Erasmus Lecture‘Transhumance, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2023, is by definition constant drifting across borders. If you are caught up in transhumance you do not stay behind a wall trying to work, or shut, out what people say and Read More
Sr Anne-Lise RIPSister Anne-Lise Strøm was buried today. We are many who will miss her deeply. She was a fully given person. In a book of conversations she published with Brita Rosenberg in 1997, she described her departure from Oslo in 1961, Read More
Christ the King C2 Samuel 5.1-3: You shall be shepherd of my people Israel. Colossians 1.12-20: He gave us a place in the kingdom of the Son. Luke 23.35-43: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom! David’s anointing as Israel’s king in Hebron marked the end of a long, tough search for realistic government once the people was home again after 430 years in Egyptian exile, then 40 years’ wandering in the wilderness. There was no historical precedent. Before the exile, ‘Israel’ had been the name of a person. Jacob received that name from the nocturnal angel that fought him at Jabbok and struck his hip out of joint (Genesis 32.22.30). ‘You have striven with God and with men’, the angel said. The name ‘Israel’ was bestowed as an honorific title. It means something like ‘God’s Champion’. God is subject in that name. Jacob is his honoured vassal. The point matters. So before the exile, ‘Israel’ was the name of a patriarch; then it was transferred to the patriarch’s nation. The concept of a nation is linked, historically and linguistically [natio > nasci], to blood ties. When Moses was called by God to his work of liberation, it was because God had ‘looked upon the sons of Israel’ (Exodus 2.25). It was his kin Moses referred to when he told Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!‘ There were many of them: six hundred thousand men on foot, not counting the children. Then, in addition, a huge mixed crowd of all sorts of people (Exodus 12.37f.). An assembly of such dimensions needed to be led, somehow. The Lord himself was their leader. When Israel had made it through the Red Sea and saw the chariots of Pharaoh sink ‘like a stone’, Miriam, Moses’s sister, sang a song we still sing at each Paschal Vigil. ‘The Lord‘, sings the song, will be king for ever and ever’ (Exodus 15.18). This was the basis of Israelite nationhood. The people was to be ruled by God. The Law, revealed on Sinai, was the basis for the society that emerged. God called elect men, and some women, to implement it. The first was Moses, followed by Joshua. Then came Gideon, Debora, Samson, and other judges. As Israel, now a people, settled, however, they felt like having a more concrete style of leadership. Round about them kings reigned. Some were magnificent. Royal might had advantages, that much was clear. A king could readily mobilise resources. As long as he had sons, there was a succession; one didn’t have the kerfuffle of finding new judges. In addition a king could reflect a degree of glory on his people. Israel’s judges lived modestly on the whole. They remained nomadic shepherds, following their flocks. Now the time had come, many people thought, for a bit of pomp and circumstance. When Israel first demanded a king, the Lord God was wrathful. He explained that political might easily corrupts, that institutions tend to acquire tyrannical traits (1 Samuel 8.10-18). The people was unimpressed, and held their ground. ‘We want to be like other nations’, they exclaimed, ‘that our king may govern us and go before us’ (1 Samuel 8.20). Then God said – I paraphrase only slightly – ‘Have it your way!’ (cf. 1 Samuel 8.22). Saul, Israel’s first king, stands as an example of everything a ruler should not be: authoritarian, fearful, increasingly irrational. David had a dark side, too. Think of Bathsheba and poor Uriah! David learnt from his mistakes, however. He turned into something very rare: a devout and humble king. ‘Remember David and all his meekness‘, we sing in Psalm 132, which follows another Psalm, attributed to David, starting with the words: ‘O Lord, my heart is not exalted, my eyes are not raised high; I do not busy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me’ (Psalm 131.1). By experience and grace, David turned into a king in God’s image, an instrument of God’s cause. As I said, such a phenomenon is rare. The kings