of the Lord Jesus. It is available for free (!) online, and I would recommend this, this and this as good places to start.

Update: Maybe he read this and was filled with remorse and contrition. Maybe not. Anyway, Jimmy Carr has (within minutes of me posting this) put this statement out to his 2, 302, 756 followers on Twitter:

I appreciate as a comedian, people will expect me to ‘make light’ of this situation, but I’m not going to in this statement as this is obviously a serious matter. I met with a financial advisor and he said to me “Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal.” I said “Yes.” I now realise I’ve made a terrible error of judgement. Although I’ve been advised the K2 Tax scheme is entirely legal, and has been fully disclosed to HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), I’m no longer involved in it and will in future conduct my financial affairs much more responsibly. Apologies to everyone. Jimmy Carr.

Credit where credit’s due. As it were. No pun intended.

Evangelisation on the Digital Continent

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Uncategorized

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communications, digital continent, Facebook, media, new evangelisation, new media, social communications, Twitter

I’ve finally got round to reading Brandon Vogt‘s book The Church and New Media, partly out of a sense of duty, and partly due to the onset of panic about a few talks I have been asked to give on this subject. I got my paperback version through the post last week – I’d have had the Kindle version, but it’s not available to download in the UK (so, you can order a book from the US, but not download a file… crazy).

Cardinal Sean O’Malley‘s introduction bears reading well, and so far Fr Robert Barron and Jennifer Fulwiler‘s contributions have been well worth considering – both in terms of the theological underpinnings of communication and evangelisation on the ‘digital continent’, and the importance of evangelisation through digital and new media.

But it’s the insight of Marcel LeJeune who really made me stop and think. LeJeune’s enthusiasm for a proper integration of social communications into the ecclesial environment is not only infectious, it’s a qualified success. At Texas A&M university, the chaplaincy (LeJeune is the fantastically named ‘Assistant Director of Campus Ministry’… only in the US) uses podcasts, YouTube, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, low-power FM radio and Flocknote (look that up is you want some cool parish communications tools). And it works – as his example of registering students with the chaplaincy via their ‘cellphone’ (sic) shows.

I might immediately baulk at the idea of getting students to get their iPhone out at the end of Mass, but really it’s no different from getting them to fill in a Gift Aid envelope, or remember the dates sung from the Epiphany Proclamation of Moveable Feasts – it’s about information being passed on for the building up of the Church, and the more effective proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, frankly, we often have people following the readings and the Order of Mass on their phones here and it’s less distracting than someone fiddling with their ribbons and swishing paper pages.

At a later date I want to write something more about this idea of the ‘Digital Continent’, which appears in this book and elsewhere in Catholic media discussions. In short, you’re either an immigrant or a native: so if you find it the most natural thing in the world to say your Office on your iPhone, or to be updating Twitter whilst the latest episode of your favourite show is on iPlayer, you’re a native; if you’re still using email as your main source of online communications (and I mean socially, not for work) – you’re an immigrant.

The Church’s new approach to social communications, especially the New Media, has to be founded amongst those whose thumbs were designed to slide across an iPad screen, not those who think that Bluetooth is a dental filling. And don’t take my word for it (cue Universal Pontiff):

It falls, in particular, to young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this “digital continent”. Be sure to announce the Gospel to your contemporaries with enthusiasm. You know their fears and their hopes, their aspirations and their disappointments: the greatest gift you can give to them is to share with them the “Good News” of a God who became man, who suffered, died and rose again to save all people. Human hearts are yearning for a world where love endures, where gifts are shared, where unity is built, where freedom finds meaning in truth, and where identity is found in respectful communion. Our faith can respond to these expectations: may you become its heralds! The Pope accompanies you with his prayers and his blessing.

At our distance today

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Liturgy

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eucharistic congress, ireland, liturgy, pope benedict, reform of the reform

These are the words of Pope Benedict XVI in a message for the close of the fiftieth Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. I have added my own emphases: 

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

With great affection in the Lord, I greet all of you who have gathered in Dublin for the Fiftieth International Eucharistic Congress, especially Cardinal Brady, Archbishop Martin, the clergy, religious and faithful of Ireland, and all of you who have come from afar to support the Irish Church with your presence and prayers.

The theme of the Congress – Communion with Christ and with One Another – leads us to reflect upon the Church as a mystery of fellowship with the Lord and with all the members of his body. From the earliest times the notion of koinonia or communio has been at the core of the Church’s understanding of herself, her relationship to Christ her founder, and the sacraments she celebrates, above all the Eucharist. Through our Baptism, we are incorporated into Christ’s death, reborn into the great family of the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ; through Confirmation we receive the seal of the Holy Spirit; and by our sharing in the Eucharist, we come into communion with Christ and each other visibly here on earth. We also receive the pledge of eternal life to come.

The Congress also occurs at a time when the Church throughout the world is preparing to celebrate the Year of Faith to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, an event which launched the most extensive renewal of the Roman Rite ever known. Based upon a deepening appreciation of the sources of the liturgy, the Council promoted the full and active participation of the faithful in the Eucharistic sacrifice. At our distance today from the Council Fathers’ expressed desires regarding liturgical renewal, and in the light of the universal Church’s experience in the intervening period, it is clear that a great deal has been achieved; but it is equally clear that there have been many misunderstandings and irregularities. The renewal of external forms, desired by the Council Fathers, was intended to make it easier to enter into the inner depth of the mystery. Its true purpose was to lead people to a personal encounter with the Lord, present in the Eucharist, and thus with the living God, so that through this contact with Christ’s love, the love of his brothers and sisters for one another might also grow. Yet not infrequently, the revision of liturgical forms has remained at an external level, and “active participation” has been confused with external activity. Hence much still remains to be done on the path of real liturgical renewal. In a changed world, increasingly fixated on material things, we must learn to recognize anew the mysterious presence of the Risen Lord, which alone can give breadth and depth to our life.

