Remembering fr Cornelius Ernst OP

Ernst was ordained in Oxford in 1956

Fr Cornelius Ernst’s early death in 1977, aged just fifty-three, cut short a theological career of great promise and significant accomplishment. As the English Dominican Province’s obituarist observes, “[Ernst] was a theologian of rare capacity who never managed to write the books that were in him”. It was not only his early death that limited his theological output, however: the heavy burdens of teaching, together with the administrative responsibilities that he obediently assumed, coupled with the scruples of a perfectionist’s attention to detail, contributed to a sadly meagre literary legacy that has, nonetheless, profoundly influenced the intellectual culture of English Dominican theology.

William Henry Ernst (known as Henry to his family and friends) was born on 16th October 1924 in British Ceylon to parents of Dutch extraction. There were, from an early age, signs of a Dominican vocation. Mrs. Ernst recalled the state of young Henry’s bedroom: “there were books everywhere, and not a single chair to sit on”. On the 8th May 1946, whilst a student at Cambridge, Ernst noted that “it became quite simply and luminously clear” that he ought to become a Catholic (and a Dominican for that matter). Reading Cardinal Newman’s works, loaned by a Jewish friend, had convinced him both that “Christian doctrine needed definition and authority” and that “Christians too were capable of intellectual exploration”. Three years later, Ernst joined the Order at Woodchester, taking the name Cornelius in religion.

Hawkesyard Priory Church

Ernst’s intellectual formation as a Dominican provided a thorough grounding in the Thomistic tradition, which balanced the eclecticism of his undergraduate studies. In 1956, shortly after ordination, he completed the Lectorate, submitting a thesis on St Thomas’s theology of grace and its sources in the Church Fathers. Assigned to Hawkesyard to teach in the Province’s house of philosophy, he served as Master of Clerical Student Brothers from 1958 until his eventual appointment as Lector Primarius (with responsibility for looking after studies there) in 1962. He moved to Oxford as Regent in 1966 and retired as chaplain to the nuns in the Isle of Wight in 1975. Writing in the house chronicle for the morning of 10th November 1959, a student brother noted that Ernst’s morning conference outlined that “students should consider themselves forbidden to smoke the morning cigarette whilst travelling in the habit”, before moving on to “speak at length of the need for recovering a sense of the distinctive tradition of the English Province”, touching on the historical constitution of humanity before rounding the morning’s session off with “a learned discourse about certain aspects of meaning”. Gladly today's Student Master tends to limit himself to treating one major philosophical problem per conference!

Indeed, it was the quest for ‘meaning’ that led Fr Cornelius to join the order and which governed his entire life as a Dominican. His theological writings repeatedly turned to humanity’s quest for meaning, seeing God as the “meaning of meaning” for which we all long. Perhaps his most influential book, aside from a collection of posthumously collected essays published as Multiple Echo, is a small book outlining the theology of grace, in which he suggests that grace can be understood in terms of the new possibilities for meaning that God works in creation.

The Former Carisbrooke Priory as it is today

Cornelius is remembered as a shy brother possessed of an outstanding intellect, theologically creative but yet attached to the traditional contours of the classical Dominican life, funny and yet serious. These paradoxes touched on what he saw as the heart of his faith: a commitment to bringing Christian doctrine into practical contact with the ‘tradition of the human heart’ as expressed in art, novels and our natural desires for beauty, goodness and truth. He wrote, in his private diary, “I cannot allow that God can only be adored in spirit and in truth by the individual introverted upon himself and detached from all that might disturb and solicit his heart. It must be possible to find and adore God in the complexity of human experience.” May he rest in peace.

Remembering fr Clifford Bertrand Pike OP

During the month of November we remember and pray for the dead. This year, as in previous years we shall be running a series of posts in which we recall the departed brethren of the Order.

Reviewing some of the obituaries of our brothers from the 1950s, it is striking, during this centenary anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, how life in the Order during this time was profoundly affected by war, with many friars serving with great distinction as military chaplains.

The life of Fr Clifford BertrandPike OP was no exception to this. Born in Bristol on 26 September 1884, one of five brothers, all of whom were educated by the Benedictines at Ampleforth, he was admitted to the Dominican Order at Woodchester in 1905 and made his profession on 27 March 1906. His younger brother Fr Anthony Alfred Pike OP would follow him into the Order two years later. He studied philosophy and theology at Hawkesyard, was ordained priest there on 28 October 1911, and at the conclusion of his studies was appointed to teach in the apostolic school in September 1913.

The following year he was assigned to London where he worked in the parish until 1916, when he became a military chaplain and served in France. He was taken prisoner, but was soon released, and once more took up his duties as chaplain until the end of the war.

Consolation amidst devastation, Mass in the battlefield

Thus in December 1918 he returned to the London priory, and in 1920 he was chosen as Subprior. His next appointment was as Headmaster at Laxton in 1928, but the Provincial Chapter of 1932 made him Vicar Provincial in South Africa. He held this office for three years until 1935 when he was once more assigned to London to work in the Parish.

