The Church Year

My sermon for the first Sunday in Advent:

There's a method of praying which I think I'm right in saying is associated mainly with St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, which involves taking a scene or an incident, usually from the gospels, and imagining ourselves present in the scene - listening to Christ preaching, perhaps, identifying with an individual in the scene, imagining the attitudes and reactions of the other people present and generally reconstructing the event in our imagination. It's a means of concentrating our mind on Christ, his teaching and his actions, and making them more immediate to us.

Every winter, when the four weeks of Advent come round, and a new church year starts again, that's the kind of thing we're supposed to do with the new liturgical season.

The Season of Advent

from tomorrow's newsletter:

Advent is a time of preparation for the coming of Christ at Christmas, personally and individually, and in the liturgy, the public prayer of the Church. In our minds and imaginations we go back to the period before the birth of Christ and contemplate the attitudes and feelings of the people at that time, as they waited expectantly for the coming of the Messiah. We try to enter into that mood ourselves as we move through the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas Day.

The liturgy during Advent focuses first on the prospect of Christ's Second Coming at the end of time: "you must stand ready," Jesus says in today's gospel, because that time may arrive suddenly and unexpectedly.

Then the spotlight moves onto the figure of John the Baptist, prophesying the beginning of Christ's ministry, again appealing to people to make themselves ready for the manifestation of God in their midst.

On the last Sunday before Christmas the focus moves to Our Lady and St Joseph and the events immediately preceding the Incarnation. "The Word was made flesh," says the gospel reading for Christmas Day, "he lived among us", underlining the real significance of Jesus' birth: the dawn of salvation and God's descent to our human level in order to raise us up into his divine life.

Every week in Advent we light candles on the Advent wreath, reflecting another theme of the season: that as the time of Christ's birth approached, God's light shone more and more strongly, dispelling the darkness of a fallen world.

St Joseph's Christmas Fayre

Last Saturday (20th November) the parish had its annual Christmas Fayre in Denbigh Town Hall. We made over £1,000, not counting the few extra donations that came in after the event. The Fayre only lasted two hours (10am - midday) and while it was going on I took a few pictures.

Santa Claus made an appearance with his glamorous assistant and gave out some early Christmas presents:

And the festive spirit manifested itself in a sudden outbreak of ridiculous headgear:

Solemnity of Christ the King

My sermon for last Sunday, the feast of Christ the King:

The prayers and readings for today's feast highlight some of the aspects of Jesus' identity which go back to the first communities of Christians and the conclusions they drew about Jesus: his identity as the long-awaited Saviour and Messiah, as God incarnate and as their shepherd and king.

The gospels describe Christ as a king in several places - never as a tyrant who rules his people with a rod of iron, but as a servant-king or (in the imagery of today's first reading) a "shepherd-king". And, as today's gospel passage informs us, Jesus demonstrates the character of his kingship by eventually laying down his life for his sheep.

A bit more on the Gospel of Life

One of Alan's suggestions during his talks last Saturday (see his own report on the event at the Torch of the Faith website) was that every Catholic parish should have an active pro-life group of some kind.

I'm going to propose that we take up this suggestion at the parish meeting here this Thursday, after the evening Mass. Actually there are some S.P.U.C. groups around the parishes of Wrexham Diocese - I did directly invite local members to the Creed, Code & Cult session on "the Gospel of Life and the Culture of Death", but they didn't seem able to make it.

Also, I don't see why the members of other churches shouldn't be invited to join such a group, although I think we have to admit that unequivocal support for the pro-life cause is not always easy to come by within the various streams of modern Protestant Christianity. A friend of mine, a priest in another diocese, told me recently that when he raised the subject of pro-life campaigning at his local "Churches Together" meeting, he was met with a deafening silence by most of the other ministers and representatives. Interestingly, the strict Evangelical churches, hostile towards Catholicism in so many other respects, often prove to be our most reliable allies in this particular area.

