Another CardinalEveryone knows Otto Preminger’s movie The Cardinal from 1963, but why had I not until recently heard of Peter Glenville’s The Prisoner from 1955? That film, too, is about a cardinal, a Prince of the Church in an unidentified country Read More
Critical SeverityI recently came across this observation in GS MacKenzie’s Travels in the Island of Iceland from 1811: ‘In all departments of literature, there is a strong disposition among the Icelanders to critical severity; and in theological writings more especially, this severity Read More
BonifatiustagAn address given in Paderborn to mark the (transferred) celebration of St Boniface’s Day. Paderborn is the seat of the Bonifatiuswerk, a foundation that in many ways assists the Catholic Church in the Nordic diaspora. The day gave us, too, an opportunity to rejoice in the fortieth anniversary of ordination of the General Secretary of the Bonifatiuswerk. At the time of the Flood it rained for 40 days. It took 40 days to embalm Jacob’s body in Egypt. When Moses entered the cloud of glory on Sinai, he stayed within it for 40 days. The men whom Moses sent to inspect the land of Canaan returned after 40 days, carrying a wonderful cluster of grapes on a pole. For 40 years Israel wandered in the wilderness. In Scripture, a period of 40 years marks a change of generations. It is said of several kings – Saul, David, and Solomon – that they reigned for 40 years. A 40-year chunk of any life is epochal. At 40, in the year of our Lord 716, Saint Boniface left England and came to the German lands in order, here, to show forth and proclaim the Gospel. We are gathered to honour St Boniface. He instantiates a number of Christian virtues we need especially today: courage, humility, and patience. Boniface emigrated from his country to show the wider world what blessedness is found in Christ. He wanted, to use a lovely Pauline phrase, to spread abroad the sweet perfume of Christ Jesus, to create a new atmosphere, so that people might breathe better and live together more peacefully and graciously. That is a high form of spiritual ecology. Any the same time we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of ordination of Monsignore Georg Austen. Dear Georg, I thank you for your faithfulness. To see that it is possible to construct a life (and to do so joyfully) on the basis of an unconditional ‘Yes!’ given once for all is vital encouragement for all of us in these ephemeral times. You are, like Boniface of yore, a pilgrimaging preacher and builder of churches. In the name of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference I wish to express our gratitude for all the good the Bonifatiuswerk has done, and keeps doing, in our countries through you and your colleagues. Churches and monasteries have been built, wonderful media projects and initiatives for youth have come about. Above all, the work of the Bonifatiuswerk nurtures friendship between individual and nations, concrete signs that the Good News truly transcends all boundaries. Your jubilee does mark an epoch. You can look back and rejoice in everything the Lord, through his call to you, has realised. At the same time you can look forward with confidence. God who calls you is, and stays, faithful; he will do this. That’s what Paul once wrote. He is as right as ever. Many congratulations on this day! May God give you his blessing and grace for the road ahead. *** Zur Zeit der Sintflut regnete es 40 Tage. 40 Tage brauchte man, um Jakob in Ägypten einzubalsamieren. Als Mose auf Sinai in die Gotteswolke eintrat, blieb er 40 Tage lang darin gehüllt. Die Männer, die Mose aussandte “um zu sehen, was