Second Joyful Mystery: The Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth

After hearing the Angel's news, Our Lady carries Our Lord in her womb "with haste" into the "hill country" to visit Elizabeth, her cousin (Luke 1:39-56). Her selfless act of making such a journey is both a corporal and a spiritual mercy.

As a result, John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth's womb, and Elizabeth spoke words of praise to her cousin that now form part of the Hail Mary, which forms the Rosary, and The Magnificat which we pray at Vespers. In this remarkable encounter, the Lord Jesus was present physically in nascent human form.

I was recently asked to take communion to a gentleman who couldn't get to Mass on account of his illness. The gentleman and his wife were incredibly grateful but it was I who had the greater debt to them for sharing with me their peace – a God-given grace in great adversity. I was very moved by the experience. When we undertake such tasks, in a modest way, we follow Mary's example.

When praying this decade, a good intention is to remember those who are unable to attend Mass, that heavenly banquet on earth.

Lord, help us to make known your presence. Help us to carry you, and be carried by you.

– Br Samuel Burke OP

Solemnity of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul

On the 29^th of June we celebrate the Solemnities of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, two apostles both very familiar to us and yet, to some degree, somewhat shrouded in the mist of history. So who were they, and why do they merit so great a celebration in the liturgical life of the Church?

Simon Peter the fisherman was found by Our Lord going about his daily work and it was from the nets that Jesus called Peter to make him ‘a fisher of men.’ When the twelve apostles were chosen from among Jesus’s disciples Simon Peter was chosen first; he was to be their head. Fulton Sheen observes that at the pivotal moment when Jesus asked his apostles ‘who do men say that I am’ he tried out all possible forms of Church governance. Was the Church to be a democracy? Who did the multitudes think Jesus was? To which there was a multitude of answers:  Elijah, John the Baptist, Jeremiah. Perhaps then the Church would be modelled after an aristocracy: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ But to this question the apostles had no words. Then, speaking up for himself, Peter confessed his faith ‘you are the Christ, the son of the living God.’ The Church of Christ was to be monarchic and its governance left in the custodianship of the fisherman Simon: ‘I say to you that you are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church… I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven’ (Matthew 16: 13-20).

And yet immediately following this great elevation of Peter came a humiliation. When Jesus gave the apostles a sight of the Divine Plan for man’s redemption, predicting his own death in Jerusalem, Peter cried out, ‘be it far from you Lord!’ Peter, first to confess Jesus’s divinity, wanted a Christ without the Cross. To which Our Lord responded ‘Get behind me Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men’ (Matthew 16: 21-23). Again and again Peter was elevated only to fall, he walked upon water only to sink. He declared to Jesus ‘even if I have to die, I will never disown you’ but then went on to deny Christ three times. However, each time St. Peter went wrong, Jesus restored him to the right path; he never abandoned the apostle he named Rock.

St. Paul too had his life, as well as his name, changed by Jesus. Originally a zealous persecutor of Christians called Saul he was overcome by a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus and from then on he became Paul, the most zealous of Christ’s advocates. As with Peter, Paul was taken by Christ and put upon a royal road, the road of Christian discipleship.

However, this road was not a smooth exit out of earth into eternity. Rather, it was the road that Christ himself travelled. Peter and Paul shared intimately Christ’s own mission, calling men back to God. They followed Christ’s path by preaching and working miracles, giving glory to God wherever they went, but their ultimate participation in Christ’s mission was to be the summation of their earthly lives, their martyrdom in Rome.

Peter’s threefold denial of Christ was forgiven by a threefold affirmation of his love. But that first denial, when he said of Christ’s cross ‘be it far from you Lord’ was not to be fully atoned for until the end of his life. Jesus said to Peter ‘when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will gird you and lead you where you do not want to go’ (John 21:18).

Peter’s desire for a Christ without a Cross was a rejection of God’s saving plan of mankind, it was a turning away from that infinite act of love upon the Cross whereby the Father glorified the Son and the Son purchased the Spirit for us. Thus, that Peter’s transgression might be utterly washed away, he was called up by Christ to the throne of martyrdom. 

Both Peter and Paul manifest for us the truth that Christian discipleship passes through Calvary, that the greatest experience of love is to be caught up in the sacrificial act of Christ upon his Cross. An experience we have every time we go to Mass, to the one same sacrifice of Calvary re-presented before our very eyes. A mystery to be sure, but as St. Paul said, ‘we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.’

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Today is also the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, and you can read about it in a post earlier this year by Br Samuel Burke in our Popular Piety series. Happy feast to all!