John Smeaton, the director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has a blog of his own, where he provides excellent, well-argued commentary on all the most recent developments in the Society's campaign work.

The Christian Institute regularly highlights pro-life issues, and recently drew attention to Virginia Ironside's advocacy of infanticide for handicapped children.

I found a lot of useful material in Dr Raymond Dennehy's long, scholarly essay on "Liberal Democracy as a Culture of Death", while of course the Linacre Centre continues to be a source of solid moral theological reflection on every aspect of contemporary medical ethics.

And then, if you're a bit bookish, have a look at Chapter Three of Richard Overy's historical study of Britain between the wars, The Morbid Age, where he summarises the arguments put forward by the different branches of the eugenics movement during the twenties and thirties - arguments echoed today in the writings of Peter Singer and others.

Creed, Code and Cult: Day 2, Talk 2

Pope John Paul II referred to Catholics as People of Life and for Life! The second presentation focused on positive ways to build a creative Culture of Life.

1. True Devotion to Our Blessed Lady The first of these was to cultivate true devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is full of grace. No other creature will ever give such a total fiat to God and to Life. Revelation 12 describes the dramatic clash between the pregnant Woman clothed with the sun and the red dragon who waits to devour Her Child. This can be interpreted both in relation to Our Lady and the Church; both bring forth new life and both are at war with Satan and his minions.

At Guadalupe in 1531, the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Juan Diego as a pregnant mother and gave him the miraculous tilma cloak. Through this a serious Culture of Death in the Aztec world was reversed and within 9 years, some 9 million natives had been converted by missionaries who used copies of the tilma to evangelise and teach the Faith. The long stream of sacrifices to false gods had ceased. The miraculous tilma image is a mystery which only deepens as scientific research progresses. For example, it appears to be photographic in nature and when the eye of Our Lady is enlarged it reveals tiny images which look like St. Juan Diego, Bishop Zumarraga and his interpreter. These were the very men present when the tilma was first unfurled. The mantle of Our Lady also bears symbols which resonate with Aztec culture and were used to great effect in catechesis. One example is the situation of the Nahui Ollin flower over the growing Saviour in her sacred womb; in Aztec iconography this flower represented the centre of the universe.

A good way to practice true devotion is to keep the First Five Saturdays Devotion, in which one makes reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary through making a good Confession, receiving Holy Communion, praying the Rosary and spending 15 minutes contemplating one of the Rosary mysteries.

2. Caring for women who have had abortions

Evangelium Vitae 99 expresses the call of the Church to women - and all involved in abortion - to seek healing and reconciliation through sacramental confession and professional support and care. If our pro-life activism is not to end in mere condemnation then we must strive to bring healing to women who suffer post-abortion trauma and the isolation this brings in a culture which accepts the killing of the unborn as normal. We need to have trained counsellors and to provide help-line numbers in the porches of our parishes for this end. We could encourage other local ecclesial communities to do the same. All Catholics should be aware of EV99 and where to get hold of a copy to help women who may be despairing.

The Rachel's Vineyard reconcilation and healing retreats are highly recommended. Please refer to www.rachelsvineyard.org.uk/

3. Challenge Sex Education

The constant tradition of the Catholic Church has condemned explicit sex education and all misuse of human sexuality. Unfortunately many of our bishops have colluded with the government in recent times to allow increasingly anti-life and anti-family programmes in Catholic schools. Parents are the primary educators of their children and have certain key rights and duties in this regard. Anyone responsible for young people needs to know the teaching of the Church about proper and improper content and methodologies for education. A good place to start is the 1995 document The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality from the Pontifical Council for the Family. Other vital ways to get informed include checking the content and methodology used in the schools attended by one's children and reading SPUC's excellent daily blog.

We can also help our young people by giving them the full and authentic catechesis in the Catholic Faith which it is their right to have; teaching them how to critique false world-views such as moral relativism and leading them to the fullness of truth and freedom in Jesus Christ. Home schooling is another viable means to overcome secularist indoctrination and every parent has the right to remove a child from a lesson/lessons if they are not happy with the content.

