Tolkien’s CreationAsked by The Tablet to contribute to its annual Books of the Year supplement, I was happy to recommend a volume that has accompanied me for much of the autumn as I’ve been reading it in small chunks at breakfast: ‘What Read More
Canta et ambulaSt Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through Read More
IrresistibleAmong the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the Read More
Tolkien’s CreationAsked by The Tablet to contribute to its annual Books of the Year supplement, I was happy to recommend a volume that has accompanied me for much of the autumn as I’ve been reading it in small chunks at breakfast: ‘What happens when a classical philologist turns his mind to the study of one of modern literature’s most audacious, best-loved enterprises? Read Giuseppe Pezzini’s Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation to find out. The book is at once an overview of Tolkien’s work and an essay in literary theory. It is elegantly composed. And it’s fun. It will tell you at last what Queen Berúthiel’s cats are all about.’ Professor Pezzini’s book is eye-opening and ear-opening. He invites readers to listen again to the noise Frodo heard ‘in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Canta et ambulaSt Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your Church!’ Better than anyone he has made sense of the jubilus in chant, ‘a certain sound of joy without words, the expression of a mind poured forth in joy’, joy that is ineffable, yet singable. Today, on the last day of the Church’s year, the Divine Office gives us another wonderful text on singing. Augustine speaks here of the kind of singing apt to keep our courage up as we pilgrimage towards hope in a world that often appears like a vale of tears. His words have great poignancy. They resound credibly still as the counsel of a father, a friend: ‘Always go onward in goodness, right faith, good habits. Sing, and walk onwards.’ Thus we shall be preserved from discouragement and pusillanimity. https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Canta-et-ambula-1.m4a
Bread Grows in WinterI’ve just received in the mail Jennifer Bryson’s translation of Ida Görres’s seminal book Bread Grows in Winter, handsomely published by Ignatius Press. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a preface. Here it is: I picked up a battered German copy of Ida Görres’s Bread Grows in Winter from a junk shop years ago. This book, first published in 1970, has been a source of inspiration to me. During my first few years of episcopacy I often took it with me on journeys, as a travel companion. Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials. Ida Görres was a woman of acute intelligence, able to fathom in herself great tensions. Her bicultural background kept her from simplifying questions of identity, cultural or ecclesiastical. When the Second Vatican Council began, she followed it enthusiastically. She remained committed to the Council’s teaching, but was increasingly appalled by the crassness with which it was instrumentalised, here and there, as an excuse for mere deconstruction. She saw spiritual and intellectual treasures being thrown overboard as the bark of the Church made its way through choppy waters. This made her grieve both on her own behalf and on that of others. Of course, she had read enough Church history to know that such losses are never final. There will always be pearl-divers ready to descend to the bottom of the sea to fetch treasures up again, patiently removing strings of algae as they rejoice in sharing their finds. But why go to such trouble when a peaceful handing-on (in Latin, a traditio) in view of present mission and future growth remains an option? It would be a mistake to present Ida Görres as just an antiquarian. Her concern was theological. She insisted, as had the Council Fathers in their constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church must be understood as a sacramental, personal reality. Görres regretted the eclipse of theology in much that was said about the Church, and done to her in consequence, in the heady years of the late 60s, with the West caught up in a cultural revolution that unfolded, often enough, as a targeted assault on institutions. The Church, she kept repeating, can neither be rightly understood nor truly loved by one who regards her in institutional terms while failing to recognise her as ‘the strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her’. For much too long, the theology of Ida Görres has been a minority interest passed on among initiates who recognise each other, as it were, by way of secret handshakes or knowing looks. I rejoice that these boundaries are bursting. The publication of Görres’s work in English is a major event full of promise for the Church’s mission, at once ancient and ever new, ‘to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit’.