Altarpiece of the Dominican church of the Holy Rosary, near the Vatican, showing our Risen Lord with two Dominican saints, Pope Pius V and Bishop Antoninus.

Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

"His name is John" - Circumcision of St John the Baptist

Readings: Isaiah 49:1-6; Psalm 138:1-3,13-15; Acts 13:22-26; Luke 1:57-66,80

Every morning of our Dominican lives, we along with all other religious and those who observe the Divine Office, sing of Saint John the Baptist when we pray the following lines from the Benedictus:

As for you, little child
you shall be called a prophet of God,
the Most High.
You shall go ahead of the Lord
to prepare his ways before Him,

To make know to His people their salvation
through forgiveness of all their sins,
the loving-kindness of the heart of our God
who visits us like the dawn on high...
(Luke1:76-78).

It is both striking and fitting that each day as we sing of the mission of John the Baptist that he should remain nameless. It is striking because he was the last and the greatest of the prophets, and the forerunner of the Saviour. It is striking because his father, Zechariah, was a Temple priest and the message of John’s birth is given to him in the liturgy – a more auspicious lineage and annunciation than that of Christ and futhermore his name was decreed by God to Zechariah before his birth. Zechariah, though struck mute on John’s annunciation for his lack of faith, was rewarded for his fidelity to God’s will at John’s circumcision, insisting that he be named John  – and yet each morning we name him not.

Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Norwich

Why, then, is it fitting that we do not name John when we sing of his mission each morning of our lives? It is fitting because it is characteristic of the way John lived his life. John’s greatness consisted in his always pointing to the one who was greater than him. John went into the wilderness and the crowds flocked from far and wide to be baptised by him, and yet still he pointed to the one who was to follow him, the one whose sandals he felt unworthy to bear. John’s whole disposition and mission is summed up in his words: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

John like all the great saints points beyond himself to Jesus Christ. As such he is a model for Christian living. At this time of year Dominican students would do well to remember his example; for another daily feature of Dominican life for the students in formation at this time in every term is exams! John reminds us of the reason we study diligently throughout the term: not for our personal glory in gaining a summa cum laude, or some other honour, but for the sake of being effective preachers of the Gospel. We study not for our own personal satisfaction, but so that we might pass on the fruits of our study to others; neatly summed up in the Dominican motto: Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere.

Corpus Christi

You learn something new every day. Researching for today’s post, I discovered that St Thomas Aquinas composed the Mass propers, such as the sequence Lauda Sion, office hymns like the Pange Lingua and other prayers of devotion for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Though traditionally celebrated as a memorial of Christ's Real Presence under the accidents of bread, the feast is now celebrated as Corpus et Sanguis Christi, uniting the once separate feast for the Precious Blood with that for Christ's body on the altar. The Body and Blood of Christ are inseparable, for Christ is present in body, blood, soul and divinity, equally under both forms of the Sacred Species. Today is a Solemnity, celebrated usually on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday but now often, as in England, transferred to the following Sunday. 

A major focus of Corpus Christi is Catholics going out into the streets carrying the source and focal point of our life, in procession, under a canopy. There is something quite mystical about the body and blood of Christ being present, as we cannot see this using our senses. Natural science would say we are mad, and what we think is empirically not possible. But when we process with the Body and Blood of Christ, we stand united. Akin to solidarity in the UNISON trade union advert that was played along to the track ‘one is the lonliest number’, the narrator tells us “You’ve got 1.3 million members behind you when you need them”. With the processions happening across the world on Corpus Christi, we have got the head of the body of the Church behind us, when we need him. We dare to process with Him through the streets and shopping areas of our cities, towns and villages, as we display our faith in what looks like a piece of bread - but what we know is the enduring presence of our God, who is with us unto the end of the world. It baffles the non-believer, but there we have it, our own advocate to God the Father of heaven and earth marches with us. Instead of trade union membership, we have the Faith. Instead of ballots for strike action, we have the Holy Mass, the sacraments of the Church and the intercession of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Many Christians find themselves in horrific situations, and are often unable to express their faith, their solidarity with the Lord. Let us give thanks that God has given us the liberty to praise him in our streets. We pray for those who are persecuted for the Faith, particularly the Dominicans and other Christians who remain in Iraq, who are unable to process through the streets for fear of violence or intimidation. For what is inside that monstrance in today's processions is a pledge and sign of our unity, a hope of the future when we shall all be one. 

The first Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation

The first Joyful mystery draws our attention to the very first moments of Jesus’s life when Mary gave her consent to the marriage of humanity and divinity in her womb and conceived by the Holy Spirit. 