Another laudable aim is to learn the stages of foetal development from good web resources like SPUC. Too many people are unaware of basic knowldege, including the fact that the human heart begins to beat at 21-25 days in the womb. Abortion really does stop a beating heart. One could also develop images of foetal development, purchase plastic baby models of the same or obtain ultrasound DVDs (TinyTots in Ireland provide these for a small donation). With these tools one could apply to local schools to offer presentations on foetal development to RE/PSHE classes. Another idea is to learn the true facts about the dreadful death caused by the withdrawal of food and fluids in euthanasia in order to inform students and others of the grim reality.

4. Build or rebuild your own family

The family is the Domestic Church. We can become so caught up in life and work (even pro-life work!) that we neglect our own family and their needs. To overcome this we need to start listening actively to our own family members to understand them and their problems, challenges and aspirations better. Family prayer is essential. Whilst it may be difficult to pray together if this has not been developed it is time to begin afresh. Even one decade of the Rosary prayed well each evening is a start. The ideal would be to create a family altar as a focus for family prayers and plan ahead in order to build up to a Rosary per day together.

A key way to fight euthanasia is to help our children to learn the value of vulnerable people. This can be done by including them in visiting and caring for sick/elderly relatives and neighbours. Do we show our children by example that people and life are more important than money and things? Another good way is for older teens to help out at homeless outreach centres.

5. Wear the little feet badge

Organisations like SPUC sell the Little Feet badge which portrays the actual size of the feet of a baby at the 10 weeks stage of foetal development. By wearing these, good conversations can be initiated in favour of life. They also make good gifts for family and friends. Young teen-aged girls generally love them!

6. Support good pro-life charities

Good Counsel Network, Sisters of the Gospel of Life and SPUC do sterling work and would be very grateful of prayers and financial offerings.

7. Fortify a pro-life parish

Dr. Bernard Nathanson was a prominent abortionist responsible for 75,000 abortions who also helped to pave the way for liberal abortion laws in America. He has since repented and became a Catholic in 1996. Today he fights abortion. Dr. Nathanson states that abortion would never have been accepted in America if the Catholic clergy had been informed, organised and unified. The same can be said of us all as a body of believers. Too much time has been wasted by people rebelling against the Magisterium, arguing in-house and focusing on secondary issues. It is time to fight back!

A. Develop a Parish Pro-life Group

This would need to be headed by a sensitive and mature person and would ideally meet regularly with the parish priest to pray, discern and develop local tactics.

B. Vigil for Life

The Holy Father has called for a vigil on the 27th November for all nascent human life. It would be great to host an all-night vigil but even Mass followed by a period of Adoration would be good.

C. NFP Teacher in Parish

Every diocese and parish should by now have a trained woman or married couple to help couples who have a serious need to space pregnancy without resorting to contraception. Such trained representatives would also be able to help infertile couples without resorting to IVF.

D. Pro-life Bidding Prayers

These could be included at Mass on a fairly regular basis to intercede for the victims and the conversion of all involved as well as keeping the issue in the consciousness of the parish.

E. Annual Pro-life Mass

The Mass could be offered in reparation for the sins of abortion and euthanasia, for the unborn or for the conversion of all involved. The homily could impart the teaching of the Church on these issues. The collection could be taken for pro-life work.

F. Pro-Life Chains

On the Saturday nearest to the 27th April each year SPUC host pro-life chains of witness along streets in various towns. This involves prior planning with the local police force and there is plenty of time to organise this for next year. The witness of a whole parish would be very valuable as is evidenced by the practice in many American parishes.

G. Pro-life witness at abortion facilities

There are different levels of sacrifice and danger to which people are called in a war. Not all are called to the same level. However, if we never go to pray and witness at the actual abortion facilities we are in danger of making pro-life work a hobby or an issue which we care about. But it is never a mere issue. It is about individual people who need our witness and prayers; the babies, the mothers, the fathers, those who work in the abortion facilities.

