It is the soil - today's sermon

"You will listen and listen again, but not understand, 

see and see again, but not perceive. 

For the heart of this nation has grown coarse, 

their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, 

for fear they should see with their eyes, 

hear with their ears, understand with their heart, 

and be converted and be healed by me."

It is easy for a preacher to forget these verses from Isiah that Our Lord quotes, and to concentrate on sowers and seeds but before we get there we have remember the effort a first century farmer would have to put into the land before it could be cultivated. 

Even if his forefathers had cleared the land of vegetation it was an annual struggle to clear it of weeds, to dig out the rocks and stones that just keep coming up, to ensure the irrigation ditches are clear, to repair the fences to keep out his or his neighbour's livestock.

Before tractors it was not too difficult if you were rich and had an ox or donkey but if you had to rely on your wife and children to pull the plough or simply had to dig it yourself it was back-breaking work. Seed too was expensive, what you sowed you didn't eat, at least not until the new harvest, and you sowed in the hungry times when what you stored for the winter was coming to an end - you didn't want to waste it - it was seed taken from your children's mouths.

Therefore before we consider anything else let us consider the soil - soil of the soul.

How can we listen and understand?

See and perceive?

How do we stop our hearts growing course?

Make our hearing less dull, open our eyes?

Indeed, how do we hear with our ears, understand with our hearts so that we are converted and healed by him?

We are supposed take as much care over the care of our souls as a farmer of Jesus' time took over the care of his soil.

First we need to stay close to Jesus, to irrigate our souls with the Sacraments and the Word of God, to stay close to the Church's constant teaching.

We need to get rid of the rocks, those hard places in our lives where the Gospel can't grow, the deep seated, heavy sins - that really can be backbreaking work.

We need to uproot the weeds, the evils in lives, the gossip, the hatred, the keeping silent in the face of evils done to others.

We need to fertilize the soil with good works, yes prayer again, frequent confession, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, acts of charity and generosity.

We are not doing this work alone, God is with us in this strenuous work, so is the great Mother of God, as too the angels and saints -read the lives of the saints- they prepared the soil in their own fields, they were experts in clearing the soil of the soul. 

God wants us to be successful. He is the sower scattering the precious seed of his grace into our hearts, he wants it to grow producing a rich harvest in our lives.

14th July ,,,

... and so the dreadful terror began that turned men into beasts...

Nasty Courtiers

Did you believe the story about the Pope submitting his five dubia to Cardinal Mueller? No nor did I, I just don't believe the stories that begin Monsignor A told Bishop B that Cardinal C had said the Pope has said or done Y. I do my best not to listen to gossip, and not to report it. If we can't try to speak the truth we are unlikely to be faithful witnesses to Christ, we have an obligation to speak the truth even if it costs us dearly in order to be credible.

I certainly don't trust Monsignori or anyone who is not willing to back up a damaging statement about the Pope without being willing to put his name to it, especially as in this case it was also about someone like Cardinal Mueller who is quite able to state frankly his own case and has a certain reputation of being honourable. Passing on this kind of 'fake news' is trading in filth, I find it as scandalous as stories about sexual deviants having parties in the Vatican.

Poor Pope Francis has to battle as much against with his friends as against his enemies, many of the more vociferous on both side are pretty unpleasant, they contaminate with their filthy lies those who listen to them and pass on in all innocence what they have heard. Simply, the Gospel allow it and threatens judgement against those who do it!

There is a very good podcast by Damien Thompson and Fr Ed Conlon at the end of this piece in the Spectator. Fr Ed hits the nail by saying that invariably liberal commentators misinterpret the Pope, it is not just journalists but as is discussed even revamped the Academy for Life came out with a statement regarding not keeping little Charlie Gard alive by extending his treatment, whilst the Pope, the very next day invited the family to Rome for further treatment.

One of the great problems with every court is that courtiers tend to fail to understand the thinking of the Prince, which means of course one moment you can be by his side giving advice and the next in a cage on the roof Castel Sant'Angelo exposed to the elements. The other thing about courtiers is they are often very nasty people, they put their trust in princes and not in the Lord. To see this today one only has to look at Twitter to see the abusive or gloating comments of those who claim to be close to the Pope today. If they judge a man to be an enemy of Francis there is no end to the vilification and bile.

The more unpredictable or incoherent a prince becomes the more violent and malevolent become those who surround him, of course they wish to control him, in the case of the current Pope this probably impossible, in the words of Cardinal Pell, 'he is unique'.

New Saints

Just seen the motu proprio about the  new criteria for a certain category of martyrs, those who give their lives for others. Maybe I am hyper-critical, or get a little to anxious about anything coming from Rome where ambiguity seems deliberately written into documents and where 2+2 can actually equal 5. I get anxious about anything that distracts us from Christ. On a quick reading it seems that it could be possible to be beatified for a love of humanity rather than for love of Jesus Christ.
Do feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

I suppose I have a certain growing concern about the canonisation/beatification of so many, once for Christians in both East and West a person's sanctity was judged on their ability to intercede and work miracles, their post-mortem activity was often much more important than their lives. St Thomas Becket, for example, was raised to the altar not so much for his legal disputes with the King but for the stream of healing miracles after his death.

There is a danger too in the beatification or canonisation of an ideology or a faction rather than a truly holy person who is now in Heaven and enjoying the Beatific vision, interceding for the Church and its members. It would regrettable if canonisation/beatification became a posthumous ecclesiastical decoration for merely the great and the good.

