A Good PriestI was recently asked: What is a good priest? The best answer I could think of was this poem by Dietrich Vorwerk, who died in 1942. ‘A priest must be/Very great and very small;/Noble as a prince,/With a peasant’s simplicity Read More
My Father’s ShadowI’d been looking forward for weeks to seeing Akinola Davies’s My Father’s Shadow. I was not disappointed. It is an intelligently designed, superbly acted study in fatherhood, developed as a prism through which to consider, more generally and profoundly, the Read More
The Inner ManA phrase from today’s vigils reading, drawn from the Acta collated for the canonisation of St Dominic in 1234, is striking. We are told that Dominic’s rejoicing heart exhilarated his face, indeed that ‘the peaceful composition of the interior man was Read More
RelishThis morning, at breakfast, I went from reading a review of two recent books on the future of the human species (one of which presages ‘a new artificial world of designed, synthetic organisms’ able to ‘exist alongside, but firewalled from, Read More
A Good PriestI was recently asked: What is a good priest? The best answer I could think of was this poem by Dietrich Vorwerk, who died in 1942. ‘A priest must be/Very great and very small;/Noble as a prince,/With a peasant’s simplicity and candour;/A hero having subdued himself,/A man who has fought with God;/A source of sanctified life,/A sinner whom God has pardoned;/Lord over his own desire,/A servant to those who are anxious and weak;/Bowing low to no human greatness,/Reverencing, rather, the least;/His Master’s pupil,/A champion in spiritual battle;/A beggar with imploring hands,/A herold bearing gifts of gold;/A man on the battlefield,/A woman at the sickbed;/An elder in his vision, /In his trustfulness, a child;/Yearning for high things,/Attentive to those that are low;/Destined for joy,/Familiar with grief,/Far removed from spite;/Clear in thinking,/Truthful in speech;/A friend of peace,/The enemy of sloth;/Well-grounded in himself —/So very different from me!’ https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Priestergedicht-Vorwerk.mp3
My Father’s ShadowI’d been looking forward for weeks to seeing Akinola Davies’s My Father’s Shadow. I was not disappointed. It is an intelligently designed, superbly acted study in fatherhood, developed as a prism through which to consider, more generally and profoundly, the nature of love. It has become commonplace to speak of a crisis of fatherhood in our time. I happen to believe this diagnosis is often to the point. It tends to be dissected one-sidedly, however: from the point of view of offspring, usually sons, who have not received from their fathers what they feel they needed or what (more ambiguously) they consider they were entitled to receive. Rarely have I seen the stereotype of the absent father so credibly presented from the other side, from that of a father who cannot be otherwise, yet whose absence is a mark, not of indifference, but of love. This film sets out from a wound of absence. It turns into an account of intimacy. The story is told tenderly but without a trace of sentimentality. It stays with you, itself a beneficial presence, for a long time.
The Inner ManA phrase from today’s vigils reading, drawn from the Acta collated for the canonisation of St Dominic in 1234, is striking. We are told that Dominic’s rejoicing heart exhilarated his face, indeed that ‘the peaceful composition of the interior man was outwardly conveyed in manifest goodness and in the hilarity of his countenance’. I have deliberately rendered the phrase with Latinate vocabulary, for the exhilaration and hilarity referred to in the Acta render important nuances of a more generic ‘joy’. This description of Dominic makes me think of the last section of St Benedict’s Rule’s chapter 7 ‘On Humility’: ‘The twelfth degree of humility is that a monk not only have humility in his heart but also by his very appearance make it always manifest.’ The spiritual life is not reducible to theoretical notions. It informs our whole being, including our physiognomy. What makes a saint a saint is this, not least: in him or her holiness has become embodied.
RelishThis morning, at breakfast, I went from reading a review of two recent books on the future of the human species (one of which presages ‘a new artificial world of designed, synthetic organisms’ able to ‘exist alongside, but firewalled from, the natural world’) to Sarah Reardon‘s essay, published yesterday, on pioneering women in the fiction of Willa Cather. Reardon cites this characterisation from My Ántonia: ‘They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating.’ It strikes me that most discourse about ‘enhanced’ humanity is conspicuously void of any relish in being human and carries not the faintest echo of ‘hearty joviality’. And that surely is the heart of the matter?
