As from the 16th September this year, which will be the anniversary of the Papal Visit, the bishops of England and Wales have decided to restore the practice of Friday abstinence from meat as binding on all Catholics in this country.

Why?

Because it was the day on which Our Lord rose from the dead the first Christians celebrated Sunday, the first day of the week, as the principal Christian day of worship rather than the Jewish Sabbath (Acts 20:7). From that time each Sunday has always been viewed as a mini Easter Sunday. Correspondingly, each Friday has been viewed as a mini Good Friday on which we observe the Passion and death of Our Lord on the Cross. From the earliest days of the Church, Catholics have abstained from flesh meat as part of this observance for two reasons: first, to do homage to Christ who died in the flesh on Good Friday and, second, as an act of penance for our sins.

Although many thought this practice had been abolished in recent years, in fact it has continued to be the norm in the Catholic Church throughout the 20th century and down to the present day. However, in some places – including in England and Wales – the bishops were given authority by the Pope to allow people to substitute some other act of penance instead.

The bishops of England and Wales have decided that abstaining from meat on Fridays should become the norm once again for both of the reasons given above but also for a third reason. When he visited Britain, Pope Benedict called for all Catholics to have the courage and the confidence to take their Faith into the public square. Abstaining from flesh meat on Fridays is a way of marking our Catholic identity and proclaiming, in just one small but distinctive way, that the death of Christ on the Cross is the most important event in human history along with His resurrection on Easter Sunday. We already mark His resurrection by going to Mass on Sunday. Now, once more, we can share a common practice as we mark His Passion and death.

This practice does not mean that we have to eat fish; there are many alternatives to non-meat dishes these days. And if we are already vegetarian we can offer our existing practice up as a penance or undertake some other form of penance instead.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes penance as a repentance and a conversion of the heart, an “interior conversion, [which] urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance” (CCC 1430). It is not that we are parading our good works before men; rather, we are worshipping the living and true God with our whole being, body as well as soul, just as the prophet Joel urges us to do in the readings on Ash Wednesday (Joel 2:12-18), and as Our Lord himself teaches us to do – whilst not showing off – in Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 6:1-6).

Let us respond generously, then, to this call from our holy Mother, the Church, to give witness to the Passion and death of our Saviour who died for us that we might live with Him.

As usual, the procession began at the Oratory, stopped at Blackfriars and concluded at the University Chaplaincy.

We were grateful to the Witney Town Band, who accompanied us, on what was the hottest day for five years!

St Aloysius’ School had an exciting day on Tuesday when Bishop William Kenney celebrated our feast day Mass at the Oratory and then officially opened the new courtyard building.

The School Council gave a splendid presentation about the new motto and Mission Statement (see the text of these below) and the music group played beautifully to entertain the guests at lunch.

Our Motto:

“Be ambitious for the higher gifts.”

1 Cor. 12:31

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Our Mission Statement:

Welcome to our school.

At St. Aloysius’ we learn to grow in holiness, to become who we were made to be.

Here we seek to know God, finding Him in all that we learn, and understanding that all that is good, beautiful and true offers us a glimpse of God.

Here we seek to love God, with our hearts, our minds and our souls, meeting Him in prayer and recognising Him in one another.

Here we seek to serve God, making the best use of our gifts to serve those around us. Here, recognising God’s delight in us, and by His grace, we become more fully alive.

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“A good school provides a rounded education for the whole person. And a good Catholic school, over and above this, should help all its students to become saints.”

Pope Benedict XVI

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The School has a new website which you can visit here.

Solemn Mass celebrated by His Excellency Archbishop Antonio Mennini, Apostolic Nuncio.

His Excellency with the Oratorian community after Mass:

Photographs by Tessa Caldecott

A score of new members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham were received into full communion with the Catholic Church yesterday evening by Monsignor Andrew Burnham. It is appropriate that this should have taken place at the Oratory, since the Ordinariate is under the protection of Blessed John Henry Newman.

These former Anglicans have been receiving catechisis here during Lent, and are now able to participate fully in the Easter Triduum.

His Most Eminent Highness Fra’ Matthew Festing, 79th Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, (pictured here with Pope Benedict) has kindly agreed to become a Patron of the Oratory’s Reaffirmation and Renewal Campaign.

Fra’ Matthew sent the following message from the Magistral Palace in Rome:

“I am delighted to be a Patron of the Reaffirmation and Renewal Campaign. The realisation of Blessed John Henry Newman’s vision for an Oratory in Oxford has brought immense blessings not only to the City and the University but to Catholic England as a whole. If these blessings are to continue, the Fathers must have the space to welcome the novices of the future and the means to develop and enhance their distinctive Oratorian missions. I urge you all to support the Campaign.”

Br Nicholas Edmonds-Smith was ordained deacon by Bishop William Kenney C.P. on 18th March – the Vigil of the Solemnity of St Joseph.

Br Nicholas’s family came over from Cape Town. Here, the South African flag flies from the Oratory arch:

The Gospel – read by Br Edward Van den Bergh of the London Oratory:

The Litany of the Saints:

Standing before the Bishop:

The Laying on of Hands:

Clothing in the Dalmatic:

Br Nicholas is given the Book of the Gospels:

The Kiss of Peace:

Assisting the bishop at the altar:

With the Bishop & Br Edward:

Cutting the cake at the party afterwards:

Photography by Tessa Caldecott

Father Andrew Burnham, former Anglican Bishop of Ebbsfleet, celebrated his First Mass in our church on Sunday, having been ordained priest by Archbishop Vincent Nichols in Westminster Cathedral the day before, along with two other former Anglican bishops who have joined the ‘Ordinariate’ set up by Pope Benedict.