A woman in America who ran an abortion facility prior to being converted to Christ and the Church said that whenever she saw a priest praying outside she knew that she would have problems that day. It is a spiritual thing. A lady once saw Fr. Pavone praying outside of the abortion mill where she was sitting waiting for an abortion. She thought, 'If there is a Catholic priest out there, then what am I doing in here?' She fled and was given counsel by a woman with Fr. Pavone. By the end of the day she had been to Confession and eventually the baby was born and baptised Guadalupe.

At times people will indeed turn around and keep their babies because they saw someone praying or even spoke to those that were.

Last year a good friend of ours prayed outside an abortion facility after praying before the relics of St. Therese. That day 5 girls turned around and kept their babies. A couple of months later our friend died suddenly. It was the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was a great comfort to his family and friends that he had responded to the fight for human life because of his deep faith in God.

What will be our response?

Our Lady of Guadalupe - Pray for us!

Creed, Code and Cult - Day 2, Talk 1.

We enjoyed being back at St. Joseph's on Saturday to deliver the second set of presentations in the Creed, Code and Cult series. Here is a synopsis of the content of the talks - more details will be found at http://www.torchofthefaith.com/

Talk 1

The Gospel of Life is nothing other than the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In light of Divine Revelation we are able to understand something of the remarkable depth of the dignity of the human person. Genesis 1:27 teaches us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. No other creature has been endowed with the same level of dignity as we have. Human beings have the powers of the intellect, memory and will together with the ability to receive and give love even to the point of total self-sacrifice.

The tragedy of the Original Sin of our First Parents Adam and Eve gravely damaged the image of God which we bear. In spite of this, humans retain great human dignity; God maintains us in being; we are still able to love and to be loved and we still have our memory, intellect and will. However, we are in a state of alienation from God which Baptism rectifies. We also suffer a darkening and rebellion in our memory, intellect and will and even our capacity to love can fall into lust and making use of other persons. Nevertheless, our dignity as humans remains.

In the Incarnation, Jesus Christ restores the image of God and even raises and perfects it to a new and higher level than before. This means we are made capable of sharing Heaven with God if we respond to His Grace and love. Indeed, Jesus Christ has identified with each individual person in a unique way, at each stage of their life from conception to natural death, by becoming one of us in all things but sin. In some sense all wombs are sacred. The lowliest task, the worst sorrow, the greatest joy are now made able to be bearers of grace and holiness. Truly great is the dignity of the human person!

Unfortunately, this profound dignity is under serious threat in our time due to a highly organised and efficient Culture of Death which spreads a low understanding of the human person through politics, medicine, education and the media. Abortion and euthanasia are two key and prevalent results of this. At the root of the Culture of Death is none other than Satan. He is the Father of lies and a murderer from the beginning.

An effective tool in the spreading of the Culture of Death has been the use of atheistic sex education which uses a combination of graphically impure content, moral relativism and social engineering to entice young people into an atheistic paradigm. Some of the key architects of sex education used it with an ideological agenda. George Lukacs was the Education Commissar for Hungary during the early days of the Communist regime. He saw sex education as a means to break young people from the traditions of their family, religion and culture. In this way they could be more easily controlled by an atheistic regime. Documentary evidence links Lukacs with the Rockefellers. Other key figures behind the development of atheistic sex education include Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey. It is interesting to note that each of these three had eugenic beliefs, links to prominent Nazis and were influenced by Occult ideas. Sanger and Kinsey were both funded by the Rockefellers as was the IPPF - International Planned Parenthood Federation.

IPPF has been one of the leading proponents of the Culture of Death at the global level and Fr. Paul Marx made it his life's work to fight it. As such IPPF labelled him as its public enemy number one! IPPF promotes atheistic sex education, contraception, sterilization, abortion and euthanasia throughout the world and assists the Chinese government with its forced one-child-policy. In Great Britain IPPF goes under the auspices of the FPA - Family Planning Association. Together with Brook Advisory, Marie Stopes International and BPAS these organisations spread their ideology through education and influencing government policy.