Traditionally the Church has seen in Mary’s obedience and Jesus’s Incarnation the beginnings of the undoing of the disharmony between God and humanity caused by the sin of Adam and Eve. Irenaeus, for example, suggested that as the first man was carved from the dust of the Earth and had an earthly breathe breathed into him, Jesus – who was both God and Man – would re-mould human nature through his own sacred humanity in order to prepare humanity to receive the Divine breathe of the Holy Spirit: God became man, in order that man might become like God.

Later thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas would see Mary’s consent, ‘let it be done to me according to thy word’, as an acceptance of this recreation in Christ on behalf of the whole of humanity. We see in the first Joyful mystery, then, two examples of an important principle in Catholic theology realized in Jesus’s salvific Incarnation and Mary’s obedience and consent: human nature plays its part in the work of salvation, but at the same time the total power of effecting that salvation comes from God.

The Joyful Mysteries

The birth of a child has the capacity to bring out the best in humanity. On a human level, little is more impressive than the heroic love of a mother for her child, the self-sacrificing service of a father in support of his family and the way in which the wider family and human society rally round in support of the new parents. There’s something deep inside each of us that can’t resist delighting in children, that can’t hold back from celebrating their uniqueness: as soon as they’re born, we want to see a photo. Over the next few years we’ll enjoy endlessly sharing news of their first steps, their first words, their first smile, their first day at school, and so on until they themselves have children (or join a religious order, etc.). Yet despite this joyful excitement that accompanies children and the possibilities that accompany them, there’s also little that is more disruptive. With the birth of a child, life is radically changed, as the family unit has a new focus and centre of energy. As the sleepless nights drag on, and the piles of nappies grow, the celibate life probably looks more and more blessed, but nothing can extinguish the joy that the new child has brought into the world.

By meditating on the Joyful Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary, we reflect—through the eyes of his mother—on this ‘disruptive joy’ that the infant Christ brought into the world. In the life of Christ, of course, the ordinary joys and disruptions of human life are matched by the possibility of supernatural joy and eternal life that Christ brings with him and the cosmic disruption that Christ’s overthrow of the regime of sin effects. These mysteries of our faith are, however, despite their extraordinary and miraculous character, nonetheless patterned by something ordinarily and authentically human (but nonetheless sanctified): conception, familial love, birth, a family celebration, the fear of loss, situations that we too face in different ways and at different times. Meditating on each of these mysteries in the light of our own daily experience of faith, then, the Joyful mysteries invite us to repeat Mary’s ‘yes’ to the incarnation in the concrete settings of our individual lives.

The Rosary: Introduction

Do you ever struggle to find the right words to pray to God? We very often "do not know how to pray as we ought" (Rom 8:26) and then we need to turn to God and say, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Lk 11:1).  In response, Jesus offers us his own words, the Lord's Prayer, to address our Father in heaven with confidence. The Church, too, has given Christians many powerful prayers to give voice to our deepest longings, to praise and thank God, and to ask him to meet our daily needs. We can make these 'formal' prayers our own by using them frequently as we lift our hearts to God. Through the habit of prayer, we become caught up in the divine dialogue of love.

The Rosary is part of the Dominican habit

The Rosary is like that: it is composed of formal prayers but in it we draw closer to Mary, the blessed Mother of God, and through her we are invited into the infinite love of Jesus. The ancient motto, Ad Jesum per Mariam – To Jesus through Mary – encapsulates this movement. We honour Mary and try to imitate her because she was the pre-eminent Christian disciple. Thus we hope to become more Christ-like.

Mary points us to Jesus

So Godzdogz is embarking on a new series on the Rosary, in which we will explore all the 'Mysteries of the Rosary' – those events in the lives of Mary and Jesus which reveal God's great plan of salvation for us. When we pray the Rosary, we use the words of the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, but in our hearts we ponder a particular 'mystery', such as the birth of Jesus, his carrying of the Cross, or his Resurrection. All the mysteries are Christocentric, even where Mary seems to be the subject (such as her Coronation as Queen of Heaven), because Mary is always pointing us towards her Son. With Mary, we contemplate and adore Jesus.

Priory Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St Dominic, Haverstock Hill, London, with 14 Rosary chapels (the last Glorious Mystery is depicted in the stained glass of the East window)

The Rosary is a prayer for all seasons: the mysteries take us through the whole range of human experiences in the light of Christ, from joy to sorrow, death to risen life. Indeed, the Rosary is many things at once: it uses simple prayers but invites profound meditation; it involves mental words and tactile beads (in fact, 'bead' comes from bede, the old English word for 'prayer'); it is very old yet always fresh; Biblical in both explicit and implicit ways; to be said alone or together in the family or religious community; a prayer for the church, the home, or the road.