The Eucharist is the worship of the whole Church, but it also requires the full engagement of each individual Christian in the Church’s mission; it contains a call to be the holy people of God, but also one to individual holiness; it is to be celebrated with great joy and simplicity, but also as worthily and reverently as possible; it invites us to repent of our sins, but also to forgive our brothers and sisters; it binds us together in the Spirit, but it also commands us in the same Spirit to bring the good news of salvation to others.

Moreover, the Eucharist is the memorial of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, his body and blood given in the new and eternal covenant for the forgiveness of sins and the transformation of the world. Ireland has been shaped by the Mass at the deepest level for centuries, and by its power and grace generations of monks, martyrs and missionaries have heroically lived the faith at home and spread the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness well beyond your shores. You are the heirs to a Church that has been a mighty force for good in the world, and which has given a profound and enduring love of Christ and his blessed Mother to many, many others. Your forebears in the Church in Ireland knew how to strive for holiness and constancy in their personal lives, how to preach the joy that comes from the Gospel, how to promote the importance of belonging to the universal Church in communion with the See of Peter, and how to pass on a love of the faith and Christian virtue to other generations. Our Catholic faith, imbued with a radical sense of God’s presence, caught up in the beauty of his creation all around us, and purified through personal penance and awareness of God’s forgiveness, is a legacy that is surely perfected and nourished when regularly placed on the Lord’s altar at the sacrifice of the Mass. Thankfulness and joy at such a great history of faith and love have recently been shaken in an appalling way by the revelation of sins committed by priests and consecrated persons against people entrusted to their care. Instead of showing them the path towards Christ, towards God, instead of bearing witness to his goodness, they abused people and undermined the credibility of the Church’s message. How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?

It remains a mystery. Yet evidently, their Christianity was no longer nourished by joyful encounter with Jesus Christ: it had become merely a matter of habit. The work of the Council was really meant to overcome this form of Christianity and to rediscover the faith as a deep personal friendship with the goodness of Jesus Christ. The Eucharistic Congress has a similar aim. Here we wish to encounter the Risen Lord. We ask him to touch us deeply. May he who breathed on the Apostles at Easter, communicating his Spirit to them, likewise bestow upon us his breath, the power of the Holy Spirit, and so help us to become true witnesses to his love, witnesses to the truth. His truth is love. Christ’s love is truth.

My dear brothers and sisters, I pray that the Congress will be for each of you a spiritually fruitful experience of communion with Christ and his Church. At the same time, I would like to invite you to join me in praying for God’s blessing upon the next International Eucharistic Congress, which will take place in 2016 in the city of Cebu! To the people of the Philippines I send warm greetings and an assurance of my closeness in prayer during the period of preparation for this great ecclesial gathering. I am confident that it will bring lasting spiritual renewal not only to them but to all the participants from across the globe. In the meantime, I commend everyone taking part in the present Congress to the loving protection of Mary, Mother of God, and to Saint Patrick, the great patron of Ireland; and, as a token of joy and peace in the Lord, I willingly impart my Apostolic Blessing.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

Video

The Liturgical Reform

16 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Uncategorized

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Beauty, liturgy, ordinary form, reform of the reform, sacrality

Here is another excellent short video from the Catholic News Service:

 

Our Present Duty

12 Tuesday Jun 2012

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anglo-catholicism, charity, eucharist, patrimony, social justice

I am grateful to the Marylebone Ordinariate Group for reminding me of this moving and impassioned speech – Our Present Duty – by Frank Weston, sometime Anglican bishop of Zanzibar, who made these remarks at the close of one of the great Anglo-Catholic congresses (1923, in fact) which were held in the Royal Albert Hall. Here is a video from the 1922 congress.

Anglo-Catholic attempts to bring about more obviously Catholic devotions within the Church of England were met with much discontent by the establishment and many Anglicans in the early years, but by this time the Movement was beginning to hold its’ own. This is why there is the reference ‘…you have begun to get your tabernacles’.

Whilst the situation of the Catholic Church is very different, these words apply equally; not least if we consider the liturgical reforms of the last few years. Thank God for Pope Benedict XVI and his profound love for and of the sacred liturgy. But the lex orandi – the beautiful and worthy celebration of Holy Mass – must always be a catalyst and fuel for the life of Christ to be seen in us, and in his Church.

Here’s the famous bit:

. . I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you, through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. . . . It is folly, it is madness, to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacrament and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating Him in the bodies and souls of His children. . . . You have your Mass, you have your altars, you have begun to get your tabernacles. Now go out into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, in the oppressed and the sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them, and, when you have found Him, gird yourself with His towel of fellowship and wash His feet in the person of his brethren.

The complete speech is available here.

On a hundred thousand successive Sundays…

09 Saturday Jun 2012

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corpus christi, eucharist, mass, patrimony

Gregory Dix (1901-1952) was an Anglican liturgical scholar and member of the Anglo-Papalist community of Nashdom. As an Anglican priest he celebrated the Roman Rite every day, privately and in Latin, and yet was never received into the full communion of the Catholic Church. He was a good friend of the moral theologian and canonist, Kenneth Kirk, who served as the Anglican bishop of Oxford – another luminary indeed.

Each year, around the feast of Corpus Christi, I read these words again. This year they make such profound sense as I celebrate my first solemn feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord as a Priest of Jesus Christ:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the ‘plebs sancta Dei’—the holy common people of God.

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