Father Andrew was assisted at the altar by Father Robert. Fr Aidan Nichols, OP preached the sermon, which is reproduced below.

Sermon by Father Aidan Nichols, OP:

We are, at this Mass, on a cusp, or boundary, or threshold. What I have in mind is in the first place the ritual calendar we’re using. We are on the cusp between, on the one hand, the Christmas season, which celebrates the Theophany, the manifestation of God the Word as a human being to other human beings, and, on the other hand, so-called ‘Ordinary Time’, a time which is far from ordinary because it consists in the telling of his story, the story of the public ministry of the Christ as it unfolds in all its dramatic action.

Appropriately, then, today’s Gospel-reading points both backwards and forwards, and its key is the identification of Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God’. Twice, actually, within a few verses of the Fourth Gospel, when the Baptist wants to identify who Jesus is, to locate him (so to say) on the map of salvation geography, these are the words he comes up with. The best explanation of that, I think, is that John the Baptist is rehearsing what it was his cousin told him. At the Baptism, the heavens were opened for Jesus, and in the open heavens he saw… well, what did he see? He saw himself as the Lamb, sent by the Father to make the atoning sacrifice which will reconcile to the Father Israel and all the world, and bring humankind home to the Father’s house. Jesus would go on to comport himself in just this fashion in his public ministry, in the strength of the Holy Spirit whose descent on him in the form of a dove verified what it was, in the opened heavens, that he saw.

The Lamb of God: that is the One we follow, it is how the God-man wishes to be known and loved. He came to make sacrifice for us. That is the impetus that drives his ministry forward till it reaches its climax in the Paschal Mystery of his Death and Resurrection. It is the attitude in which he still stands before the Father, showing the marks of his now glorious wounds. And it is why the continuing sign of that sacrifice – the Mass – is the true centre of the Christian religion.

In the Eucharistic sacrifice, we bring ourselves – all we do and are, all we have done and have been – to be, through purification and transformation, united with the Lamb, Jesus Christ, in his self-offering to the Father. All we did and do, all we have been and are, our life and labour, we should put (so the spiritual writers advise) onto the paten, into the chalice. Bishop Andrew – I’ve known Andrew so long and closely under that description I find it hard to break the habit – is celebrating today his first Mass in full union with the Catholic Church. What does this offering of the gifts mean, then, for him?

What is said of the life and labour of any Christian is said with special force of the apostolic life and labour of an ordained person. ‘What we did and do, what we have been and are’: all Andrew’s former ministerial activity, inevitably, is signalled is these words and so it is now taken up into union with the Lamb’s oblation of himself, taken up in a new way as the sacrificial offering of a Catholic priest in the full, unclouded, indisputable, sense of those words.

What he has done, what he has been: as with all of us, that must mean the faults and failings from whose weight we ask to be relieved through this renewal of the Lamb’s oblation. But is also means the grace-supported actions which we join to the Lamb’s offering not for purification but for further enhancement. In the spring of 1843, Newman wrote to a correspondent, ‘At present… as far as I can analyze my convictions, I consider the Roman Church Communion to be the Church of the Apostles, and that what grace is among us… is extraordinary, and from the overflowing of His dispensation.’ I’ve left out in this citation a phrase in parenthesis for the sake of drawing attention to it now – ‘what grace is among us (which, through God’s mercy, is not little)’. The task before Andrew and the others in the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham is to translate into terms of Christian life, thought and worship, what that ‘not little’ grace has done, in the history of the Church of England – what it is that can be placed on the paten, put into the chalice, not for propitiation, in a spirit of repentance, but for the praise of God’s glory, in a spirit of thanksgiving. And this is the second sense in which we stand now on a cusp or boundary or threshold.

It will entail a very great deal of hard work. It is nothing less than the reconfiguring of Anglicanism by union with the Petrine centre and its criteria of orthodoxy. It is taking up again, in a totally fresh context, the task Newman set himself and his fellow Tractarians in 1837:

‘We have a vast inheritance, but no inventory of our treasures. All is given us in profusion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, select, harmonize,and complete. We have more than we know how to use; stores of learning, but little that is precise and serviceable; Catholic truth and independent opinion, first principles and the guesses of genius, all mingled in same works, and requiring to be discriminated.’

And Newman closed:

‘[W]e need peculiarly a sound judgment,

patient thought, discrimination, a

comprehensive mind, an abstinence from

all private fancies and caprices and personal

tastes – in a word, Divine Wisdom.’

We rejoice today for Andrew personally as a long odyssey is completed, but since no share in priesthood is ever conferred for the individual’s satisfaction but only for some wider good, we also have to draw attention to the task that awaits him. Newman spoke of the ‘concentration and adjustment of great Anglican authorities’. Andrew has already begun working on the liturgical dimension of this, entrusted by the Holy See with co-ordinating efforts on that front, in recognition of his outstanding competence in that area.

But there is more than that. There is bringing this new ecclesia particularis, this new ‘particular church’, into the movement for renovating the whole Church which we associate with the mind and heart of Pope Benedict, a movement which respects the Second Vatican Council but places it, by a hermeneutic of continuity, in the great Tradition as a whole. It is a movement towards the fullness of Catholicity, in which the fathers of the Oxford Movement can take effortlessly their place.

So, Father, let me leave you and this congregation with one final citation from the Blessed John Henry, ‘I have a work to do in England’.

Aidan Nichols, O. P.,

16 January 2011