On Friday 6th November, a large and enthusiastic group of students from the University coordinated Nightfever in our church. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed, and volunteers invited passers-by to come in, light a candle, and pray. Over one hundred did so, and there was a steady stream of people adoring the Blessed Sacrament throughout the evening.

At the High Mass on Sunday, the Solemnity of All Saints, Br Oliver was instituted as an Acolyte. The acolytate is one of the ‘ministries’, formerly called ‘minor orders’, on the way to the priesthood. Anciently, the acolyte carried candles and tapers for the liturgy, and took a fragment of the Pope’s Host to Masses elsewhere in the City of Rome. This state is one that reminds us of the holiness of the liturgy therefore.

The candidate is called forward:

He is blessed:

He is handed the ciborium, containing the bread which will be transformed into the Holy Eucharist, as a sign of his service of the altar:

He assists the Deacon in preparing the altar:

He washes the Celebrant’s hands:

The elevation of the Chalice:

The Ecce Agnus Dei:

Holy Communion:

The recessional of the Mass:

Photographs by Hannah Chegwyn.

There was a full house on Saturday for Fr Jerome’s first talk on the Catholic history of Oxford.

In this first talk, Fr Jerome spoke about Oxford before the University: the founding of the city by St Frideswide, the problems with the Danes, the collegiate church of St George and the thirteen parishes established in Oxford in this period. This coming Saturday he will move onto mediaeval history with “Saints and Scholars”.

Also on Saturday, Fr Daniel showed a group of students from the University, and visitors from Catholic chaplaincies in the south of England, around some of Catholic Oxford. They began by praying at the supposed tomb of St Frideswide at Christ Church. They then headed to Merton College, before going to see where Blessed John Henry Newman prayed in the chapel at Oriel and then where he preached in the University Church. Br Samuel Burke, O.P. showed them Blackfriars, and finally all sang the Salve Regina before Our Lady of Oxford in our church.

Here is the group in Tom Quad at Christ Church:

His Grace the Archbishop came on Saturday to confirm in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.

Before the Confirmation, His Grace catechised and prayed with the candidates.

Nine candidates were confirmed, followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament:

Afterwards there was a reception in the Parish Centre.

The Archbishop brought a splendid crosier, replete with baroque cherubs:

Fr Jerome will give a series of talks on the Catholic history of Oxford on Saturday mornings at eleven o’clock. Tea & coffee will be served beforehand. The topics will be as follows:

31st October: Before the University
7th November: Saints and Scholars
14th November: Martyrs and Recusants.

This is the text of Fr John Saward’s sermon, preached at the High Mass on 9th October:

‘The words of St Paul:
‘Be not conformed to this world’.

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Blessed John Henry Newman was a fighter, always a fighter. He found ‘peace’ in the Catholic Church, as today’s Collect tells us, but it was not the world’s easy peace. The peace that Newman experienced in the One Fold of the Redeemer was the peace hard-won by the Redeemer on the Cross, a fruit of the Holy Ghost, the peace of a mind resting in the fullness of faith, of a heart obedient to God, a peace you can know even in the heat of battle if you are true to Christ the King. Newman was a fighter, as all the saints were, as you and I are called to be from our Baptism, and by the grace of our Confirmation. ‘A fight [said Newman] is the very token of a Christian. He is a soldier of Christ; high or low, he is this and nothing else.’ Christians have a work to do in this world, and also a spiritual war to wage.

Who, then, were the enemies of this great hero of ours? Why, ultimately, the foes of every human soul in every age – the world, the flesh, and the devil – foes that should be well known to us all. No Christian ought to be insensible to the attacks of the devil and his demons, the fallen angels, against whom, as the Apostle says, we must fight with the whole armour of God, and in the strength of the risen Christ. Nor should we need reminding of the flesh, that is, the infirmities of our fallen human nature, the wounds in the powers of our soul. But in this modern age, certainly for the last fifty years, in the era of a confusing ‘opening to the world’, many Catholics have become forgetful of the Christian’s duty to fight the world. We need to hear again the Apostle’s command, Be not conformed to this world, with its echo in St John, ‘Love not the world’, with its source in the words of the incarnate Word, who warned His disciples that the world would hate them, as it hated Him, but urged them to ‘be of good cheer, because [He had] overcome the world’.