Filipina nuns pray the Rosary during the EDSA demonstrations that peacefully toppled the Marcos dictatorship

The Rosary is also a specially Dominican prayer. It is 'our sacred heritage' and 'a characteristic mark of the Order', and we wear the Rosary on our habit. The modern Rosary was shaped and popularised by Dominicans, such as Blessed Alain de la Roche, Jakob Sprenger and later Pope St Pius V, but earlier forms were important to St Dominic himself and the first brethren. Indeed, you can often see depictions of Our Lady granting the Rosary to St Dominic.

Our Lady giving the Rosary to St Dominic

This series will feature a reflection on each of the 20 mysteries as well as an introduction to each set of mysteries: Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, and Luminous.

For some information about how to pray the Rosary, see https://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/prayers/rosary/how_to.htm. 

But note that the Dominican style is simpler in its core constituents. It begins:

O God, come to our aid.

O Lord, make haste to help us.

Glory be ... Amen. Alleluia. 

The first mystery is then announced (no Apostles' Creed), followed by the Our Father, 10 Hail Mary's and the Glory Be. The pattern is repeated to complete the set of 5 mysteries. There is an option to say all 15 or 20 mysteries, but this is not necessary! Then the Rosary finishes with the Salve Regina (Hail, Holy Queen).

Traditionally, roses are distributed after Mass on 7 October, the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary

Pentecost 2014 photos

Last week we celebrated Pentecost, which is of course the titular feast of the Priory of the Holy Spirit (Blackfriars), Oxford. In recent years we have begun to celebrate the Pentecost Vigil on the Saturday evening, which offers us a rich scriptural feast and some glorious music, too. 

In his homily at the Vigil, the Deacon, Br Nicholas Crowe OP, drew out these connections between several Old Testament and New Testament narratives – including the way in which Pentecost resolves the linguistic chaos of Babel, not by abolishing the diversity of languages, but by uniting us in the Holy Spirit such that we are restored to a mutual understanding and love.

On Pentecost Sunday, the evening liturgy of Mass & Vespers was followed by the annual Doorkeepers' Dinner. This is our opportunity to show our appreciation to the volunteers who give up a lot of time to keep the door during the day, taking deliveries and answering all kinds of queries! This dinner is just a small way in which we can say 'thank you' for their generous support and friendship.

Requiem Mass for Peter Geach RIP

On 24 May, a Requiem Mass was held at Blackfriars, Oxford for the repose of the soul of Peter Geach, who died on 21st December 2013, aged 97. Together with his wife, Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter was an enormously influential philosopher of the 20th century, but also a great witness to the Catholic Faith. At this Requiem organised by their daughter, Sr Tamsin Geach OP, many members of the Geach family were present, as well as old friends, philosophers, and admirers.

We are pleased that Fr Richard and Sr Tamsin have graciously allowed that the sermon preached on that occasion be shared here on Godzdogz.

Sermon Preached at a Requiem Mass for Prof. Peter Geach

by Richard Conrad, O.P.

on 24^th May, 2014, Blackfriars, Oxford

Readings:  Song of Songs 2:8-14 (the Prophecy at Mass on the day Prof. Geach died, 21^st Dec. 2013)
                  I Peter 3:15-18 (the Epistle for Sunday 25^th May, 2014, 6^thSunday of Easter)
                  John 14:15-21 (the Gospel for Sunday 25^th May, 2014, 6^thSunday of Easter)

For the festschrift marking what he called “their fifty years of philosophical, spiritual and personal married partnership,” Cardinal Cahal Daly wrote: Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe “have given us a model of personal faith and Christian witness, and of sacramentally hallowed and faith-deepened partnership in Christian marriage, which are a source of inspiration to us all.” Their Marriage took place on St. Stephen’s Day, 1941. They had met in the spring of 1938, at a Corpus Christi procession, providentially brought together by an even greater Sacrament. About that meeting granted “by God’s mercy,” Peter wrote, “I have never got over being suddenly struck with amazement from time to time at my good fortune.” All the Sacraments, of course, speak to us of the love affair between the Lord and His Bride the Church, the love affair between the Lord and each elect soul. But Marriage and the Holy Eucharist most specially point us back to an earlier moment in an earlier spring when the Lord who had come from heaven to seek His holy Bride bought her with His own Blood. Committing Himself to His Sacrifice, Jesus gave us the Holy Eucha­rist and thereby the privilege of applying the power of His Sacrifice to the living and the dead.

