You will notice the large scaffolding tower at the back of church. This is because of the little showers of plaster dust which have been falling on the Epistle side of the church. All the loose and potentially-dangerous plaster is being removed and replaced, so that we can all pray safely.

Meanwhile, there is a splendid new fire-escape from the library into the yard to the south of the church, and now that this has been built, the yard will at last be resurfaced.

Photographs by Hannah Chegwyn

Congratulations to those 45 young people who were confirmed by Bishop William Kenney, C.P., on Saturday 21st November, the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

On the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, 9th November, which also happens to be the birthday of our Director of Music, Mr Edward de Rivera, we took the opportunity to have a Solemn Mass, followed by a reception in the Parish Centre to honour the twenty-five years of unstinting service that he has given to music at the Oratory.

The choir sang Charles Gounod’s Messe Chorale: Quatrieme Solennelle, and at the party afterwards the singers presented their director with a specially-composed motet.

The Oratory owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Edward de Rivera, and we all wish him every blessing. His last Mass directing the music will be on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a quarter of a century to the day from when he began building from nothing the musical tradition of our church.

Regular readers will know that there is a travelling bust of St Philip, made in Seville for his five-hundredth anniversary year, which has been travelling around the Oratories of the world. We had been expecting it some time ago, but heard that it was delayed, somewhere between Maastricht and Alcala de Henares.

Then, quite unexpectedly, and enormous crate was delivered last week:

The box took quite a lot of effort and ingenuity to open, but when we succeeded, inside was the bust of our Holy Father.

The bust shows St Philip, filled with the Holy Spirit, pointing to his heart, which was enlarged by the Spirit’s action. The bust contains a relic of St Philip’s body.

We have put the bust on St Philip’s altar to give people the opportunity to pray before it. As to when and where the image will go next: St Philip has a habit of surprising!

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.