What is ‘the world’ that, according to our Lord and His Apostles, Blessed John Henry Newman and all the saints, is our enemy? Not the material universe, which was created good and beautiful by God, even if now it is bleared and smeared by human and demonic sin. Not the world in the sense of mankind, for ‘God so loved the world that He gave up His only-begotten Son’ for its redemption. No, as the Fathers explain, the world as enemy, the world of which Satan is the prince, is the world of the worldly, those who live as if this world were the only one and reject the Word of the Cross as foolishness. In every age, even in societies ostensibly Christian, the worldly are the ones who run the show, the powers that be, the movers and shakers, the opinion-formers, Mr Worldly Wise and his friends in the media. The world so defined, says Newman, is ‘the confederacy of evil’, and in all his preaching, whether at St Mary’s or in the Oratory, he exhorts his hearers with vigilance and intelligence to resist it. There is ‘an eternal enmity [he says] between the Church and the world … Beware lest the world seduce you … And you will be seduced most certainly, unless you watch and pray that you enter not into temptation’. ‘Whoso will be a friend of the world [says the Apostle] becomes an enemy of God’.

Throughout the history of the Church, especially in the modern age, the world has enticed many Churchmen, especially theologians, into compromise. Back in the 1960s Eric Mascall said that what shocked him most about the so-called ‘radical’ theologians was their ‘sheer social conformism’. Whatever the world demands, they supply. One form of this conformity to the world is what Newman called ‘Liberalism in Religion’, what St Pius X would condemn as Modernism, which reduces faith to a sentiment, abandons reverence for objective truth, and makes tolerance the only virtue. Then there is ‘the Religion of the Day’, the religion of the ‘tame Church’, in Newman’s phrase, as distinct from the Church Militant. The Religion of the Day, bland and undemanding, lets the world do its deadly work unchallenged and unchecked. ‘It has taken the brighter side of the Gospel, [says Newman in the pulpit of St Mary’s] its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten … Everything is bright and cheerful. Religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins … Even firmness is looked on with an unfriendly, suspicious eye.’ The opinions Newman satirizes are familiar to us. The Religion of the Day has never gone away.

God in His wisdom and love has given us John Henry Newman’s example, teaching, and prayers as an armament of special effectiveness for the spiritual combat of today. His is a theology, as Father Louis Bouyer once said, ‘for times of general apostasy’, the times we live in. Newman understood that all the pseudo-theological capitulations to the world – Liberalism, Modernism, and the Religion of the Day – are in the strict, apostolic sense anti-Christ. According to these heresies, there is nothing from which modern man needs to be saved, or at least nothing he cannot master by his own powers, and so there is no need for God Incarnate as Saviour. Conformity to the world is a theoretical and practical contradiction of our Lord’s words in this evening’s Gospel: ‘Without me you can do nothing.’ If you love the world, you cannot love Jesus and abide in Him.

John Henry Newman was received into the Church in the month of our Lady and her Rosary. Under God, she is our chief help in spiritual warfare. In her humility, purity, and fidelity to the truth, she is terrible to the devil, like an army in battle array, and a perpetual defiance of the world. ‘Her Son will deny her nothing that she asks; [writes Newman] and herein lies her power. While she defends the Church, neither height nor depth, neither men nor evil spirits, neither great monarchs, nor craft of man, nor popular violence, can avail to harm us; for human life is short, but Mary reigns above, a Queen forever.’ Her Immaculate Heart will triumph over the father of lies. Her Son and God has overcome the world.

FORTY HOURS OF DEVOTION TO THE BLESSED SACRAMENT
16-18 October 2015

Friday 16th 6pm: Solemn Mass of Exposition

11pm: Compline (Sung by the Dominicans of Blackfriars) and Benediction

Followed by a vigil throughout the night

Saturday 17th 5am: Sung Matins and Lauds

6am: Low Mass in the Extraordinary Form

10am: Low Mass

6:30pm: Mass for Peace (with hymns)

8pm: Lauda Sion by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Sunday 18th 12am: Reposition of the Blessed Sacrament

11am: Solemn Mass of the Sacred Heart

Followed by Exposition throughout the day

5pm: Solemn Vespers, Procession and Benediction

Author of the Inspector Morse books, Colin Dexter, came to celebrate his birthday in the Oratory Library last week, and was welcomed by the great Chestertonian, Aidan Mackey.

In the very last Inspector Morse novel, “The Remorseful Day”, Morse comes to visit our church and lights two candles to St Anthony. Colin Dexter kindly signed a copy, which will be a prize at our next Murder Mystery evening.

Oxford Oratory
Mass for 25th Anniversary of Foundation
27th September 2015

I have to say that it really does seem like yesterday that the two young Oratorians from Birmingham arrived here in September 1990 and stood in this pulpit to announce that the parish was under new management! A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and God’s providence has placed us in different places than we expected but thank God St Philip’s work continues here and we pray that it will do so for many years to come.