And so we offer the Holy Eucharist today for Peter, together with our continuing prayers. On 31^st May, 1938, Peter professed his faith in the power of Christ’s Sacrifice at his reception into the Catholic Church. Writing from Warsaw in 1985, he concluded his brief philosophical autobiography with the elegiac couplet:

            Sexaginta annos complevi hucusque novemque
            In Domino sperans, dum vocet ipse: Veni.
                        (which I translate:)
            Sixty and nine years have I thus far run
            Hoping still in the Lord, till He say, “Come!”

Peter had 28 more years to run, until that day last December when the passage from the Song of Songs was read at Mass in which the Lord says to His Bride and to the elect soul, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come.”

Not long before that day, Peter had expressed his persevering hope, and his conviction of our solidarity in Christ’s love, by asking More to “organise for [him] to be a courtier in the Court of the King of Heaven.” We are in fact compelled by gratitude and affection to do our bit to arrange that for him, by offering this Sacri­fice, and our prayers, that Peter’s hope, and our hope for him, may have been fulfilled.

For our offering, and our prayers, are made to the eternalGod about whose almighty Providence Peter wrote in a typically careful and penetrating way. The Liturgy entrusts to God all those personal pilgrimages whose outcome is not yet revealed to us while the Spirit and the Bride still say, “Come!”, and we hope to inherit the New Heavens and New Earth which the Lord Jesus has inaugurated and pledged by His Death and Resurrection. When, as David, Sybil, St. Peter and St. John say, the old cosmos is dissolved, then all that is hidden will be manifest; and we hope and pray, for ourselves and those who are dear to us, that all sins will be revealed as forgiven, so that nothing will be revealed that is not an occasion for joy. Then, we hope and pray, the Lord will say to us, and to Peter and Elizabeth, “Let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet,  and your face is comely.” Reflecting – reflecting to each other – Christ’s risen glory, we shall, in concert with the Angels, sing to God the Father every honour and glory, in, through and with Christ, united in the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Gift of whom was won for us from the Father by Christ by the Sacrifice He offered.

Early Christian funerary monument in Rome: the souls of the dead are symbolised by doves around Christ (X-P)

For the time being, however, Peter’s voice, with which he spoke so elegantly, has fallen silent. So we lend him our own voices, and sing for him the prayer of someone facing the King of tremendous majesty, as Peter did last December, when what will be revealed at the General Doom was revealed to him personally. We call on Jesus the Fount of pietas, the one, that is, in whom God’s devotion to us took flesh, asking that all He did and suffered to purchase the pearl of great price, namely Peter’s soul, may bear its fruit.

We pray, then, that Peter may so have passed from this life as to have heard the Lord say, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come.” We pray that he may so have persevered in faith, hope and Love as to be welcomed by the Angels and Martyrs into the Courts of Heaven. And if any further “dying with Christ” remained to be done after he had endured some years of outwarddecline, we pray that Peter may swiftly and gently have completed his share in Christ’s Cross, so that faith and hope have been replaced by Vision and Possession, and Love has come home.

Faith, hope and perseverance are the work of the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Loyalty, whom Jesus’ Sacrifice won for us. Our love of God, our love of truth, our loyalty to each other and to our voca­tion, the cherishing by husband and wife of each other, are fruits of the Spirit of Truth, the Divine Covenant-Love in Person. The signs are that Peter was indeed possessed by that Spirit of Truth, and so possessed that Spirit while on pil­gri­mage, as we hope and pray he now possesses Him in Heaven. From his earliest years Peter had a native talent for sensing ideas that are incoherent, even wicked; and a love of wisdom, which his father nurtured. For a time he followed his father’s frequent changes of faith, but having discovered MacTaggart, Peter remained ever after grateful for the “standards of rigour, clarity and honesty” that MacTaggart set for him. Peter’s native talents, and his instinct for honesty, were, I suggest, a praeparatio evangelica. So, when he was a student at Balliol, as he later wrote: “My Mactaggartian beliefs were honed to a sharp edge by con­troversy. Increasingly… I found myself arguing with Catholics. I was certainly cleverer than they, but they had the immeasurable advantage that they were right – an advantage that they did not throw away by resorting to the bad philosophy and apologetics then sometimes taught in Catholic schools. One day my defences quite suddenly collapsed: I knew that if I were to remain an honest man I must seek instruction in the Catholic Religion.” 

