MissionFor almost a century, the Missionaries of the Holy Family have had a special care for the Catholic community in the Prelature of Tromsø. The Fathers who came in 1931 were predominantly German; now it is the Polish province that Read More
ExerciseHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 9.16-27: That is how I run, intent on winning. Luke 6.39-42: Can the blind lead the blind? When I think of the Apostle Paul, I don’t spontaneously think of an athlete. I can’t see him running in Chariots of Fire. Paul comes across as a bookish, sedate man. He’d most happily have spent his free time in constructive argument. He would have walked a lot, like everyone in Antiquity did, unless they were filthy rich. But would he have run? This counter-intuitive note adds force to Paul’s choice of an image with which to describe Christian life: ‘All runners in the stadium try to win. I run intent on winning.’ It’s good to be reminded that the Christian life is akin to physical exercise. The metaphor speaks to a time in which anyone who doesn’t go regularly to the gym, or prepare to run marathons, is looked on as a bit of a freak. I find it interesting to see that a near-universal consensus has emerged regarding the desirability of the exercise and moulding of the body in pursuit of well-being and good looks. Imagine what might happen if people would invest similar energy in nurturing and forming their souls, aspiring to spiritual beauty. The world would be transformed. As any exercise App will tell you, the secret to lasting impact is regular effort. It’s better to do something modest every day than to go for a binge-workout every two weeks. This just leaves you exhausted — and might damage your body. On this last day of retreat we may ask ourselves: what’s the state of my regimen of spiritual exercise? A retreat is a golden opportunity to make healthy resolutions. Athletes in the stadium run, Paul stresses, in the hope of winning a prize. What great goods God has in store for our souls, if only we’d equip ourselves to receive them! We can start by noticing the cataracts that blur our interior vision. If a blind man leading another blind man runs risks, what might we say of a blind man who sets out to sprint on a race course? Let’s, then, work out where our blind spots are, and ask the Divine Physician to heal them. Restoring sight is what he does. If we let him act, freedom and confidence of inward movement will be restored to us. Then we shall stand a chance of being truly useful to others, unmarred by that false, blind judgement which the Gospel condemns as hypocrisy. From Chariots of Fire, image on Wikipedia.
Right QuestionsHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 8.1-13: A man may imagine he understands something Luke 6.27-38: Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. ‘A man’, writes Paul, ‘may imagine he understands something, but still not understand anything in the way he ought to’. That statement speaks to our time. For us, now, ‘understanding’ has to a large extent become a subset of the imagination. We fancy something, make some sort of projection, then fashion our ‘understanding’ accordingly, carefully sifting, selecting and deselecting material in order to underpin our chosen hypothesis. Artificial Intelligence, in which many place a confidence I can’t see is warranted, is a terrific ally in this endeavour. It humours us, ever ready to collate ‘evidence’, such as it is, that corroborates points of view on which we’re already fixed. This is seductive: we like to be affirmed and proved right. But if we are in any way committed to a search for truth, for the real, the tendency is deadly. Growth in understanding presupposes critical questioning. The ancient Greeks knew this. The Socratic method of probing enquiry was until not long ago the paradigm of education in the West. That is no longer so. As a result we’ve grown less resilient in response to opposition. Faced with people who do not agree with us, we increasingly sulk, threaten, or fly into a rage. Paul’s formation was Rabbinic, not Socratic. But the Rabbis were great questioners as well; indeed, part of the Rabbinic approach was to work out which questions were licit and helpful, which were not. Paul points towards this kind of enquiry when he says there is a way in which we ought to understand things. The believer asks questions already knowing the final answers. They are given him in Scripture, in the teaching of the Church. The believer’s concern is to discover how the answers may most helpfully be applied to his own time’s specific predicaments. That’s our task, yours and mine, right now. It is the Church’s task to formulate the right questions about the uncertain, menacing times in which God has placed us. By sticking to that task we may plausibly help our contemporaries see the direction in which they ought to be going. Our questions will at times provoke. So we must be prepared to face the reactions evoked above: the world’s bad temper, intimidation, even fury. That’s nothing to get too excited about. We must carry on regardless, careful to observe the terms prescribed in the Gospel for Christian engagement with the world: even as we speak the truth to it, we must love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who abuse us, asking the Lord to pour out his compassionate blessing on all. Can I see the wood for the trees?
Time Growing ShortHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 7.25.31: Our time is growing short Admittedly, there’s something a bit weird about reading an epistle written two thousand years ago that tells us: ‘time is growing short’. What can Paul have meant? He was a man immersed in the concrete business of living. We know that from his letters and from Luke’s account of his career in Acts. Constantly travelling, teaching and exhorting, tent-making, resolving quarrels as well as igniting them, scourged and stoned, living with ‘danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren’ (2 Cor 11.26), Paul knew the density of time; he also made provision for a long-term future. Why else would he have bothered to criss-cross the Near East and Greece, planning trips to Rome and Spain, spending himself to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth? His reminder that time is short is not a summons to the fatalist passivity that doomsday prophecies, secular as well as religious, are apt to produce, however. He urged people to work hard, to build and edify, plant and water; at the same time he’d have them know that no present project, however noble, has a claim to lasting finality. There is, quite simply, a passing-away imprinted on the nature of all enterprise in this world. We must learn to give our free consent to it. Paul does not want us to stop engaging in human pursuits. He tells us to engage in them in such a way that eternity will somehow shine through them. It’s in this sense those who have wives should live as if they had none, those who buy and sell should live as if they owned nothing, and so forth. The believer must do what he can to build up the earthly city, yet stay conscious that this city will fall. Further, all we construct now we must one day leave behind. If we nurture this consciousness while building, the leave-taking that must inevitably come, sooner or later, will be less of a wrench; there’s also a chance that we’ll build with greater grace, honouring the work for its sake rather than imposing ourselves on it, trapped in the wet cobweb of vanity. We shall know, then, the joy and freedom of the beatitudes, the rich blessing that comes from being poor. Relieved of having to make too much a mark in the present, from at all costs tagging everywhere, we’ll have our eyes set on the kingdom of heaven, where an eternal name awaits us, written on a white stone that alone can reveal to us the sense before God of everything we’re busy with in this world. View from Kananaskis.