für ein Land [Kanaan] ist”, kehrten nach 40 Tagen zurück mit einem wunderbaren Rebstock an der Stange. Während 40 Jahre wanderte Israel in der Wüste. Ein Zeitraum von 40 Jahren steht in der Bibel für den Übergang zwischen Generationen. Von mehreren Königen — Saul, David und Salomon — wird berichtet, sie regierten 40 Jahre. Ein 40-jähriger Lebensabschnitt ist epochal. Mit 40, im Jahre 716, verliess Bonifatius England und kam in die deutschen Lande, um hier das Evangelium vorzuleben und zu verkünden. Wir sind versammelt um Bonifatius zu ehren. In ihm sehen wir ein Beispiel christlicher Tugenden die wir heute sehr benötigen: des Mutes, der Demut, der Geduld. Bonifatius hat sein Land verlassen um der weiteren Welt die Glückseligkeit des Lebens in Christus zu vermitteln. Er wollte, um es mit Paulus zu sagen, den Wohlgeruch Christi verbreiten, eine neue Atmosphäre schaffen, damit die Leute besser atmen und gnädiger, friedlicher zusammenleben. Das ist eine hohe Form der geistigen Ökologie. Zur selben Zeit feiern wir das vierzigste Priesterweihejubiläum von Monsignor Georg Austen. Lieber Georg: ich danke Dir für Deine Treue. Zu bestätigen, dass es möglich ist, ein Leben zu gestalten (und zwar glücklich!) auf Grund eines unbedingten, einmal für alle gegebenen “Ja” ist eine vitale Ermunterung in diesen so ephemeren Zeiten. Du bist, wie Bonifatius damals, ein pilgernder Verkünder und Kirchenbauer. Im Name der Nordischen Bischofskonferenz möchte ich ein herzliches Vergelt’s Gott ausdrücken für all das Gute, das das Bonifatiuswerk durch Dich und Deine Mitarbeiter in unseren Ländern ermöglicht hat und weiterhin ermöglicht. Kirchen sind entstanden und Klöster, tolle Media- und Jugendprojekte. Vor allem bestehen durch den Einsatz des Werkes nährende Freundschaften zwischen Nationen und Personen, konkrete Zeichen, dass die Frohbotschaft tatsächlich alle Grenzen durchquert. Dein Jubiläum ist epochal. Zurücksehend darfst Du Dich freuen all dessen, was der Herr durch seinen Ruf an Dich verwirklicht hat. Zur selben Zeit kannst Du zuversichtlich in die Zukunft blicken. Gott, der Dich beruft, ist und bleibt treu; er wird es tun. So schrieb einmal Paulus, und er hat immer noch recht, der Alte. Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum heutigen Tag — und Gottes Segen und Gnade für den weiteren Weg. Saint Boniface chopping down the oak of Gaesmere, after a painting by Heinrich Maria von Hess. This is how Willibald recounts the incident in his Life of Boniface: Now many of the Hessians who at that time had acknowledged the Catholic faith were confirmed by the grace of the Holy Spirit and received the laying-on of hands. But others, not yet strong in the spirit, refused to accept the pure teachings of the Church in their entirety. Moreover, some continued secretly, others openly, to offer sacrifices to trees and springs, to inspect the entrails of victims; some practiced divination, legerdemain, and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries, auspices, and other sacrificial rites; while others, of a more reasonable character, forsook all the profane practices of the Gentiles and committed none of these crimes. With the counsel and advice of the latter persons, Boniface in their presence attempted to cut down, at a place called Gaesmere, a certain oak of extraordinary size called in the old tongue of the pagans the Oak of Jupiter. Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly, the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord. Thereupon the holy bishop took counsel with the brethren, built an oratory from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to Saint Peter the Apostle.