At the same time, of course, Elizabeth was also seeking instruction; then they met, and, as Cardinal Daly put it, “shared a passion for truth… a profound reverence for God, the mysterium tremendum, and an equally profound reve­rence for truth… and they have seen the search for God and the search for truth as ultimately the same quest.” In this pursuit of truth they showed what Luke Gormally called “the sort of intellec­tual independence which is inimical to syndrome thinking.” So, to other people’s surprise, but not their own, Peter and Elizabeth would sometimes not know what the other was thinking. They could always be fascinated by each other’s ideas. But Peter could truthfully write: “Both of us, I hope, have avoided two vices: frivolous change of mind, and adherence to past sayings in the desire to have been right rather than beright.”

While remaining firm in the Catholic Faith, Peter respected the “[M]any people who are far from the Chris­tian religion… [but] have had a deep devotion to the pursuit of truth.” After all, “[i]t is not surprising that men are found to value truth even apart from being enjoined to do so in revelation; men are made for the truth…” While saddened in one place where he worked by “petty hostility” and some incomprehension, Peter “found relief in the friendship of a group of Christadelphians… a Christian tradition not of fanatical enthusiasm but of quiet persuasion; they often cite the text, ‘Be ready to make a defence to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.’ My dialogue with my friends [Peter wrote] was I hope a matter of ‘speaking the truth in love’ on both sides; honesty about our differences served to bring out some measure of deep agreement.”

Peter had been given a special talent for logic, which is an invaluable tool in the service of truth. 

In the dedication of his book Reason and Argument, Peter quotes Kotarbiński’s poem:

            On every side the weeds of error grow;
            Vengeful logician, at them with the hoe!
            - Na chwasty moja praca później się rozpostrze.
            - A teraz czym się trudnisz? – Sama siebie ostrzę.
                        “Weeding? For that just now you must not ask!”
                        Why not? “Tool-sharpening is my present task.”

Peter’s recovery of his maternal Polish roots gave him a precious insight into how the “idiotisms of idiom” that each language has, do not matter for logic, a point sometimes missed by English – but not, he claimed, by Polish – philosophers.

Our natural talents, and the charismatic gifts bestowed by the Spirit of Truth, take on new lustre, a divine value, if – and only if – they are employed in Charity, in that divine Love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. In that Love, we can “speak the truth in love” by words and by deeds. St. Paul tells us (I Cor. 13: 8-13) that our know­ledge and our prophecy are imperfect – indeed, there comes a time when they, and the exercise of similar talents, must cease, and in Peter’s case, as in many cases, this was some years before death. But for all our present life, faith, hope and Love abide, and we pray that for Peter that God-given, God-directed Love has carried him to see “face to face”, so that his service of the truth is rewarded in “understanding fully, even as he has been [eternally] understood.” 

We pray, that is, for the fulfilment of his own prayer expressed in his book Truth and Hope: “Soaking myself in McTaggart, I imbibed a desire for Heaven and eternal life, which of course I had not to abandon on becoming a Catholic; and meanwhile I was preserved from giving my heart with total devotion to some less worthy end… Even as regards the relation of time and eternity I had no need to find McTaggart wholly mistaken. God’s life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, really is the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons; and we have the great and precious promise that, in a way we cannot now begin to understand, we shall transcend all the delusion and misery and wickedness of this life and become sharers in that eternal life.”

The music at Mass included:   

The Sequence Dies irae, dies illa;
The hymn “Lo! He comes with clouds descending” in the full version by Charles Wesley and Martin Madan;
The antiphons In paradisum and Chorus Angelorum

The literature referred to in the sermon comprises:

GEACH, Peter. “A Philosophical Autobiography.” In Harry A. LEWIS (ed.) Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. Pages 1-26.

GEACH, Peter. Providence and Evil. The Stanton Lectures 1971-2. Cambridge: CUP, 1977.

GEACH, P. T. Reason and Argument. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

GEACH, Peter. Truth and Hope. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

GORMALLY, Luke (ed.) Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. With a foreword by Cardinal Cahal B. Daly. Blackrock: Four Courts Press, 1994.

OULikeit! - 'Oxford's most likeable wind quintet'

Br Matthew Jarvis will be performing on flute with OULikeit! – ‘Oxford’s most likeable wind quintet’ – this Saturday, 14 June, at 2.30pm in Jesus College Chapel. 

This relaxed afternoon concert will feature works by Barthe, Farkas, Ravel and Nielsen. 