Today we are here to give thanks for the many gifts God has given us through St Philip. I remember Archbishop Maurice saying that in founding the Oratory he wanted a distinctively Catholic institution in Oxford. 1990 was Newman’s centenary year and God’s providence brought the Oratory here to the city Newman loved. As a community we have many people to thank for their support and generosity both in the parish and beyond its bounds. So many have given us an enormous amount of support in so many ways both spiritually and materially. As a former Provost and on behalf of the present community I would like to record our thanks all those living and dead who have helped to bring the Oratory to life here. There is one person I should mention by name and that is the late Archbishop Maurice Couve de Murville. It was his courage and foresight that has made possible what you see today. We couldn’t have done it without him and the Oratorian community remains ever grateful for his support and the more than generous gift of this property. Our thanks should also be given to the Birmingham Oratory for their generosity in initially giving three members of its community and financial help to begin this venture.

People sometimes say to me how wonderful that the community here in Oxford has achieved so much in such a short period. I do know that it has been hard work but I am sure that the Fathers here would agree that it is God who has done the real work. People often ask, “Well what is your pastoral plan in the Oratory?” At which point I look blank because St Philip’s way is not one of programmes and targets but of being a fisher of people. Meeting people where they are encouraging, befriending and teaching them to love God. There is no formal plan or theory but as the Blessed Cardinal Newman said:

“St Philip preferred to yield to the stream and direct the current which he could not stop of science, literature, art and fashion and to sweeten and sanctify what God had made good and man had spoilt. He perceived that the mischief was to be met not with argument not with science not with protests and warnings…. But by the great counter balances of purity and truth.”

For me at any rate the role of the Oratory is not to be in the vanguard of protest and ecclesiastical controversy but simply to make people saints in their own homes and constantly to remind people of the infinite riches of God’s love and mercy. Traditionally this has been done, as it is here in Oxford today, through prayer, preaching and the administration of the sacraments especially that of Confession. This of course includes the careful celebration of the liturgy using the best of the musical and cultural traditions of the Western Church.

So when we arrived here twenty-five years ago we did what we had learnt from the senior fathers in Birmingham. In turn they had learnt it from Newman who in turn had been taught by the Fathers of the Roman Oratory whose memory and living tradition in the time before the Risorgimento went back directly to the time of St Philip.

As we heard in the first reading the Apostles were joined in prayer with our Lady and great things happened through their unity and faith. The Venerable Cardinal Baronius wrote that St Philip’s first disciples (of which he was one) were united together by prayer and charity like the first disciples and fervent to spread the Good News. In a recent insightful letter of our Holy Father Pope Francis on the 500th anniversary of our founder’s birth, he said:

“St Philip Neri also remains a luminous model of the Church’s on-going mission in the world. The perspective of his approach to neighbour in witnessing to all to the love and mercy of the Lord can serve as a valuable example to bishops, priests, consecrated people and lay faithful. Since the very first years of his life in Rome, he exercised an apostolate of personal relationships and friendship, as the privileged way to open people to the encounter with Jesus and the Gospel. His biographer thus attests: “He approached in a simple fashion, now this one, then that one, and everyone quickly became his friends”. He loved spontaneity, avoided artifice, and chose the most entertaining ways to educate in Christian virtue. At the same time he proposed a healthy discipline which entailed the exercise of willingness to receive Christ concretely into one’s life. His deep conviction was that the path of holiness is rooted in the grace of an encounter — that with the Lord — accessible to whoever, of whatever status or condition, receives Him with the astonishment of children.”

Friendship with God and those around us, prayer, the Mass, Confession and works of mercy are at the heart of the Oratorian witness to the universal Church. Surely this places the sons of St Philip at the very heart of the new evangelisation and the forthcoming Year of Mercy.

St Philip is a saint of the New Evangelisation in that he rekindled in those who had grown lukewarm in their faith of the riches of God’s friendship in a profoundly personal way to the people of Rome who were forgetful of God. His constant use of the Confessional until the day of his death is another indication to us that the mercy of God is there for the asking and that the gift of God’s mercy is a unique in each individual. I am convinced that St Philip’s way is a one which is ever more relevant for the future of the Church and thank God his work continues here and in many more places not only in this country but around the world. I ask you today to pray that St Philip’s work will continue to flourish in Oxford and I ask you to pray especially for vocations to this Congregation.

As a footnote I would like to take this opportunity to thank Archbishop Bernard for his constant support of the Oratory both here and in Birmingham and to Bishop William too for his kindness and friendship to the community over the years.

On Sunday 27th September we were delighted to welcome His Grace the Archbishop, Bishop William Kenney, C.P., Bishop Robert Byrne, Cong. Orat., and many friends to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of the arrival of the Oratorians in Oxford.

The Archbishop is received at the door of the church with a crucifix and holy water:

He processes to the Sacred Heart Chapel, where he prays before the Blessed Sacrament:

A Solemn Pontifical Mass, in honour of Our Lady, Queen of the Oratory, was celebrated:

Bishop Robert preached, and we hope that his sermon will be available soon on this website:

After Mass, there was a fine party in the Parish Centre:

A beautiful cake was cut by the Archbishop:

Photographs by Hannah Chegwyn.