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.

The Lord's Prayer: 'And lead us not into temptation'.

'The Temptations of Christ' 12th Century mosaic in St Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy. 

The life of Jesus shows us that victory in the battle of temptation can become possible only through prayer. The 'Our Father' therefore becomes a tool against sin, which results from our consenting to temptation.

We must not forget then that these are the words Jesus gives us, 'Lead us not into temptation'. By asking the Father not to 'lead' us into temptation we are asking a twofold reality to come about: both 'do not allow us to enter into temptation' and 'do not let us yield to temptation'. The letter of James reminds us that 'God cannot be tempted and he himself tempts no one' (1:13). God wills for us to be free from evil. It is our own desire that allows temptation to surface, therefore we ask him not to allow us to take the way that leads to sin.

But are we supported when we ask him to lead us away from being tempted?

Yes. This petition we ask, has a beautiful thread woven in that is subtle, yet strong. We, in the words Jesus gives,  implore the Holy Spirit for discernment and strength.

The Holy Spirit enables us to discern when adversity and trials arise, which in of themselves are in fact necessary for the growth of our inner being. In this discernment we are able to see the differences between 'being tempted' and 'consenting to temptation'. We only desire what appears to be good, the Holy Spirit's gift of discernment allows us to have a reality check. Is what we perceive to be a 'delight to the eye and desirable', actually the opposite, and in reality its fruit is sin, which leads to death. This power of discernment given is not a gloomy reality, it is a way in which the believer is both empowered and transformed joyfully as they journey through life.

Manuscript depicting Origen of Alexandria. 

Origen writes: 

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings... There is a certain usefulness to temptation. No one but God knows what our soul has received from him, not even we ourselves. But temptation reveals it in order to teach us to know ourselves, and in this way we discover our evil inclinations and are obliged to give thanks for the goods that temptation has revealed to us'

(De Orationis 29).


The plea therefore, 'Lead us not into temptation' from this most powerful of prayers, implies that we need to make a decision of the heart with the assistance of the Holy Spirit. One of my favourite lines from scripture, which is sung in my weekly prayer, sums up this reality so accurately, 'For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'. Mt 6:21.

But if the feeling of temptation is too much for me, why does a loving God the Father enable me to feel weighed down with temptation? Again we must remind ourselves what Scripture says... 'No testing has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, so that you may be able to endure it' (1 Cor 10:13).

The Temptation of Thomas Aquinas.

'We do not pray to change the divine decree, but only to obtain what God has decided will be obtained through prayer'. St Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologiae. 

It is by his prayer that Jesus vanquishes the tempter, both at the outset of his public mission (see mosaic at the top of this post) and in the completing action and struggle of his agony on the cross. In this divine instructive prayer of the 'Our Father' then, Christ unites us with his battle and his agony. He encourages us to be in vigilant communion with his heart. Also, we cannot ignore the collective pro noun here, the word.. 'us' lead... 'us'.  Jesus is teaching us to pray this not only for ourselves, but that of the whole Church. United in his words to the Father, 'keep them in your name'. We are never alone in the battle of prayer over temptation, feel supported when next saying this line in the 'Our Father', that all those saying it are saying it for you and themselves, just as Jesus did, and as we will, in our last temptation of our earthly battle. When praying this line therefore we are ultimately asking for our final perseverance.    

'Lo, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is he who is awake' (Rev 16:15).

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.

Our Father: Thy will be done on earth as it is heaven

                                   “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”

So familiar is recitation of the Lord's Prayer to many of us that often, I suspect - if some readers are anything like me - we have not really tuned in, not really got around to focusing on what exactly it is we are petitioning the Lord for with these words, before we are already over half-way through the prayer and thinking about who we might be forgiving for their trespasses against us!

The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel

These are difficult words. Obviously they are not difficult to say, but they can be very difficult to mean. Throughout the history of the Church it has ever been thus. Think of Peter's confession to Jesus in Mark 8: "You are the Christ", whereupon Jesus foretells of how he must suffer, be rejected and killed, before He will rise again. And what is Peter's reaction to this? Peter has the audacity to rebuke Jesus, before being swiftly rebuked himself by Jesus with those cutting and chastening words, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men."

Peter desired that the Lord's will be conformed to his – to his ideas of what the Messiah should be –and this desire has remained prevalent to this day. To will what God wishes is hard. It is much easier to pray that God would will what we wish. And yet, whilst we go on doing this, we will not become truly Christ-like; in fact, we will grow apart from him. We must aspire to follow the example of Christ at Gethsemane who said: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will.” This is Jesus perfectly living out the perfect prayer He taught us.

The Agony in the Garden, El Greco

The first stage in living out this petition has to manifest itself in an earnest to desire to learn what it is that the Father wills. Again, to do this, we are best to follow the Lord’s example; to pray and to be familiar with the scriptures. The Father’s will is not necessarily ours! Thomas Aquinas reminds us, in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, that the third gift which the Holy Spirit works in us is called the gift of knowledge. He goes on to say that “among all that goes to make up knowledge and wisdom in man, the principal wisdom is that man should not depend solely upon his own opinion.” We can know the truth, but we do not always find it by contemplating our own desires.