Admission is FREE and the music will be followed by a drinks reception. 

Please feel free to share the following poster with your friends!

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We're trying to raise funds to build a new website for all the online apostolates of the Dominican Friars in the UK. This will bring together original homilies, talks and other materials on the Catholic faith in the form of inspiring texts and videos, within an attractively designed new website suitable for viewing on desktops, tablets and smartphones.

Godzdogz – along with Torch, the preaching site of Dominican priests – will still exist as a distinct area within the new site, but with a shared navigation, and our readers and followers will have the option of discovering new material.

Being in a single site will also give us a higher profile on the web, meaning a higher search engine ranking, so more people will be able to come and discover our preaching. And with social media sharing fully integrated into the site, friends of our readers and followers will be able to discover this preaching for the first time.

Just think what this could mean – more people will hear the Word of God, and so more people will be able to hear the call of Jesus Christ. 

Could you be a part of this? In just a few weeks' time, will you be able to look at the new site and say, "I helped to build that!"

Please donate today, and help us bear the costs of this important new phase in our online mission. Thank you!

https://www.justgiving.com/dominicans-online-mission

Pentecost Joy 2014

Readings: Acts 2:1-11.

At first glance, the miracle associated with Pentecost seems quite unnecessary: the ‘devout men living in Jerusalem’ are already dwelling together, naturally sharing the common lingua franca of the empire, before their linguistic divisions are supernaturally overcome by the Holy Spirit. In precisely this superfluity, however, the miracle of Pentecost underlines the utterly gratuitous super-abundance of God’s self-giving grace. No miracle is strictly necessary, least of all the miracle of our salvation. Nonetheless, despite the seemingly redundant miracle that accompanies it, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is far from incidental to our Christian vocation, nor is the form of its visible manifestation at Jerusalem at all arbitrary: in fact, the visible miracle highlights Pentecost’s status as the definitive overcoming of the human pride, or hubris, that was manifested at Babel. 

The primeval history of the Book of Genesis (located in its first eleven chapters) records the spread and growth of sin outwards from the Garden of Eden, and God’s matching it by the addition of grace upon grace through which he overcomes the disorder of human sin. These chapters culminate in the story of the Tower of Babel, the moment at which God introduces linguistic division into human history as a means of frustrating human collaboration in the sinful project of attempting to breach the barrier between heaven and earth by climbing out of human history into the eternity above the earth. At Pentecost, by contrast, humanity is gathered together by the gift of the common ‘language’ of the Holy Spirit, being brought to participate in God’s own project enacted in human history, that of elevating creaturely realities to enjoy the uncreated Trinitarian life of God. 

In overcoming Babel, however, God does not annihilate its linguistic differences: the multiplicity that Babel introduced is left gloriously intact. Rather, the miracle of Pentecost is one both of speaking and of hearing, with each person speaking their own language and yet being heard in the distinctive first language of the individual hearer. Rather than inscribing into Christianity the common human experience of difference as a division—a barrier that prevents communion—Pentecost establishes difference as true diversity, an opportunity for shared joy, a manifestation of God’s creative delight and an expression of Trinitarian unity amidst difference. This establishment of true Pentecostal diversity reflects God’s subversion of the human ‘tyranny of normality’ that—in its fear of that which is alien or other to ourselves—demands conformity and the repudiation of all cultural difference, and which—as the history of the last century demonstrates—has so often sacrificed human dignity on the altar of warfare, violence and oppression. This peaceful diversity, established by the Pentecost Spirit, finally overcomes the tethering of salvation to one particular cultural-linguistic group, offering the peace that world cannot give to all peoples and nations, “Jews and proselytes alike” (v. 11). 

Indeed, it is Pentecost that establishes on God’s terms what was groped after (but which could hardly be imagined) in the foolish human terms of Babel, kneading the leaven of Christ’s paschal victory into the life of each individual believer. By the incarnation, God brings the divine life ‘down’ to earth; by the ongoing mission of the Holy Spirit, God brings humanity to walk the ‘upward’ path cut by Christ’s resurrection and ascension into glory. But our ‘upward’ journey depends entirely upon Christ’s ‘downward’ journey to dwell with us, and his ‘upward’ victory ahead of us. Indeed, without Pentecost and its promise, the Lord’s Ascension would have been accompanied by a certain sadness, with the disappearance of the Messiah behind the cloud marking the absence of Jesus from the world that he has redeemed. The coming of the Spirit, however, disrupts our conventional disjunction between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’: Christ’s Ascensions is a bodily ‘withdrawal’ from the world precisely—and only—so that he can be present to the world in a new and more intimate fashion, by the indwelling of the Spirit within us and the establishment of the Church as the institutional perpetuation of this presence, which will endure until the end of time. 