Corpus ChristiDeuteronomy 8.2-16: Do not forget the Lord your God! 1 Corinthians 10.16-17: There is one loaf, we form a single body. John 6.51-58: Whoever eats this bread will live for ever. The Lord’s Eucharist was instituted in great confidentiality. Jesus took the disciples away from the noisy streets of Jerusalem into an ordered upper room. There he blessed and broke the bread. There he took the chalice, gave thanks, and gave it to his disciples, saying: ‘This is my blood of the covenant. It will be poured out for many.’ The Twelve ate and drank. The Eucharist was a hidden covenant at first. It was, to put it in Greek, a mystery. In Apostolic times, and for quite a while thereafter, the Eucharist was celebrated secretly. While it was illegal to be a Christian, while Caesar claimed the whole man and thought himself a god, it was too dangerous to celebrate the mystery openly. That would expose Christians. The sacrament would be at risk of desecration. Only in the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine, to the astonishment of many, declared himself a Christian did churches became an integrated, monumental element in the cityscapes of Antiquity. A Catholic church exists for the sake of the Eucharist. By all means, other sacraments are celebrated there, too: children are baptised, youth are confirmed, couples are married, clerics are ordained, sins are forgiven. Still, it is the Eucharist that binds all the elements together. How we long for it when we cannot receive it corporally! Our very longing is then a high, noble form of worship that touches God’s paternal Heart. Awareness that the Lord is present in the consecrated Bread and Wine grew in the Church through a thousand years. In the middle of the thirteenth century, at the time of St Thorfinn, when the young Olav Audunssønn pottered about dreaming of Hestviken, that awareness was given liturgical form. A feast was instituted to honour the Body and Blood of Christ. Thomas Aquinas wrote wondrous texts for it. We recite them still: ‘Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,/Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,/See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart/Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.’ Today’s feast calls us first of all to silent wonder, to marvel at God’s nearness. The Church, however, knew herself obliged to proclaim this message to the world. In the High Middle Ages people still had a sense – a sense we’ve lost – that the universe is one. It seemed natural, then, on Corpus Christi, to bring the Blessed Sacrament out of church, into the streets. We may, now, expose the mystery. The Word became flesh to save and sanctify the world. His is Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. He would embrace all things, all people. Let the world see it and rejoice! In the sixteenth century, when so-called ‘reformers’ denied the realism of the Eucharist, Corpus Christi gave Catholics an occasion to convey to an ever more rationalistic and cynical age that, no, the Lord has not abandoned his people. He is humbly faithful to his pledge. We recognise and revere him in the Sacrament, for us a source of beatitude. A Corpus Christi procession can shock the uninitiated. It can also awaken unconsciously seeking souls. Sigrid Undset relates how an encounter with the Real Presence shook a Norwegian painter who, 25 or so years before Undset was born, had studied art in Düsseldorf. The painter, a well brought-up young man, secure in his Lutheranism, had walked into town to observe the Corpus Christi procession of 1854. ‘The lights, the canopy and the priests carrying this thing wearing gold-embroidered silken vestment – all this was picturesque, and he had come to Düsseldorf to make pictures. But when the people on the pavement dropped to their knees and the men bared their heads, he could only smile as he stood there straight, tall as he was, with his painter’s hat upon his wavy painter’s hair. – The next moment they sprang up, the men round about, and sent his hat flying down the street.’ Then he suddenly intuited: the Holy One is here! The painter was Karl Schilling. The experience he entertained on that Düsseldorf street marked the beginning of his conversion. Shortly thereafter he became a Catholic; with time he became a holy priest. The Church honours him as venerable, an exemplary Christian. ‘Five minutes before I became a Catholic’, Schiller later wrote, ‘I had no idea what it was all bout.’ What was needed was the sight of adult women and men kneeling reverently before the Presence of the Lord. Faced with such a reality, he could not keep wearing his hat. It had to to be shed, like Moses’s sandals at the Burning Bush. We often ask ourselves how we might communicated our faith, so dear to us, to an age that seems indifferent. This incident of Schilling’s gives us a clue: by honouring God’s holiness – and by living according to it, evidently. Schilling lodged with a Catholic family. They kindly but clearly explained to him what Corpus Christi is about. He stressed that he owed that family much. ‘The perfect living-out of faith I witnessed among them brought me more than all the apologetic literature in the world.’ It is no use knocking off others’ hats off for their impiety’s sake if I myself do not lead a life that instantiates the Gospel. When Father Karl Schilling lay dying in 1907, some young people came to bid him farewell. He told them: ‘You must become saints, great saints!’ Then he said, by way of a final testament: ‘Oh my Jesus, make me ever love you more and more!’ The Holy One is among us to nurture us unto holiness, that we may walk as he walked, in our own inner cell and in public life, out in the streets. Amen.