A Coptic Orthodox friend says their criteria for canonisation is the need to be dead for 70 years and for numerous miracles or supernatural occurrences at their intercession or at the place of their burial.

Simply, I get worried about the removal of the clearly supernatural elements in our faith.

Language: The Great Divider

Phone calls on Saturday or Sunday mornings are normally about Mass times. This Sunday I had a phone call asking, “Where is there Mass at midday in Brighton?” I replied, “There is one here at 12.30, it is in Polish”. The response, “Is there one in Vietnamese? If not we can do English but not Polish”.

Language is of course the great divider, I would have got, I suspect a similar response if I said Mass was in Latin. It is amazing to think most of the world was evangelised when the Church used sacral Latin.

Brighton is a veritable Babel of different languages, Polish amongst the Catholic community is certainly in the majority, and the Polish bishops ensure that for Poles there is a good system of chaplains, having a separate Mass perhaps makes it difficult for the children of Poles who are more comfortable with English to integrate, especially when the move from home. Until the last ten years Portuguese would have been the next biggest language group, there is as far as I know only one Portuguese speaking priest in the country, the result is that hardly any Portuguese seem to come to Mass, though when they return home they might well be devout.

Language for us is a problem, it is of its nature divisive, in the way it isn’t for Islam whose ‘liturgy’ is in classical Arabic, it is of course the sermon that becomes the problem for them as it was for us.

Though we say Latin in the past was the great unifier of Western Catholicism, until just before the Council silence in the liturgy amidst coughs and shuffling of the congregation was the norm, because of course microphones on the altar were forbidden, 'amplification' on the sanctuary was done by the clergy singing, this didn't happen at low Mass which is what most people attended, so in point of fact most people were evangelised by encouraging a strong devotional life based as much on the domestic and school as it was on the parish or mission church. He was merely responsible for celebrating the sacrament properly, praying and possibly preaching a half good sermon and not much else, the Church survived and prospered.

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As an addenda: I thought this from NLM was interesting, in the world of the Traditional though priests as a species were important, as individuals, at least in church, they were not that important, I remember a friend who left who said he couldn't cope 'with the weight, the responsibility'. He wasn't the type of priest who could "say the black and do the red".

The Novus Ordo Missae has horizontal and vertical dimensions, but what it lacks is precisely depth. The depth has to be brought to it from the outside — from the interior spirit of the celebrant, from the accidents of place and time, from the luck of options well-chosen and well-executed.[1] As it stands, the modern liturgy does not supply that depth in and of itself. It is utterly at the mercy of the ars celebrandi, the community, the authorities, the prevailing mores of society. Even as contemporary society is living off of the fumes of traditional morality, so too the contemporary liturgy, to the extent that it is sanctifying of men and glorifying of God, is living off of the fumes of traditional liturgy.

Abrogation of Summorum Pontificum?

A French newspaper has reported Pope Francis, once Benedict dies, will abrogate Summorum Pontificum and handover Old Rite's celebration solely to the SSPX. Apart from saying that the Traditional Mass was not and could not be abrogated, he gave the right to every Western Catholic priest to say which ever form of the Roman Rite they chose; pretty logical considering the non-abrogation of the Ancient Mass.

Will Francis abrogate it? That is anyone's guess, but there are lots of questions that arise in my mind

• Will the SSPX be reconciled Rome? I would suspect not but then all Francis needs to do is say they are reconciled and there are few problems, except possibly the appointment of successors to Bp Fellay et al.
• Would the members of Traditional Institutes like the Society of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King join the reconciled SSPX? I doubt it, there are lots of wounds in what some might like term the Traditional Movement, so many sacrifices and humiliations undergone to remain faithful to union with Rome and distant from the SSPX.
• Would the SSPX want these other Institutes? I doubt it they have their own structures and spirituality. As charming as the three remaining SSPX might be, it is significant that Abp Lefebrve chose them for anything other than a leadership role, he wanted leadership of his priestly society to be priests, not a bishop.
• There are many diocesan priests, there are Dominican's and members of other religious institutes like Oratorians who have developed a deep love of the Usus Antiquior, will heads of these orders like to lose, often the younger and the brighter of their priests? Very unlikely, Figaro recently reported a quarter of priest ordained in France this year are what it calls 'traditional priests', ordained in the traditional rite but one suspects that a significant number of younger priests 'have sympathies' and with Pope pushing his own agenda on the Church these sympathies are likely to grow.
• What about the Bishop? Most would not want the SSPX involved in their diocese in a significant way or looking after significant numbers of 'their' faithful, or gathering vocations from 'their' young men (even, especially, if they can't gather them themselves). Yesterday, Bishop Campbell handed over English Martyrs, Preston. to the Institute of Christ the King, another big Preston Church to a traditional institute, one presumes such an action followed by several of our bishops is not done because they consider these priests museum curators but effective evangelists, where others have failed, but within, not outside, of their diocese and their personal oversight.

What I can see happening is Pope Francis, possibly, refusing bishops the right to celebrate ordinations in the Old Rite but I don't think that will work either. It might be seen as sniping at one or two Cardinals

The Child

At that time Jesus exclaimed, 'I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.  Matthew 11:25 

In this context, if we wish to understand what it means to become children we must look at Jesus, he is the Son, who was totally at one with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, It, and "Unless you become like little children ...", should be, can only be, understood in a Christology sense: seeing Jesus as THE child.

The Church has always understood these statements in the context of embracing the Evangelical Counsels, of casting off other dependencies until there is only the relationship of the soul and the Father, without any other affections and yet as we grow in the spiritual life gives us the capacity to love all that is created and all that belongs the Father.