Salve Regina Procession at the end of Vespers in the London Priory Church 2014

In 1940 he became Parish Priest at Woodchester and Subprior in 1941, but returned to London once more in 1944, where he was to spend the remainder of his life continuously and devotedly occupied with parish work. He died peacefully on 19 May 1954 at the age of 70 with 48 years of profession and 42 of priesthood.

The esteem in which he was held by those who he had laboured so diligently and lovingly for so many years was evidenced by the fact that the vast London church was unable to accommodate all those who came to his funeral. He was buried at the priory cemetery at Woodchester.

Sermon for the Funeral of Fr Bede Bailey OP

Sermon for the Funeral of Fr Bede Bailey OP, 19th August 2014 

by Fr Richard Conrad OP

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9 and John 6:51-58

With the death of Fr Bede Bailey at the age of 97, we have lost an important link to a key part of our English Dominican history, for Bede was the last surviving Dominican to know, personally, Fr Bede Jarrett, who, as Provincial, brought us back to Oxford and Edinburgh. I presume David Bailey, as he then was, met Fr Bede Jarrett through growing up near Hawkesyard. His mother became a Catholic early on; his father, courageously, did so some years after her, and was instructed by Thomas Gilby. David Bailey was schooled at Ampleforth, but he decided to join the Order of Preachers. That was at the time Fr Bede Jarrett was ill, too ill in fact for David to visit him in hospital. Bede Jarrett died in 1934; David entered the novitiate a year later, and was delighted to “inherit” the earlier Fr Bede’s religious name. This went well with his veneration for what might be called “continuity of line”.

Priory Church of St Dominic, Newcastle, where Fr Bede was Prior in the 1950s

Bede studied at Hawkesyard and Oxford; he was pleased that his “ordination line” took him back to Archbishop Ullathorne and, through him, to the Vicars Apostolic – a precious part of English Catholic history.

Bede’s ordination was followed by a dizzying series of moves, eight in sixteen years. In each place he was assigned, he held several jobs at once. Often he was cantor, owing to his musical voice and, I guess, the feel for the chant he had picked up at Ampleforth. For some of the time he was in Edinburgh where, decades later, he taught the novices to sing, and used to encourage them to “soften their endings” – not always with success.

The job of guest-master was also often undertaken by Bede, going well with his sense of hospitality – and with his skill at being “conversible”. When I was in Edinburgh with him, I noticed that if he was away we didn’t always know what to talk about at supper, whereas when he was present there were no embarrassing silences.

Bede also had a pastoral streak: he was often assigned roles such as curate or air-force chaplain – and (in those early years and later) he was sometimes chaplain to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. He had a real concern for the poor: when he was Prior in Newcastle he was proud that the men’s club in the parish had good, and cheap, beer; and he was assiduous in visiting the poor.

During a short time in Oxford around 1948, Bede worked with Conrad Pepler for Blackfriars Publications, and, because of Conrad’s Ditchling connections, I’m sure this helped develop Bede’s interest in Eric Gill and David Jones. But his interest in the work of these craftsmen would also have struck a family chord, for Bede’s father had been managing director of Royal Doulton.

At that same period, Leonard Boyle was a student in Oxford, and remembered later how easy it was to tease Bede, who was rather solemn, and very English.

When I was Prior in Cambridge in the early 90s, Bede visited and complained, “When I was young I had to kow-tow to the old, and now I am old I have to kow-tow to the young.” But he glossed over the middle period of his life, when he made something of a career of being Prior himself in various places! – though I am not sure to what extent people did kow-tow to him, given that he always seemed to have to take on himself several jobs he should have been able to delegate.

This phase of Bede’s ministry began in 1956, when he became Prior of Newcastle; he held that post for six years. After two years as parish priest in Woodchester, he was Prior in Oxford for three years. Then after three years as university chaplain in Leicester he was Prior there for three years. He spent two years as chaplain to the Dominican nuns in Carisbrooke, then returned to Newcastle as curate and after two years was elected Prior there again.

It was in 1965, when he was Prior of Oxford, that Bede became Archivist of the Province. He was given two shoe-boxes of materials, and set himself to build up the archives. He was not trained as an archivist – he used to boast that he only had two letters after his name, O.P., and none of these pretentious doctorates – but several publications emerged from his time as Archivist, notably the entry on Gerald Vann in the great Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, and of course the letters and other papers of Bede Jarrett that he selected for publication in “Dominican Sources in English”. Bede had a profound interest in our heritage, and a passion for its preservation. His time as Archivist began traumatically: we had closed our novitiate house at Woodchester, and a certain brother sold off a great deal of the library, including some rare books that were very valuable for our history. Bede tried, without much success, to recover some of them, and years later was still trying to make good some of the gaps. He went to Rome once or twice around 1990 to obtain replacements for some items, and was received kindly, but was much distressed at the state of the library in our mother-house at Santa Sabina: “The library,” he wrote, “is in a most disgraceful state, and is used more by the [book]worms than by the brethren.”