in Judah’s and Israel’s lines who followed David’s example can be counted on one hand, even with an amputated finger or two. This background is needed to see what it means to celebrate the feast of Christ the King! The feast is not about political potency. When Jesus, at a certain point, realised that people ‘were about to come and take him by force to make him king’ in the worldly sense, he beat it. He ‘withdrew to the mountain by himself’ (John 6.15). He only accepted the royal title when he was about to be raised up on the cross. By pouring himself out he showed his glory. God, who is almighty, does not suffer from jealousy. He has no status to defend before rivals, for he has none. His wish is to set us free from servitude so that we, freely serving him, may learn what freedom is. We are called now, as Israel was called then, to sing: ‘God is king for ever and ever!’ Thereby we ourselves are clothed, by grace, in royal dignity. Pope Pius XI inaugurated the feast of Christ the King exactly a century ago, in the jubilee year 1925. What was then still called The Great War had been brought to an end seven years before, but peace was uneasy. Sabres were being rattled on all sides. Arms were being restocked. Ultra-nationalism made Europe tense. Pius XI did note, it is true, certain signs ‘of a more widespread and keener interest evinced in Christ and his Church’; but he recognised the risk that such interest could be held hostage by worldly pretension. So he bade the Church, and the world, raise their eyes towards Christ, the King, who reigns from the Tree and there displays his love, the criterion for the kingdom he founded, into which he calls us. To honour Christ as king, wrote Pius XI, is above all to ensure that he may reign freely in my heart. That way my life is formed by his commandments, his presence. This is the sense of the solemnity we keep today. If Christ, the Prince of Peace, rules in us, we may be bearers and sources of his peace. What the world needs now, more than any amount of talk, is an effective, clear-sighted, peace-bearing, truly Christian presence at its core. Amen.
Mosaic from the cathedral in Monreale: William II is crowned by Christ. Christ alone is ‘King for ever’. Any exercise of earthly might is by delegation and for a while – that’s what earthly potentates so easily forget.
Erasmus Lecture‘Transhumance, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2023, is by definition constant drifting across borders. If you are caught up in transhumance you do not stay behind a wall trying to work, or shut, out what people say and do on the other side; you move back-and-forth seeking sustenance in changing landscapes for yourself and your flock. Mireille Gansel develops the metaphor of transhumance in a twofold way. On the one hand, languages constitute pastures. Shepherded from one to the other is significant content — in a poem, novel, treatise, or confessional statement seeking new form. On the other hand, language itself can be thought of as a flock led from winter to summer grazing with the translator as its shepherd. Language, in this account, is a nomad reconciled to the transient nature of any ‘home’.’ From this year’s Erasmus Lecture, now available on YouTube.
Sr Anne-Lise RIPSister Anne-Lise Strøm was buried today. We are many who will miss her deeply. She was a fully given person. In a book of conversations she published with Brita Rosenberg in 1997, she described her departure from Oslo in 1961, when she set out for Lourdes to join the convent of enclosed Dominican nuns there, on a hill overlooking the sanctuary: ‘The train started moving. Her father ran alongside it crying out, ‘Anne! Write!’ He was weeping.’ It seemed as if this intelligent, enthusiastic young woman full of joie de vivre was lost to the world. Little did one know. Through her long, faithful monastic life, Sr Anne-Lise became the Catholic Church’s best known (and probably best loved) ambassador in Norway. She directed, taught, consoled, and encouraged countless people with her characteristic mixture of lucid realism and unshakable trust in the transforming power of God’s mercy. She was funny, full of self-irony; at the same time inscrutable, with her mind set on eternity. Grace and experience made her wise. She was a thoroughly loveable human being. May God grant her the hundredfold she herself so credibly embodied.