Desert Fathers 48You 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. Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] about certain impure thoughts that the human heart conceives and about fruitless desires. Abba Poemen said to him: ‘Shall the axe be vaunted over him who hews with it?’ You, likewise: do not give [your thoughts] a hand and take no pleasure in them, and they will be ineffectual. Abba Isaiah asked the same question. Abba Poemen said: ‘If somebody abandons a chest full of clothes, they will decay over time. When it comes to thoughts, the same process applies: as long as we do not put them into concrete action they will over time decay and be gone. The battle of the heart of which we have heard Antony speak plays out to a large extent in the mind. It is unhelpful to envisage the two as categorically distinct. We are inclined nowadays to think that thinking goes on in our brain whereas our heart is the seat of feelings. At the same time, we recognise the truth of what Christ says: ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. The heart has, Biblically speaking, intellective faculties. Affectivity and intelligence are intertwined. It follows that if we are serious about desiring a pure heart, we must first of all labour to purify our minds. But what a cesspit our mind sometimes seems to be! We dream, then, of fumigating it, seeking an instant remedy that might eliminate all noxious content. Poemen tells us that this is an illusory dream. Once we have allowed a thought or desire into our heart and mind, it settles and makes itself comfortable. We are not built as computers: there is no ‘delete’ function that will, when a button is pressed, get rid of undesirable content. Poemen’s message to both enquirers, Isaiah and Ammoes, is the same. He assures them impure thoughts can be excised, but only over time, through a process of slow starvation. Patience is called for, and endurance. The saying about the axe, which Poemen cites, is from Isaiah, part of an oracle about causality. A tool is only effective when someone wields it. It is not an autonomous agent. Isaiah invokes a range of examples. His point is ethical, even political: human institutions may not glory in themselves when used as instruments for purposes intended by God. The Lord enables and moves them then, none other. We are asked, similarly, to consider where our bad thoughts come from, then to cut them off at the source. If we do, they will sooner or later lose their power and leave us in peace. For a thought or desire has no more autonomy than any old tool we may have lying about in our garden shed. Thoughts can impersonate autonomy. The Enemy of good may manipulate them in such a way. But it is by callous deceit. As long as we do not nurture the poisoned content of our mind, it will wither. We shall need to build up sticking-power to sit tight while this process takes place. To speak concretely, we may take as an example a battle many people fight: that of pornographic addiction. A cynical industry engenders this unfreedom by playing on registers that touch our deepest desires and darkest fears, all within a miasma of vulnerability. A person may be seduced by pornographic propositions for a while, thinking perhaps they are coming to terms with sexual frustration, telling themselves this is freeing. Then the moment comes when they see that content they have watched does not stay in the ether, but lodges itself in the mind, conditioning relationships, disabling innocence. Such a person may wake up desperate one day and think, ‘For God’s sake, get this stuff out of my head!’, only to find that no such immediate option exists. The temptation will be great to burrow more deeply into the source of impurity, to give in to its proffered promise of comfort and satisfaction. One may see through the lie of it, perhaps, yet feel there is nowhere else to go, all the while being plagued by an ever more all-encompassing unhappiness and shame. To such a one Poemen says: despair not! He assures him or her there is a way out of captivity. He gives them a twofold piece of advice. First they must turn off the tap of unhealthy stimuli, seeking whatever help they need to do so. Then they must take responsibility for mental, affective baggage acquired. They must learn to say, in the first person: These impulses do live in me, for I have let them in, but now I stop; when a thought or image from my hoard comes to me, I will not pick up and fondle it, but give it to the Lord with a prayer for mercy: ‘Lord, this thought was mine, but now I offer it to you; it will no longer have power over me; create a new heart in me; teach me to love beautifully’. Over time this procedure can work transformation. Of course, it applies to other addictive thought-processes, too, like wounds to our pride. The Fathers tell of an elder who lamented in his cell: ‘On account of a single word, all this gone!’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘I know 14 books of the Bible by heart, yet a single complaint against me obsessed me for the whole of today’s liturgy!’ It can be upsetting to realise what scorpions lurk in my heart. After all, I would like it to be a pure temple to the Lord. But once I know the blighters are there, I can take action, putting a tumbler over them to curtail their movement, making sure they are not fed. Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56.
IrresistibleAmong the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the poet Tore Ørjasæter, was a close friend of Undset’s: ‘My husband Jo remembers how as a little boy he was lifted up by a very large, very adult person impossible to contradict, but not dangerous, to be placed in an armchair with a picture-book or some toy. Sigrid Undset was not one to crawl around to play with children or to utter baby-talk. In contrast she gave him, each Christmas, well-chosen sports equipment or books.’ Undset, wholly convinced that ‘maternity is life itself’, was unsentimental with regard to the task it represented. Thereby she has something weighty and original to say to our time.
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This Sunday, 30 November, heralds the begining of Advent 2025 – the beginning of the Christian new calendar. Now in its twelfth year, an interactive digital Advent calendar will be published by the Catholic Communications Office to offer a Read More 1 Likes
Today is the First Sunday of Advent, which marks the start of a season of expectation and preparation as the Church prepares to celebrate the coming of Christ. #Advent 19 Likes
Blessing for an Advent Wreath: Lord God, your Church joyfully awaits the coming of its saviour, who enlightens our hearts and dispels the darkness of ignorance and sin. Pour forth your blessings upon us at we light the candles of Read More 1 Comments
195 years ago today, Our Lady gave St Catherine Labore the Miraculous Medal. It was evening, the nuns were in chapel for the convent’s community prayers which included the rosary, when the Blessed Virgin appeared to St Catherine the second Read More 6 Likes
Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Colman of Cloyne - Our Patron Saint. We invite you to join Bishop William Crean and the Cathedral Chapter in prayer for 10am Mass this morning, in St. Colman’s Cathedral, to mark this Read More 3 Comments
Is there a supplement available with a specific Mass - Collects, Readings, Eucharistic Prayer to commemorate our Patron Saint? Read MoreHappy Saint Colman's feast day to the Diocese of Cloyne 🙏 🙏🕯🕯