After his final three years as Prior in Newcastle, Bede returned to Carisbrooke. I visited the nuns there a couple of times, and put up some extra shelves for the archives. There were two friars living there: Bede – and the brother who had dispersed the Woodchester library! I was amazed at how kind and solicitous Bede was to the older brother, despite what had happened. He could be critical, he could recognise mistakes and injustices; with a deft turn of phrase he could sum up people’s foibles (he sometimes referred to the Provincial Council as “that quango”) – but he was also aware of the need to forgive, and to put the past into the past. When he was around 75, he wrote about the importance of “denying oneself the right of disappointment even for five minutes or so,” and about how brooding can destroy one’s obedience to the brethren – and can even destroy oneself in some degree.

When Carisbrooke closed, Bede and the archives moved to Edinburgh. He filled a huge basement with material relevant to our history, to the context of our history, and illustrative of our influence.

Bede’s interest in our past went with an interest in people – a wide-ranging, and largely non-judgmental interest, an attitude which also made him a very kind confessor. All sorts of people came to visit Bede and the archives.

Of course Bede was upset by things like betrayal of confidence, and by the Order’s failures to appreciate and cherish its past and the people who were important to it, notably David Jones. He was (rightly) angered by stupidities and injustices in the Church. It was notable that along with his interest in the past, he was in many ways forward-looking. He was struck by the work of Conrad Pepler at Spode House, and how this prepared English Catholics for Vatican II. Bede was aware that many old rigidities and fussy rules would have to go – I guess he saw them as unnecessary, un-Dominican, un-English. His three years as Prior of Oxford, 1964-67, were rather traumatic, and I am not sure he ever referred back to them.

Bede was also interested in ecumenism, and when he was in Oxford set up some joint lectures with Pusey House. Later he invited Michael Ramsey to lecture in Newcastle. Bede was himself a visiting lecturer for a term at Lincoln Theological College.

In 1996, at the Diamond Jubilee celebration that Bede shared with Columba Ryan and Bernard Jarvis, Malcolm, then Provincial, spoke of the determination that had kept them faithful for 60 years, a determination born of love of the brethren, love of the project set for us by St. Dominic, and above all love of the Divine Word whom we have to preach. That determination kept Bede faithful during tough periods. But a few years earlier he had written, “I am quite convinced that I have been given more happiness by the Order ... than most people in life experience, and I am happy and hope to help in other people being happy… our province is blessed more than most in that. On the whole we don’t seem to bicker.” Then he added, “One has to prepare for old age just as one has to prepare all the time for dying, and dying happy.” That fits with a story Bede sometimes told of a renowned monk and teacher at Ampleforth, who was asked what he was concerned to impart to the young, and replied, “I prepare them for death.”

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Bede reported that his doctor had said he might live another ten years – “A prospect that does not fill me with enthusiasm.” But he was given all of 97 years. I feel that the last eight or so of them were years of waiting, in the spirit of our first Reading: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.” So we pray that Bede will “be glad and rejoice in [God’s] salvation.”

A great deal of Bede’s ministry was of course sacramental, and he had a profound sense of the power of the Sacraments. He once remarked to me that if we had to choose between keeping Mass going without preaching, or keeping preaching going without Mass, the Mass would do more to build up the Church. It is that Eucharistic Sacrifice that we now offer for the repose of his soul, that Eucharist which, as we heard in the Gospel reading, is the pledge and cause of the final resurrection. Here, the Word who became flesh still lives among us, to impart grace and love. This grace and love must “take flesh” in the fabric of our lives and relationships, in our historical “locatedness”. Bede could see how grace and love “took flesh” in the lives of real people, not bypassing their characters and their connections, their strengths and their foibles. He could see how grace and love had to “take flesh” in the life of the Province, the Order and the Church – and often had to empower the forgiveness of mistakes, betrayal, injustice, enabling us to build for the future rather than brood on past hurts. We saw grace and love “take flesh” in Bede’s own life and ministry, not bypassing his own talents and foibles. So we pray that God “who began the good work in” him, may “bring it to completion in the Day of [our Lord] Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).

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.

Fr. Giles Hibbert O.P: Requiescat in pace

Following the the death of our Brother, Giles Hibbert O.P. some members of the Studentate attended his funeral on 15th January at Blackfriars, Cambridge, where Fr. Giles had lived for the past year.  Fr. Giles's friend and brother, Fr. Fabian Radcliffe O.P, gave the homily, which we reproduce here in full.

Homily for the Requiem Mass of Fr. Giles Hibbert O.P.