Desert Fathers 47You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here. About Abba Netras, the disciple of Abba Silvanos, it was said that he, as long as he lived in his cell on Mount Sinai, paced himself reasonably on account of the needs of the body. But when he became bishop of Pharan, he began to drive himself very hard. So his disciple said to him: ‘Abba, when we were in the desert, you did not practise this kind of asceticism.’ The elder said to him: ‘There we had the desert, and peace [hesychia], and poverty. I wished to manage my body in such a way that I would not fall ill and start looking for what I had not. Now, though, we have come into the world and are surrounded by many temptations. For that reason I chastise my body in order not to put to death the monk [in me]. And should I fall ill here, there will be somebody at hand to assist me.’ When illness came their way, the Fathers received it as a welcome guest, even as they opened their heart’s door hospitably to Sister Death, the pasch by which they would enter eternal life and know the fulfilment of their earthly striving. They believed in divine providence. It would not occur to them, if they were true to their habit, to murmur at any trial that came their way as gift. They would, however, remonstrate with anyone who, for want of prudence, brought harm upon himself or herself. To visit the sick is a corporate work of mercy, a Gospel commandment. St Benedict prescribes it in his Rule as a monastic observance. If a monk in the Desert fell ill, his neighbours would be obliged to care for him. Abba Netras, for as long as he lived on Sinai, an inaccessible place, would spare his brethren such inconvenience. He lived therefore with moderation and did not take austerities too far, to spare himself worry and others trouble, thus to be able to live peacefully, offering up a constant sacrifice of praise in the very place where God had deigned to make his presence felt to the people of Israel. The hardships and graces of Sinai were sufficient to keep him, there, on the straight and narrow. There was no chance of indulging in luxury: life was materially poor. Spiritually, it was rich by virtue of the incomparable stillness the desert offers, teaching a man to become a hesychast. Netras was not permitted to remain in this blessed state. Not in the form of sickness did providence visit him, but through a call, administered through holy Church, to a different state of life. Netras was made bishop of Pharan, the main urban centre of the Sinai peninsula in Roman times — the Wadi Feiran of modern Arabic. Compelled to descend from the mountain into the plain, he was obliged to tear himself away from the embrace of Rachel, a symbol of the contemplative life since Origen, to enter the fray that constitutes a bishop’s ministry, made up of countless daily demands and distractions, and necessarily exposed to a degree of worldliness. In the context of this shift, Bishop Netras chose to organise life differently. He, who had been a paragon of reasonableness, started to practise strict fasts and vigils. One might have expected him to the opposite, assuming a grand public persona. Many would have expected him to do so. But instead of relaxing, he got tougher on himself. This is what caused the brother who lived with him in the bishop’s palace, even as he had shared his life on Sinai, to be thoughtful. He could not see the logic of Netras’s comportment, so asked: What, Father, is this new observance about? Netras’s answer springs from both realism and self-knowledge. As long as his context of life rendered extravagance impossible, he did not need to look for supplementary mortification. The desert, in its poverty and quiet, had served as guarantor of monastic probity. His removal to the city changed all that. There was no longer a regular life to ensure an equilibrium of activity and prayer. Local grandees, such as they were, would invite him to parties. Some people would flatter him, others would deplore him. Staying spiritually on an even course, which on Sinai had felt almost automatic, was no longer easy. Netras experienced the need for props he had not required before. Consequently he took measures, keeping outward temptations in check by greater inward rigour. Explaining this to his brother, he said he did not wish to put to death the monk in himself. It was as a monk that he had been called to serve as bishop; for him to serve well, the monk must keep alive. Netras does not moan about the part entrusted to him. He would no doubt have thought as Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria did when an abbot asked him: ‘Who is greater in his state of life, the likes of us, who have lots of brothers placed under our care whom we lead, each according to his need, towards salvation, or those who in desert places work out their own salvation?’ Cyril answered: ‘Why wedge apart Elijah and Moses, seeing that they were both well-pleasing to God?’ This exemplifies discernment of the kind the Fathers counselled: an ability to see things and situations as they are, without illusions but also without melodrama, trusting that God’s provident grace can draw blessings out of everything as long as we take right measures to stay faithful and attentive where we happen to be, keeping alive our deepest, truest self, the one that grows and blossoms out of God’s call. The landscape around Mount Sinai. Wikimedia Commons.