The result is a veritable death culture with 550 - 600 surgical abortions per day; a massive teen pregnancy problem; a seriously low fertility ratio which threatens to overload the pension/healthcare system due to more older people than young people; the neglect of the elderly and the growing spread of the horrific death due to euthanasia by withdrawal of food and fluids. The number of chemical abortions due to the Depo-Provera implant, the IUD coil, the so-called Morning-After-Pill and the little-known abortifacient component of the regular contraceptive Pill cannot be known exactly - but must be dramatic. Barrier methods of contraception increase the incidence of abortion as even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute acknowledges.

In spite of all this we must maintain Christian Hope! Pope John Paul II sought to build a new Civilization of Love based on the Gospel of Life. He reminds us that, although the blood of Abel and of all innocents cries out to God for vengeance, the Blood of Christ cries more eloquently and calls for Divine Mercy. This is truly the limit which is placed on evil. We may not be complacent but neither may we despair. As with all things the answer is Jesus Christ.

The late Cardinal Trujillo, former President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, had a bronze statue of David and Goliath opposite his office door to remind him that with God we shall conquer and slay the giant of the Culture of Death.

The first talk concluded with the words of Deuteronomy 30: 15, 19: 'Behold, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. .. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life then, that you and your descendants may live.'

End of the World? Keep Calm and Carry On

Sometimes there are stories in the newspapers about people who discover that they only have a short time to live - six months, or six weeks, maybe - and who immediately draw up a list of all the things they want to do while they still have time. It could be something like a luxurious world cruise, or bungee-jumping off Niagara Falls, if they're inclined to be adventurous.

Other people claim that if they only had a few months or weeks to live they would fill up the time with a lengthy self-indulgent spree: a huge wild party, or a string of wild parties, spending all their money, getting drunk all the time. Sometimes they have the idea that ordinary principled behaviour can be abandoned: they'll be dead soon and they won't be around to pay the price or face the consequences of selfish, immoral behaviour.

Creed, Code & Cult - Session 2

On Saturday 13th, Alan and Angeline Houghton arrived for the second set of talks under the heading of Creed, Code & Cult. The topic this time was "The Gospel of Life and the Culture of Death", phrases taken of course from Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical letter "on the value and inviolability of human life".

We were lucky again with the numbers who attended: 35 in all, including Fr David Gornall, S.J., from St Beuno's Spirituality Centre in nearby Tremerchion, who concelebrated Mass with me before the talks began.

Stephanie Redfern Jones had also invited a few friends - young Catholics who had met several times before at retreats and talks elsewhere in the diocese.

They had a quick lunch at the end of the talks and rushed off to the cinema in Rhyl, leaving the rest of us to review the contents of Alan's talks over a plate of party food and a glass (or two) of plonk.

Praying for the Holy Souls

Now that we're into the month of November, when traditionally Catholics pray for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, I though I'd take the opportunity to say something about our belief in Purgatory, especially as the readings this Sunday revolve around the subject of life after death, the resurrection of the body and the prospect of our sharing in the fulness of eternal life with God.

The first thing to point out of course is that belief in Purgatory didn't arise out of thin air. It developed through reflection on certain passages of Scripture, from both the Old and New Testaments.

All Saints' Day

Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven by Fra Angelico

My sermon for Sunday 31st October, the Solemnity of All Saints:

The Cult of the Saints has always occupied an important place in the Christian religion and admiration for the holiness of particular saints has always been an important part of individual Christians' spirituality.

In the Gospel reading for today's feast we heard that great list of blessings, the Beatitudes, from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and the saints are the men and women in the history of Christianity who succeeded, maybe to a far greater degree than most ordinary believers, in making that list of spiritual qualities their main aim in life and their rule of life.

Bishop's Visitation, cont.

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