Had Giles lived another 12 days he would have reached the age of 85. That’s quite an achievement for someone who in the last two decades of his life suffered severe arthritic and neuralgic pain, and kept going largely on morphine. He was certainly tough. Still, we have not come here simply to congratulate him on living beyond the four-score years that the Psalmist allotted to the strongest of us. No. We have come here primarily to commend Giles to the mercy and love of God and to pray that he will enter into the fullness of Christ’s risen life for which he longed. 

So if that is the purpose of a requiem mass, then the homily should not just be a eulogy about the dead person. At the same time how can one preach a funeral homily without saying something about the one who has died? And if you are to speak about him, you will certainly want to speak well of him, which is precisely what a eulogy is.

Incidentally, that word ‘precisely’ was one of Giles’s favourites. But, as he ruefully remarked, Edmund Hill in his review of Giles’ book, gently pointed out that his use of the word was usually in inverse proportion to the clarity of his thinking.

Giles came from what we can call an ‘establishment’ background. His father had been a General in the army and his grandfather an Admiral in the navy. He followed his father into the army, and saw service in North Africa and also in Korea, where, like Julius Caesar, he threw bridges across rivers. After a few years, the army sent him to Cambridge to do a degree in engineering. It looked as though he was set for lifetime in the Army. But that was not to be.

What was it that transformed Captain Robert Hibbert of the Royal Engineers into Brother Giles Hibbert of the Order of Preachers? It’s not easy to say, because he never really talked about it. I sometimes left openings in conversation so that he could reveal more, had he wished; but he never did. But from what little he did say, we know that at Cambridge he had a ‘Damascus Road’ experience: Christ came to meet him, and overwhelmed him, and he was convinced that his only possible response was to become a Catholic and a Dominican. 

We tend to compare experiences like this with St Paul’s conversion. I think Giles had some reservations about St Paul, but he loved St John; and perhaps John’s story of the call of Nathanael is closer to Giles. Nathanael had scoffed at the suggestion that the Messiah might come from the wretched little town of Nazareth. But then Philip took Nathanael to meet Jesus; and Jesus said: ‘Here is a true Israelite in whom there is no guile’. Nathanael was astonished. ‘How do you know me?’ he said. Jesus replied: ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you’. Just what that means we can never know. But it overwhelmed Nathanael. ‘Rabbi’, he replied. ‘You are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel’. Cambridge, it seems to me, was Giles’ fig tree, where Christ saw him, and knew him, and called him. And like Nathanael he replied: ‘You are the Son of God’.

This experience seems to have come to him out of the blue. But his response must have been a wholehearted ‘yes’, because he never seriously wavered, either as a Catholic or as a Dominican. That’s not to say, of course, that he didn’t have difficult moments, periods when he was exasperated with the Church and with the Order. But then, surely, we all experience that. He always knew that for him any alternative way was simply not possible.  

His life in the Order was characteristically unconventional. He studied in Louvain, taught in the studium, was Regent of Studies for a short time, and worked on a long drawn-out doctorate, with a typically vast theme: the doctrine of man in St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and St John of the Cross. At one point he received a letter from his supervisor which began: ‘Dear Mr Hibbert, I do not seem to have heard anything from you for over a year’. He cherished this letter with a mixture of pride and shame. 

Round about this time he became involved with the peace movement, and made links with peace groups in East Germany and with the communist party in Britain. All this was inspired by his sense of justice. But politics was not his strength. He was essentially a highly intelligent engineer, witness his complex model railway set-up in the cellars of Blackfriars, Oxford, and his intricate electric bell system in the Priory entrance hall there. Years later, when Giles had moved away from Oxford, the electrician who dismantled the system marvelled at its sophistication, and could not imagine how anyone could have devised it. 

In the late sixties he and I embarked on a series of epic holidays: canoeing down the River Severn, exploring the north-west of Scotland, five times to the west of Ireland, and then to Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. In the early eighties he moved into university chaplaincy at Sheffield and briefly at York, and became a strong supporter of Student Cross. Later he moved to our house in south Manchester, where he began Blackfriars Publications, printing and publishing small theological pamphlets, which he saw as his contribution to our preaching apostolate. He became the national chaplain to the Newman Association, and chaplain to its Manchester and North Cheshire Circle.

After the closure of the Manchester house he moved to Chapel-en-le-Frith; and there he stayed, still publishing, until it became too difficult for him to live on his own, and he moved to the London Priory, and later here to Cambridge.

So he came back to be with his brethren in a priory. And he settled in remarkably well. He was not always easy to live with. He could be fractious, aggressive and contemptuous. But this did not come from malice or perversity, I think, but from a temperamental impatience with what he took to be hypocrisy or pomposity or limp piety or self-deception in others. Sometimes he realised his judgement of someone was quite wrong, and then he was disarmingly and sincerely repentant. Those who looked after him when he needed it in his later years discovered that though he could be exasperatingly difficult, he was at the same time humbly grateful for their care. The novices, I am sure, will remember this. Some years ago at Chapel-en-le-Frith, after he had been ill in a local nursing home, he went back, with presents, to say thank you to the staff who had cared for him. 