Our individual lives as those incorporated into the Church—the Spirit’s visibility—by our Baptism, and sealed with the same Spirit by our Confirmation should be deeply and authentically Pentecostal: “telling out in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (v. 11). There will, of course, be those who mock, those who accuse us of excessive optimism and joy, and perhaps even those who suggest we’ve also imbibed too much of the ‘new wine’ (the devil’s buttermilk, as Dr. Paisley insists on calling it). Yet the Christian joy that we celebrate today is not the cheapened joy of the drunkard, but the costly joy purchased by the death and resurrection of Christ who goes ahead of us. This is a joy born of a perfect love, the unique joy of being intoxicated—here and now—by sharing in God’s own eternal life, a joy freely and inexhaustible shared in the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit, which sends us out as missionaries with this Good News. This, even more than the rushing of mighty winds and the descent of visible tongues of fire, should do today as it did for those who first received the Spirit in Jerusalem: fill us with amazement and perplexity, and leave us with the question “What does this mean?”

Catholic Social Teaching: International Issues

On international issues, Catholic Social Teaching is fundamentally concerned with solidarity for the common good. It acknowledges the interdependence between countries and presses for greater co-operation to establish fairer economic and political structures and to defend basic human rights. In these respects, the Church shows herself to be a 'moral Great Power', not just through her teaching, her diplomacy and the visible role of the Papacy (important though these are), but also in the reality on the ground, with her humanitarian outreach in hospitals, schools, missionary outposts, and even perhaps your local parish.

The Church laments several serious problems at the international level, including unfair trade systems, the greed in the global financial system, the lack of exchange of technologies, and uneven application of international justice. Of course, the relevant international institutions and structures are not necessarily themselves to blame; often they need to be bolstered and extended; other times they require serious reform. The Church wants to see an increase in "democratic and participatory" forms of government and the "free flow of information" on which such forms are based (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), §46).

More urgently, there are crippling material needs that need to be met. There is a fundamental Christian duty to meet the basic needs of our neighbour, especially to feed the hungry (Mt 25:35, 37, 42). Thus, Benedict XVI has spoken boldly of "the right to food, the right to water", based on "the fundamental right to life". He goes on to argue it is not so much the lack of material things as a "shortage of social resources" that cripples the poorest in the world. Basic human needs are not being met because we lack "a network of economic institutions" to guarantee an equitable provision of resources. There needs to be structural (hence sustainable) development - in agriculture, transport, technology, and markets systems (Caritas in Veritate (2009), §27).

Global stability will not be achieved without rich countries taking concrete steps to assist the long-term development of poorer countries, with due accountability and transparency at the receiving end. Nevertheless, international issues cannot be boiled down to economics. Economic development divorced from the moral and religious recognition of fundamental human rights will only "enslave" us, as St John Paul II warned (Sollicitudo, §46).

This means, among other things, that the religious dimension of humanity should be respected by the state. The presence of religion in public life creates an important dimension of transcendence, including the appeal to universal moral principles and to a search for ultimate truth. More basically, the state must promote religious freedom and recognise it in law as a civil right. This is not just a freedom of worship, but a freedom of conscience; it is not just religious tolerance, but true freedom; in other words, it is not just a matter of prudential law, but a principled recognition of human dignity. Indeed, the inalienable dignity of the human person is the golden thread running through all Catholic Social Teaching.

Thus, in the seminal Declaration on Religious Freedom at Vatican II (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965), the Church teaches that "the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed Word of God and by reason itself." Certainly, we have a moral obligation to seek and promote the truth; and as Christians, the Great Commission (Mt 28:19-20) impels us to evangelise the world, to bring all people to the true religion which subsists in the Catholic Church. But truth has a force all of its own, and cannot be imposed by external coercion. Truth flourishes, not in a climate of apathetic relativism, but in an atmosphere of authentic freedom, as Milton recognised: "Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

In fact, this commitment to religious freedom is an ancient tradition in the Church. Indeed, it is what sustained the early Christian martyrs, who died as witnesses to a truth that the state tried to repress. They died for freedom; and they died in freedom, in "the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom. 8:21). In the 21st century, however, let us not forget that there are more Christian martyrs today than at any other time in history, as well as many non-Christians suffering persecution. Our very own human dignity is at stake while these atrocities continue. So we urgently need to pray and work for peace in our times.