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
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 revise 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 long since 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 and 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 ambled into town to observe the Corpus Christi procession of 1854. ‘The lights, the can0py and the priests carrying this thing in gold-embroidered silken vestment – all this was picturesque, and he had come to Düsseldorf to make pictures. But when the mass one the pavement dropped to their needs 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, those men round about, sending 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 conversation. 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 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 fight, so infinitely 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 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 had come to bid him farewell. He told them: ‘You must become saints, great saints!’ The 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.
Justin MartyrIt should make us think that Justin Martyr was decapitated for the sake of his faith during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, that most philosophical of emperors whose sayings you can find on websites called things like ‘Inspiring Thoughts for Every Day’ where readers adorn them with cute little pink hearts and shooting-star emoji. It is possible, then, to talk volubly and well about the meaning of existence yet, at the same time, to run a totalitarian system with little room for freedom of thought and conscience. The story of Justin’s martyrdom is touching. He accounts for his faith with pregnant utterances. When the inquisitor asks him to worship the emperor at least a little bit, Justin says: ‘No sensible man descends from pity to impiety!’ On behalf of himself and his four companions, he declares: ‘Do with us what you like, but we are Christians, and we will not sacrifice to idols.’ A like clarity is found in many early acts of martyrs. Justin, though, had a clearer understanding of his faith than most. He was a philosopher by training. He knew the currents of his day, a hodgepodge of truth-claims not entirely unlike the one we confront in the chaos of our time. Justin considered this reality analytically and steadfastly. Having become a Christian, certain that the Word made flesh is the hermeneutic key to all things, he tried that key everywhere. If Christ is the Word whereby all things came into being, he thought, he must have left a trace on all that is. Then it should be possible to seek an impression, an image, a reflection of the Word in improbable places. That is how Justin came to formulate the lovely notion of the logos spermatikos, the ‘word sown abroad’. It presupposes the Gospel’s parable of God as the Sower. The Word is generously sown throughout the universe in order to nurture humankind. We must gather in its harvest carefully, wisely. Justin’s conviction that God’s goodness can be sought, and potentially found, in all created things, in any sincere quest for truth, gave him strength to stand firm in the final trial, his heart on fire with a love that knows no boundaries. Icon of St Justin, whose feast occurs on 1 June, by Theophanes the Cretan. Wikimedia.
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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 7 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