That illness sparked another change: a deeper reflection on death and purgatory. He had earlier been puzzled, perhaps sceptical, about purgatory. Some years before, when Bob Ombres wrote a booklet on purgatory for Blackfriars Publications, Giles wanted to entitle it: ‘Purgatory? You must be joking!’ But now, faced with the prospect of dying, he clarified his thoughts in a short paper which he called ‘Embracing the Future’. We are to die with Christ, he says, so that we can live with Him. And he suggests that at death, “in a flash of timelessness”, we are confronted with all those whom we have hurt, confronted with all the times and ways that we have put ourselves first, either in aggression or through laziness. And we are healed by the loving presence of the Christ who stands by us as friend, teacher and healer. 

So purgatory is not passive – being healed or cleansed – but rather a process of responding positively to those whom we have hurt, having to meet the challenge of being healed through them in Christ. So one is able to say: “I look forward to dying, however painful the experience of purgatory is going to be”. It is better, he says, to speak of ‘dying’ rather than ‘death’; the one is positive, the other somewhat negative. “Dying authentically”, he says, “is rather like building a bridge – constructive and creative, a leap forward towards something new – the other side”. So the elderly, ailing friar joins hands with the young army engineer. 

I cannot but think that this is the spirit in which Giles embraced his own death, in which he sought forgiveness, in Christ, of all those whom he had harmed and wounded. “I hope”, he wrote (in words that might have been written for today) “that I don’t ‘meet’ any of you ‘there’; for it would mean that I had at some time hurt you, or failed in caring for you. I hope, however, that we shall all ‘meet up’ purified in the glory of the light of the Resurrection – in other words, in Heaven”. And then, characteristically, he adds: “whatever the meaning of ‘meeting up’ might be”.

Fr. Giles Hibbert O.P.

Giles Hibbert OP RIP

It is with sadness that we inform Godzdogz readers that Fr Giles Hibbert OP died peacefully in Cambridge on 28 December. Fr Giles was for many years chaplain at Sheffield University and, more recently, manager of Blackfriars Publications.

Requiescat in pace.

Remembering… Kenelm Foster OP

Described as “every inch a Dominican”, Fr Francis Stephen Kenelm Foster OP was a noted scholar, outstanding preacher and beloved as both brother and pastor.  He was born on 26th December, 1910 in colonial India, where his father, a Catholic convert, served as a High Court judge.  It was in Florence, however, that the young Kenelm was brought up by his maternal grandmother.

Fr Bede Jarrett OP

Moving again, he attended prep school in Brighton, before going to Downside.  Downside played host to a seminal event in his life when he heard Fr. Bede Jarrett OP preach a retreat. After Downside, Kenelm went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, on a scholarship, and it was during these undergraduate years that he was introduced to the study of Dante by Professor Edward Bullough, benefactor of the Cambridge Priory and Father of Fr Sebastian Bullough OP.  At the end of his studies, Kenelm gained a First and was offered a Fellowship, which he declined: he was intent on joining the Order of Preachers.

Dante Alighieri

Kenelm’s early Dominican life took the usual path: he entered the Novitiate at Woodchester in 1934 at the age of 24; he made his profession on 28th September 1935; and, he was ordained priest on 14th July 1940.  After serving as Curate at Holy Cross, Leicester, he was elected to a lectureship in the Department of Italian Studies at Cambridge University, later being appointed to Reader in Italian.  Amongst his many interests, two stand out: the lives and works of St Thomas Aquinas and Alighieri Dante, publishing important works about both including The Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas, God’s Tree, and The Two Dantes. Before he retired in 1979, amongst the many accolades he received, Fr Kenelm was appointed Master in Sacred Theology by the Master of the Order, one of the greatest honours for any Dominican.

He died on 6th February 1986, aged 75, after 50 years profession as a Dominican. His beloved Thomas summed up the Dominican mission as contemplata aliis tradere: to give to others the fruit of contemplation. In his scholarship, preaching and ministry, Fr. Kenelm was faithful to his mentor’s words. Requiescat in pace.

Remembering...Aylwin Tyndal-Atkinson OP

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Fr Aelwin Tindal-Atkinson was born in Zurich in 1896, and was brought up in England. After leaving Lancing College, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and at the end of the First World War, he studied at Oxford where he became a Catholic. He went as a seminarian to Fribourg, but decided to offer himself to the English Dominicans.

He received the habit in 1923, made his profession on 10th November 1924 and was ordained priest on 2nd June 1928. By the following year, Fr Aelwin was to be one of the original members of the new Blackfriars community in Oxford. Although it was originally intended that he continue studies, he went in 1929 to teach in the Dominican boarding school at Laxton Hall, Northamptonshire. For ten years he was in charge of the liturgical life of the school and for the last five of those also in charge of the boys' religious development.