Birthday of the Mother of GodHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. Romans 8:28-30: With those he justified he shared his glory. Matthew 1:1-16, 18-23: A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. The Churvh began with a cry of joy shouted into the sunrise: ‘He is not here!’ Christian Easter sets out from the empty tomb. What just yesterday seemed unthinkable is at once verifiable fact. Human experience is liberated from the hic et nunc. Christ’s resurrection bestows on human nature a share in eternal life. The first Christian confession was simply: ‘The Lord is risen, risen indeed!’ Soon, though, the wish, indeed the need, arose to look to the past. Who is the Risen One? How is the life he gives related to his teaching? Already on Easter Day the disciples began the work of remembering what had been before, in pursuit of the Big Picture. Out of this process, the testimony of the four Gospels gradually came into being. That wasn’t all. The growing Church, in search of the path it must follow, couldn’t hear enough about Christ. With great care and fresh eyes she re-read Scripture, astonished to discover in it the features of her divine Lord. What she saw, she recorded in writing. A sublime confession such as that of Paul to the Colossians expresses the faith of the first century: [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him (Col 1:15-16). In this way the faithful gazed into eternity. At the same time they scrutinised history, for as Paul also wrote, to the Galatians: ‘When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman’ (Gal 4:4). That woman was, and remains, the guarantor that God’s Son truly took on our nature; that the incarnation is not just a topic for devout meditation but a power at work for humanity’s renewal. Christians came to want to know the woman, too; they started enquiring about, retelling, and dramatising her history. The feast we keep today may only be evidenced as a liturgical celebration from the sixth century. It isn’t for that reason a late feast, for all that concerns the becoming and the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary is implicit in the Church’s faith in the incarnation. In the present day we really need a renewed Marian outlook. Why? First, to be reminded that God does not improvise his agency. The genealogy of Jesus Christ speaks of the secret gestation of redemption in persons largely unaware of the role they played in salvation history. Their unknowing preparation became deliberate in Mary, who on behalf of all Israel made an act of conscious, heroic consent to agency in God’s saving plan. Her Yes, prepared by the faith of generations, must become ours. Secondly, it would really benefit us now, I think, to consider that God, who entered history as male, with a gendered specificity that cannot be abstracted; that this God who became ‘man’ and a man, in whose image and glory we are called to have a share, began his existence in a woman’s womb. The biological process remains a paradigm for ecclesial life. Christ’s birth is both an historical given and a continuous mystery of transformation. It was not merely for aesthetic reasons that Christians of antiquity adorned the apses of their churches, just above the altar, with wondrous mosaics of the Theotokos. The Church, as we read in Lumen Gentium, is Marian in essence, presented to us as a feminine subject. As far as I can see, this is something not much spoken of much these days. It is a pity. For here, too, we find a mystery of gendered specificity that seeks coherent expression. Only by finding, and and voicing, that expression will we as believers and members of the Church, be we women or men, find our true, essential form. In this symbolic, sacramental interaction of the masculine and the feminine, fundamental to Catholic life, we shall find, of this I am pretty convinced, the true response to many painful perplexities present in our time.
Our Lady of the Inkpot in Hildesheim cathedral. Christ, holding a feather pen, writes the history of humanity anew, but for this he needs the ink that Mary provides.
MissionFor almost a century, the Missionaries of the Holy Family have had a special care for the Catholic community in the Prelature of Tromsø. The Fathers who came in 1931 were predominantly German; now it is the Polish province that provides us with priests, men of courage and generosity, who continue to do much to build up the Church both materially and spiritually. Last year Mateusz Rodziejczak produced this cinematographical account of a remarkable mission. The dialogue is in Polish, but the images speak for themselves, and need no subtitles.
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Today we remember St. Ciarán the abbot, one of the twelve Irish disciples who studied under St. Finnian 🙏 When Ciarán left for his studies, his family sent their favourite cow with him as a gift for the monastery he would Read More 7 Likes
World Youth Day 2027 in Seoul, South Korea The Diocese of Cloyne is now accepting expressions of interest for its pilgrimage to World Youth Day 2027 Please email Fr. Eamon Roche at worldyouthday@cloynediocese.ie to express your interest, even if your interest is Read More 5 Likes
Happy Birthday Our Lady ❤️ Mother of God and Our Mother! ‘Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much, You can never love her more than Jesus did’, -St Maximilian Kolbe Pictured an image of Our Blessed Mother in Read More 5 Comments
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Teresa of Calcutta. St. Teresa known as “Mother Teresa” dedicated her life to helping the sick and the poor and founded The Missionaries of Charity Order. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II Read More 12 Likes
Today we remember St. Mac Nissi (or Oengus) When he was born, Oengus was baptised by St. Patrick at a Holy Fountain that sprang from the earth. He studied under St. Patrick and his disciples growing up, and was gifted with Read More 2 Comments