Requiem for Priests2 Macabees 6,18–31: Eleazar, one of the foremost teachers of the Law, a man advanced in years and of beautiful countenance, was being forced to open his mouth wide to swallow pig’s flesh. Luke 19,1–10: «Zaccaheus, today I must stay at your house.» It’s November. We pray for the dead. Tonight we celebrate a Requiem for the deceased priests of the prelature. The lectionary lets us read the story of Eleazar from the Second Book of Maccabees. It unfolds in the 170s BC. The Holy Land is a colony of the Seleucid Empire, heir to that of Alexander. At its head is Antiochus Epiphanes, an ambitious, rabid enemy of the God of Israel. Antiochus set about systematically imposing idol worship on the people. He would have none of the inheritance of Patriarchs and Prophets. He would eliminate remembrance of the Covenant. Nothing was to nurture devotion to the one true God, based on the commandment: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’. This tendency is typical of totalitarian regimes that lack an ethical foundation. To such, set on exalting themselves to absolute status, the mere thought of Israel, the people of God’s promise that reminds the world, by its mere presence, that any human, bureaucratic policy must be tried in the light of a divine standard, is odious. Not every believer is a hero face to face with such a campaign. If one is made to fall, to bend the knee to the king as if he were god, many others, too, are gained. One compromised conscience makes others fall, like domino pieces. But if one resists! Then the pretensions of power are unmasked. Eleazar possesses the needed resolve. He, a man over ninety, is not concerned just to save his skin. He would not let his weakness become a stumbling block to others. So he gives his life without histrionic gestures. He thinks about the young, he says. He would like to give them an example of what life is about, and ‘of how to make a good death, eagerly and generously, for the venerable and holy laws’. This learned old man resisted royal might. He prevailed, though he lost his life. Remembrance of his fidelity gave others strength to live faithfully. We count, as far as I know, no martyrs among the priests who have served in the prelature of Trondheim. Few of them are idealisable; they had, like most people, their curiosities and eccentricities. Many amusing stories are told about them. When with my inner eye I look out over the assembly of these God-given men, however, when I behold those who laid the foundation for the many good things we enjoy today, what I see first of all is fidelity and perseverance. In some I see an image of that ‘very beautiful countenance’ ascribed to Eleazar, a sign that grace has found a physical foothold. Our priests give their lives that others might live. They proclaimed the fullness of faith. The made it possible for Christ to be bodily present here up north, so that the sanctuary light might burn in our churches, a source of comfort and strength, especially when storm winds raged outside. It is an excellent thing to have a good intention. The substances of an intention, though, is tested by time. Many of the priests who laboured here could have lived more visible, more publicly appreciated, more apparently successful lives elsewhere; but they chose a hidden, often austere existence as weather-beaten shepherds of a little flock because the Lord in his wondrous providence had called them here. We remember them with gratitude and reverence. May the Lord give them a rich reward for their endeavour and raise them up to life eternal! And may he grant us grace to be faithful to the lot God entrusts to us, for the glory of his name and the world’s salvation. May our good priests rest in peace! Amen.
Requiem by Louis Charles Crespin
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ADORATION - After 11.30 am Holy Mass to 6pm . Would you like to spend some time with Jesus, maybe 30 minutes or more . What a beautiful way to spend Sunday afternoon! If the weather permits and it seems Read More
Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. It is the last Sunday of our Church’s liturgical year. As we choose to actually live our lives liturgically, we can move through life in the flow of the liturgical calendar. Read More 13 Likes
To mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of Saint Oliver Plunkett, and the 50th anniversary of his canonisation, RTÉ Television and BBC NI Television will each broadcast a programme on Sunday 23 November 2025. Please share this information Read More 3 Likes