Academically, his concern was to resurrect European and Christian culture from its 'museum status', and to educate in mind and emotion a generation of integrated human beings as the "living stones" for a new Jerusalem.

He became a military chaplain at the outbreak of the Second World War and for most of it was the senior chaplain in Scotland where he won much respect. In 1945 he was elected prior of Oxford and three months later, provincial of the English Province. The following year, at the invitation of the Master General, he became a member of his council with the title 'Provincial of Scotland' and so he presided as vicar general of the province at the elective chapter before proceeding to Rome. As well as being a member of the council there he was also for a term Prior of Santa Sabina. In 1957 he left Santa Sabina and became a penitentiary at St Mary Major's where he stayed until his retirement in 1974.

Shortly after his return to England he died very suddenly in an accident in London, on 4th December 1974, aged 78 with 50 years of profession and 46 of priesthood.

Remembering . . . Fr Cyprian Rice OP

Fr Cyprian Price OP was born on 14 December 1889, the son of a Woodchester Baptist Minister. After his schooling, he joined the Levant consular service and was sent as a student interpreter to study Arabic, Persian and Turkish at Cambridge, where he converted to Catholicism. Despite his intentions to join the Dominicans whilst at Cambridge, he was prevented from doing so by the outbreak of the First World War, during which, he was posted to the consular service in Crete and the Middle East. By 1919, however, he was clothed at Woodchester in 1919 and made his first profession on 20 September 1920. Ordained on 19 July 1925, he was an obvious choice, when the Master General wished to send a friar to assist in Mosul, Iraq. Subsequently, in 1929 he joined the staff of the apostolic delegate to Persia in Tehran for three years and was regent of the delegation after the delegate’s retirement.

Entrance gate to Shiraz at the turn of the 20th century

In 1932, he returned to England and was posted to Newcastle for a year, before returning to Persia for the opening of the English Province’s house in Persia in 1933, in Shiraz, Southern Iran (the life of a Friar is not often without stark contrasts). Along with Fr. Dominic Blencowe OP, he rented a house in Shahpur Avenue in the centre of the city. Within a few months they began celebrating Mass in Farsi and published a small book of prayers, also in Farsi. Though the mission lasted only a short, due to its enforced closure by the government, their work was an inspiration for the future, and the Dominicans continue to have a presence in Iran.

The next twelve years were spent dedicated to Parish work in Newcastle, followed by three years in London, and then onto Stroud where he was superior, only to return to Newcastle once more.

1930s Newcastle

In 1947, the Master General assigned him to Cairo to teach Persian at the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies. Three years later he was sent to the Angelicum, the Dominican University in Rome, where he became Subprior. In 1951, posted once more to England, he taught Greek to the postulants at Hawkesyard, followed by assignations to first Pendleton, then Leicester.

In 1956, he was to be sent overseas once more, this time to become a penitentiary (a full-time confessor) at St Mary Major’s in Rome (where Dominicans continue to hear confessions to this day). During this time he also completed his major work, The Persian Sufis, published in 1964.

St Mary Major, Rome

Early in the summer of 1966, he became ill and returned to England for the final time. He died on 26 August, aged 76 with 45 years of profession and 41 of priesthood. He was buried in the priory cemetery at Woodchester. His was a life that answered the call wherever it took him.

Eternal Rest Grant Unto Him, O Lord

And Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Him

May He Rest In Peace

An article by Fr Cyprian on the Persian Sufis is available here: http://www.khamush.com/sufism/persian_sufism.htm

A history of the Dominicans in Iran is available here: http://www.irandoms.org/frameeng.htm

Remembering... fr Giles Black

William Barrington Giles Mary Black OP was born in Scotland on the first day of the year 1887. Queen Victoria was still on the throne, the first Sherlock Holmes story was soon to be published and Leo XIII was entering the ninth year of his pontificate.

Educated in Edinburgh, before studying for his degree at Oxford University, Black was raised in the Scottish Episcopalian Church and after graduating he served as an Episcopalian clergyman in Aviemore, an attractive town in the midst of the Scottish Highlands. Along with some members of his parish Revd. Black was received into the Church before the Great War, undergoing a conditional baptism and receiving the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Communion in his mid-twenties.

During the war he saw active service and fought alongside French forces on the Western Front, being decorated with the Croix de Guerre for his bravery in combat.

In 1919 he entered the Dominican Novitiate at Woodchester and was professed the following year on the 13^th of June 1920. He was ordained priest on the 19^th July 1925 and he worked initially in Newcastle, serving there eight years, before being assigned to the restored house at Edinburgh where he became a popular chaplain to the students of the university and a widely sought after speaker throughout Scotland.

After around twenty years of priestly service, at fifty-eight years old, Fr Black was exhausted and often seemed close to death. However, his service to the Order and Church was not yet complete and in 1950, after four years as Master of Laybrothers, he was elevated to the position of Preacher General by the Master of the Order. Too ill to stand this preacher had to sit during his homilies and over his last four years he promoted the cause of the then Blessed Martin de Porres, who would be canonized in 1962, eight years after Fr Black’s death at the age of sixty-seven with thirty-three years of profession.