Another CardinalEveryone knows Otto Preminger’s movie The Cardinal from 1963, but why had I not until recently heard of Peter Glenville’s The Prisoner from 1955? That film, too, is about a cardinal, a Prince of the Church in an unidentified country run by a totalitarian regime in the wake of the Second World War. It is in essence the record of a drawn-out process of interrogation designed to break down an upright character. An interrogator – on the face of it a humane man, a doctor from a cultured background – picks the cardinal apart in systematic fashion, subjecting him to solitary confinement interspersed with sessions of manipulation, prodding the priest’s weak point: his humility. Alec Guinness is remarkable as the cardinal. Bosley Crowther, who could be fierce as a critic, noted 71 years ago that he plays ‘a role of tremendous emotional and intellectual complexity. And he does so with such clarity and feeling that it strikes the very marrow in your bones.’ Guinness was received into the Catholic Church in 1956. Playing this role had something to do with it.
Critical SeverityI recently came across this observation in GS MacKenzie’s Travels in the Island of Iceland from 1811: ‘In all departments of literature, there is a strong disposition among the Icelanders to critical severity; and in theological writings more especially, this severity has occasionally assumed a very rigorous form. A curious instance of this kind occurred about a hundred years ago, when an unfortunate man was publicly whipped, as a punishment for the errors he had committed in a translation of the book of Genesis’ (pp. 303-4). I wonder what those stern, austere readers would have made of Deepl or ChatGPT.
The End of DesireSimon Stisen describes himself as ‘the Pentecostalist Pastor who came out of the closet’. In his podcast Greatest of all he investigates different aspects of faith and sexual orientation in conversation with a variety of people. I was recently privileged to be Simon’s guest. What is the finality and end of human desire? How does grace act in our lives? Is there a way through disorder to order? Is there not a risk attaching to the hyper-eroticisation of sexuality in contemporary discourse? These are some of the questions we addressed in a conversation you can find – in Norwegian – here. Simon refers to the Nordic Bishops’ Conference on Human Sexuality from 2023. This is how that letter concludes: Many are perplexed by traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. To such we offer a word of friendly counsel. First: try to acquaint yourself with Christ’s call and promise, to know him better through the Scriptures and in prayer, through the liturgy and study of the Church’s full teaching, not just of snippets here and there. Take part in the Church’s life. The horizon of the questions with which you set out will be enlarged in this way, as will your mind and heart. Secondly, consider the limitations of a purely secular discourse on sexuality. It needs to be enriched. We need adequate terms to speak of these important things. We shall have a precious contribution to make if we recover the sacramental nature of sexuality in God’s plan, the beauty of Christian chastity, and the joy of friendship, which lets us see that great, freeing intimacy can be found also in non-sexual relationships. The point of the Church’s teaching is not to curtail love but to enable it. At the end of its prologue, our 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats a passage from The Roman Catechism of 1566: ‘The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love.’ By this love the world was made, our nature formed. This love was made manifest in Christ’s example, teaching, saving passion, and death. It is vindicated in his glorious resurrection, which we shall celebrate with joy during the fifty days of Easter. May our Catholic community, so many-faceted and colourful, bear witness to this love in truth. St Mary of Egypt and the Monk Zosima.
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Today we celebrate the feast of St Columba (also known as Colum Cille) from Donegal. He went on to found monasteries in Derry, Durrow, Iona and Kells before leaving Ireland to become a pilgrim for Christ. He is noted for Read More 2 Comments
Today June 7th we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ is also known as the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, which translates from Latin to "Body of Christ." This feast calls us to focus on two Read More 8 Likes
✨CORPUS CHRISTI 2026 ✨ The Corpus Christi Procession will take place following 12 noon Mass next Sunday, 7th June. Once Mass has ended, we will process out of the Cathedral, across the road and into the Garden of Reflection. We invite Read More 2 Likes
Today is the day when many people will ask us, "How was #CloyneLourdes2026?" The truth is, it's hard to put into words. Lourdes is more than a place; it's an experience. It's the friendships formed, the kindness shared, the faith renewed, Read More 7 Likes
Cork Doctors For Life Amen 🙏 