Translatio OlaviOur country is preparing a national jubilee whose culmination will be 29 July 2030. The Jubilee marks the millennium of the Battle of Stiklestad. The official website declares: ‘1030 was a milestone in nation’s consolidation and evangelisation.’ This is all well and good. As Norwegian Catholics we shall of course participate with zeal in all good, shared initiatives. We share the Jubilee Committee’s determination that ‘our country shall come to know the stories that have shaped Norway.’ In order to live up to that task, though, we must insist that the effective impact of the Battle of Stiklestad came, not in 1030, but the following year. 1030 was marked by tense unrest. The battle’s consequence was not sovereign consolidation, but alienation. Svein Knutson, a fourteen year-old lad, son of the Danish King and his co-wife Alfiva (King Knut was modern in the sense that he practised polyamory), became Norway’s ruler. Svein introduced Danish laws. Many were humiliating: ‘Such was the importance given to Danish men that one Dane’s testimony could overturn that of ten Norwegians.’ Those who had backed the Danish-sponsored peasant revolt against Olav had to answer for their options. People whispered among themselves: ‘You were promised peace and better justice, but have been given constraint and thraldom.’ Snorre adds: ‘It was hard to counter-argue such sentiment.’ Well, that is what this country looked like after the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. At the same time it was said that Olav, for being strict, had been a righteous king. There were rumours, too, that he was a holy man. The miracles that had begun to be reported at Stiklestad on the very night of the battle did not cease. Many started praying to Olav, and were heard. It seemed obvious that the king even after physical death was among his people, and kept caring for it amicably. Against this background Bishop Grimkjell asked, on Norway’s behalf, the Danish ruler, Svein, for leave to dig the dead king up. He wished to give Olav a worthy burial. People in general were curious to see the state of the king’s body, for was it truly the case that he was alive for being dead, surely it would show? Alfiva, a pragmatist, hoped to prove once for all that here was a corpse like other corpses, so to be done, at last, with pious imaginings. That’s not how it went. Twelve months and five days after Olav’s death, on Monday 3 August 1031, Olav was exhumed just a couple of stone’s throws from where we are now assembled. His coffin looked freshly planed. Olav appeared to be asleep. His cheeks were ruddy (always a trait of his); his hair and nails had grown. Amazingly, life was clearly at work in this dead man. Being good realists, citizens of the gloriously enlightened twenty-first century, we may think that, sure, this is the sort of tall tale fools were inclined to believe back in those dark times, the products of cultic propaganda. Before we take that self-satisfied hypothesis too far, we might reflect on the following: pretty much all the inhabitants of Nidaros, Medieval Trondheim, witnessed the proceedings. There would have been between 500 and 1,000 of them, and crowd that could perfectly well gather in one place. Trondheimers, we may safely assume, did not suffer fools more gladly then than they do now. Given the sheer number of eye witnesses, Snorre could not have permitted himself, later, to claim as true something everyone knew to be false. In addition, we have the statements of contemporary witnesses. Already in Glælognskviða, a poem written for King Svein a year or two after the exhumation, we find a chiselled poetic assertion that Olav was found ‘with his body unharmed, his hair and nails having grown as if he were alive.’ It is plainly unscientific not to take such evidence seriously. The eleventh-century witnesses are in any case confirmed by a much later source. Just before the Reformation was sternly imposed in Norway, just before veneration of saints was declared to be both ungodly and illegal, the chest in which the saint’s relics reposed — the chest which Nidarosdomen was built to house — was opened for inspection by Olav Engelbrektsson, our last archbishop. He confirmed in writing that the king’s body was ‘consistent and whole as far as both the skin and the bones were concerned, so that no member was divided from the rest.’ His face was entire ‘with flesh and skin intact’. The only thing that could be said against it was ‘that the hairs of his eyebrows were scarce’. The archbishop remarked that ‘a sweet air exuded from [the body], and there was no scent of corruption.’ Take note: this report was kept in Norway’s state archives, in the administrative centre of a camp that deplored all the devout attention given to Olav’s body from the moment it was dug up and translated on 3 August 1031. What happened later to the relics? Unfortunately, we cannot be fully certain. However it is a well-attested tradition that a shin-bone was at some point isolated and kept, first in Copenhagen, then in Oslo. We are blessed to have a fragment of that bone here in our cathedral. Biological analysis has shown that it belonged to a tall man in his mid thirties who lived in the first part of the eleventh century. We have every reason to venerate our relic of St Olav with informed, keen devotion. And indeed, it is a vehicle of healing grace from God today just as it was 996 years ago. King Svein Knutsson ruled Norway for a few years. According to Snorre he was ‘a child both in years and in understanding’. Alfiva was the one in charge. Norwegians soon had their fill of them both. When Olav’s incorrupt body was found, it seemed obvious: Here was the living presence on which our nation’s sovereign unity is founded, the ‘Perpetual King of Norway’, the noble example of all royal authority in this land. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it was the joyful find made on 3 August 1031 that consolidated Norway and decisively oriented a Christian mission here. The sight of Olav’s red cheeks a year and five days after he had been killed at Stiklestad came to symbolise the fact that God’s grace in Christ, when it is readily, freely, and intelligently received, transforms even a person’s physique from within, as a pledge of our faith in the resurrection of the flesh. Christian hope is not abstract and vague; it is palpable and concrete, possessing power to illumine even the body politic. This is what we commemorate today, on the feast of St Olav’s exhumation and translation. It is our responsibility to point towards the stature of this event’s forthcoming millennium, on account of its importance for our faith, of course, but also, quite simply, in the service of historical truth.
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Today is the feast day of Saint Muiredach (Murtagh), the patron saint of the Diocese of Killala in Co. Mayo and Sligo. Muiredach was placed at the head of the Church of Killala by Ireland's patron St. Patrick, and is remembered Read More 8 Likes
Today we celebrate the Memorial of St Clare of Assisi. O God, who in your mercy led Saint Clare to a love of poverty, grant, through her intercession, that, following Christ in poverty of spirit, we may merit to contemplate you one day in Read More 2 Comments
Today is the feast of Saint Lawrence of Rome. He was one of the seven deacons of the Roman Church in charge of the material needs of the faithful. Gifted with a sense of humour, he met his martyrdom cheerfully, Read More 3 Comments
Gospel of the Day (Matthew 14,22-33) After he had fed the people, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and precede him to the other side of the sea, while he dismissed the crowds. After doing so, he went up on Read More
Today we celebrate the Feast of St Dominic, a Castilian Catholic priest and founder of the Dominican Order. He is the patron saint of astronomers. St Dominic, pray for us 5 Likes