Fr Giles Black took the name Mary, in honour of the Blessed Mother of God and he is especially remembered for his promotion of the Rosary amongst the faithful, writing two books on the subject Fifteen Steps (1942) and Our Lady in England (1949)

May Our Lady’s prayers always be with him,

Eternal Rest Grant Unto Him, O Lord

And Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Him

May He Rest In Peace

John Baptist Watson OP RIP (1929-2013)

Please join us in praying for the repose of the soul of our brother John Baptist Watson OP, of our Newcastle community, who died on 5th January and was buried yesterday. Brother John Baptist was born in the North East in 1929, and, after joining the order as young man (being professed on 30th December 1951), he served as a lay (cooperator) brother in various priories, later being ordained to the permanent diaconate, which he exercised in Newcastle for many years. His health declined in recent years, and he moved into a nursing home near the priory, where he received something of a new lease of life ministering to his fellow residents and, for example, leading them in praying the Rosary. After a short illness, he died in the Newcastle Infirmary, having received the Sacraments from his Superior.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,

and let perpetual light shine upon him.

May he rest in peace.
Amen.

"That is a true friend" - Fr Denis Geraghty OP (1929-2012)

Fr Allan White OP, formerly Prior Provincial of the English Province and currently Senior Chaplain at New York University, preached the following homily at the funeral of Fr Denis, which took place at St Dominic’s, London, on 5th November 2012:

One of the things Father Denis felt strongly about, and often he only seemed to feel strongly about things, indifference like logic was alien to him, was the undesirability of panegyrics at funerals. Once on returning from a funeral he dismissed the sermon of the preacher saying ‘he came to praise him not to bury him.’ Father Denis believed that the task of a Dominican friar is to talk about God. The work of a priest is not to draw attention to himself but to point towards Christ. He is sent for the service of Christ's Gospel. The priest points to Christ by coming to resemble him and that resemblance is to be seen not only in what he says but in what he does and in what he is. Word and deed go together. The word does not only need to be heard it must be seen.

St Thomas Aquinas considered, perhaps not surprisingly, that being called to the work of preaching was to be called to the highest form of human existence (IIaIIae 188.6) Those chosen by the risen Christ as his ambassadors are chosen because they have seen him, and eaten and drunk with him, they have enjoyed his society and been accepted as his friends. The way that they live their lives is a demonstration of the friendship they enjoy with him. In the end the most powerful and important sermon we ever preach is the sermon of our lives. In wrestling with the Word our lives become an enacted word, commentaries on the Gospel.

Fr Denis preaching at the funeral of Br Vincent Cook in 2010

Blessed Jordan of Saxony said of St Dominic that God gave him a special grace of compassion for sinners, the poor and the afflicted: he carried their distress in the innermost sanctuary of his heart. For Blessed Jordan Dominic had a gift, a charism, which prompted him to see and to share in an intense way in the sufferings of others. The Dominican mission of preaching is an exercise of the mercy of God made real and mediated through the human life and experience of his ministers. Father Denis raised eccentricity to a new level. He was a distinct and idiosyncratic character, his intention may have been to act as a signpost to Christ, he may have wished his own personality to fade into the background but God gave him a special grace of eccentricity which brought people to see the Lord in him. The countless number of people who came to him for counsel, confession, companionship and spiritual friendship testifies that in him they found the living Word of God’s love, forgiveness and acceptance. He was not unaware of his own failings and would often disarmingly admit them, usually when he had brought one of the brethren to the brink of murdering him, but instead of isolating him from others and marking him off from them these traits of character made him more accessible to others. He thought of himself as unimportant and was gifted with a rare humility which rather than rendering him bland or anonymous made him uniquely original. At times his unconventionality bordered on the anarchic but the gift he received form God was precisely to be a minister of God’s own anarchic grace which freed people from the broken circumstances of their lives from which they believed there was no escape. Father Denis never believed he was an expert on anything, but he was expert at reading human hearts. This skill he acquired through allowing the Lord to break open his own heart. He never thought that he had graduated from the school of the Lord’s service. There was always something more for him to learn and one of the things he was learning in the last years of his life was how to complete his Dominican profession of obedience as he handed himself over in surrendering himself into the hands of God.

It was said of St Dominic that he spoke only to God or about God. Fr Denis relished the ministry of the word. He loved to talk about God. In fact, he loved talking! He was always ready to preach employing that unique form of exegesis which blended acute human insight and profound spirituality with an amalgam of Professor Bultmann and Saint Alphonsus Ligouri. He never seemed to lose his way yet we knew that if he ended his sermon with the phrase ‘and so we might like to reflect on that’ it was because he was not sure of his conclusion. If he used the phrase ‘and so my dear people’ the brethren knew that things were dire. As he loved to talk about God, in his last years as his health declined he was drawn more deeply into talking to God in the mystery of prayer. His favourite spot in this church was at the foot of the crucifix in the Lady Chapel. There he spent many hours in prayer. If his active apostolate was limited his contemplative apostolate was not. Father Provincial told me yesterday that whenever he was troubled about some difficulty or problem in administration he would go to Father Denis and commission an immediate five decades of the Rosary. Father Denis was the Provincial’s equivalent of a Tibetan prayer wheel.

Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The most concentrated form of his teaching was given on the cross where he displayed his free and loving obedience to the will of the Father. In recent months Denis entered more closely into the mystery of the cross as he prepared to take leave of us and return to the Lord whom he loved and longed for. He knew there were no short cuts. The way to glory is the way of the cross and by cleaving to the cross he hoped to learn its wisdom from him who was gentle and lowly of heart. It was that yoke of gentleness and lowliness that Father Denis took gladly on his shoulders when he was clothed in the Dominican habit at the age of 44.

Blessed Jordan, replying to a letter of Blessed Diana in which she asked him to recommend some spiritual books, advised her that all the spiritual knowledge and wisdom she desired would come from the crucified Christ. He compared the crucifix to an illuminated manuscript she needed no other books:

...you will indeed be more nobly and sweetly consoled by that book that you have daily before the eyes of the spirit, the book of life, the tablets “of the purest law, that excites the soul.” This “pure law” (Ps. 18:8)…is love, when you behold Jesus your redeemer with arms outstretched on the Cross, written with his wounds, pained with his holy blood. …No book can lead more compellingly to love.

It was in this book that Father Denis read deeply as in these last months of private and secret intense pain he prepared for the final stages of his return to his Father’s house.

When St Thomas talks about the New Law of the Gospel he asks is it a written law? He concludes that no book could contain the excellence of Christ’s teaching. The new law of grace was designed to be impressed on the hearts of its hearers. Preaching, proclaiming the word is not the communication of information, it is not an empty moralism telling people what to do, it witnesses to Christ. The foundation of our life is the sequela Christi, the following of Christ. We are all disciples of Christ. Our ministry flows from discipleship. In our day we have often come to privilege the spoken word over every other form of word. We need to remember that we have heard His voice, but we have also seen His glory. As we read in the second reading from the First Letter of John our subject is not only what we have heard but what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed, and felt with our hands…the word of life. There is a hearing, but also a seeing. It is true that scriptural revelation is a revelation of the word, but it is not only that. Underlying the word there is always a vision, there must always be a vision. The whole story of scripture is driven by a hunger for sight, a nostalgia for the vision of God. “It is your face Lord that I seek. Hide not your face.’ In our intensely visual society, dominated by the flickering image of screen and tabloid, people want to see. In our world many people have lost the ability to read the Word, the witness of Scripture is alien to them, all the more need then for preachers who not only speak the word but do it and live it and show it forth. As an old Chinese missionary prayer has it ‘Lord make us to be Bibles so that those who cannot read the Word can read it in us.’

In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul reminds them that they are God’s work, his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared us in advance to walk in. We are God’s project, or as some translate it, we are God’s masterpiece, his principal work of art. We are being warned not to get ideas above our station. We are not our own project. We cannot create ourselves, if we try to do that we shall inevitably follow the wrong template, we will be design failures. When we try to fashion ourselves we frequently start with the wrong blueprint of humanity. Paul is saying that we often start from our own experience of what it is to be human and think that this is all there is to it. In fact we start in the wrong place and inevitably reach the wrong destination. The model of true humanity is presented to us in Jesus; it is only as we conform to this blueprint, live in accordance with the life that comes through him that we are truly alive and taste of true humanity. We can only be truly human if we allow ourselves to be his work. It is in disposing ourselves to be God’s work that we become not less ourselves but more ourselves. We become originals and workers in the world of the anarchy of grace.

Once St Francis of Assisi was passing through a field when a peasant who was ploughing saw him and ran up to him. He asked him if he was Francis and Francis said indeed he was. The farmer then said ‘I tell you do not be other than you appear to be for many people put their trust in you.’ Fr Denis never appeared to be other than he was and many mourn him today who never regretted putting their trust in him. We pray that as he continues his journey from glory to glory before the throne of God that he is becoming even more himself, although with what effect on the heavenly liturgy can only be imagined.

Last week we celebrated Mass for Father Denis in the chapel of New York University Catholic Centre. After the Mass one of the students came to me and said ‘Father I am sorry for the death of your friend.’ He asked me what he was like. I gave as best I could a description of Father Denis. At the end the young student asked me a question which rather took me aback. He asked, ‘Did he make you feel as if you wanted to be a better person.’ I was surprised at this and thought about it before answering. I replied ‘Yes, he did.’ I do not think he quite managed it as so often in this life desire outstrips performance. The young student then said: ‘that is a true friend.’

That is a true friend.