This takes humility; as St Thomas goes on to say: ‘Out of humility one does not trust one's own knowledge: "Where humility is there is also wisdom." (Proverbs 11:2) The proud trust only themselves. Now, the Holy Spirit, through the gift of wisdom, teaches us that we do not our own will but the will of God. It is through this gift that we pray of God that His "will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And in this is seen the gift of knowledge.’

Now the second part of fulfilling this petition is perhaps the most difficult. To will God’s will over our own when the two are in conflict is challenging. But paradoxically this is the only way that we will ever be truly free. Whilst we are slaves to our own wills, we will never obtain the freedom that Christ promises, we will never be our true selves; we will never allow grace to perfect our nature.

But conforming our will to His is easier said than done. It is not an easy thing to confront greatness. We can struggle enough when we find it in another person, let alone when we contemplate our finitude in relation to God. If we are not careful this can discourage, even paralyse, for the greatness of the other makes me feel my own littleness, perhaps even deluding ourselves that we don't really matter. Goethe said that there is only one defence against great superiority, and that is love. And perhaps this is true, for it is only love of Christ that can help us partake in the divine life. But Fr Romano Guardini wonders whether this covers the entirety of the matter; for it may not always be possible to love. He suggests that it may be more correct to say that the best defence against great superiority consists in truth and reverence, which say: “He is great, I am not. But it is good that greatness should be, even if it is not in me but in another.” Then there is an open space, and envy disappears.

As I write this, I think of how much pressure there is on the Church to change its teaching and its practice. I cannot help but think that what we are witnessing is largely as a result of the desire that God be more like us. We find something hard or requiring heroic qualities and we wish that God did not will it that way. We delude ourselves that because God’s mercy overflows, that He can no longer judge. We forget that mercy cannot exist without justice. We begin to think that the greatest travesty is that somebody might be put off the practise of the faith because of its difficulty. And thus we seek to argue why God’s will must be for us to remain in whatever state we are in, and that the Church’s teaching should alter to condone us in our sin, not call us out of it, at the same time abandoning the notion of conforming ourselves to Christ.

St Martin de Porres OP feeds the poor, Holy Cross Dominican Priory, Leicester

Archbishop Charles Chaput wisely reminded us recently about what happens when we ignore Jesus’s teaching: “If we ignore the poor, we will go to hell. If we blind ourselves to their suffering, we will go to hell. If we do nothing to ease their burdens; then we will go to hell. Ignoring the needs of the poor among us is the surest way to dig a chasm of heartlessness between ourselves and God, and ourselves and our neighbours.” And he goes on to say that whilst all are welcome in the Church “we can’t pretend that they’re welcome on their own terms. None of us are welcome on our own terms in the Church; we’re welcome on Jesus’ terms. That’s what it means to be a Christian—you submit yourself to Jesus and his teaching, you don’t recreate your own body of spirituality.” Only if we truly heed these words can we pray with integrity: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Dominican Priories: Glasgow

The Dominican house in Glasgow is a fairly recent mission for the Order, in the grand scheme of things. The official seal of the city often used on official materials is “Let Glasgow flourish” but what is often missed out is the full text of the seal, “Lord, let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word and the praising of Thy name”. Glasgow was founded as a city by St Mungo, who is also the city’s patron saint. Since its days as a small merchant town known for salmon fishing on the Clyde, Glasgow has always been an important ecclesiastical centre. The Dominicans had a Priory in Glasgow from 1246, when William de Bondington, Bishop of Glasgow, and the Cathedral Chapter, at the behest of King Alexander III (1241-1286) welcomed the friars to the city, asking that the Friars Preachers be received in his diocese. Our Dominican priory was situated some few hundred yards south of the Glasgow Cathedral, at the bottom of the modern High Street. The priory complex included a school for the teaching of the liberal arts, and a house studium. 

The pub named ‘Blackfriars’ is located near to where the medieval Dominican priory in Glasgow was situated. 

The Dominicans were forced to leave Glasgow during the Scottish reformation, and the Priory was secularised by the state in 1566-67. It was not until 1965 that the Order made a return to Glasgow and committed to having a Dominican presence in this important Archdiocese. 

One of the institutions which the Dominican Order was associated from the very beginning, is the University of Glasgow, when in 1451 when Bishop William Turnbull founded the University. The foundation of the University was an event, but its growth and development was a long, gradual process, involving the coming together of several factors. It was in the buildings of the Dominican ‘Black Friars’ priory in Glasgow, that the first university meetings and business, and the first lecture, took place. The priory continued to provide teaching facilities until the University gradually acquired its own permanent premises. The Dominican church was also used for university worship.

A major factor in kick-starting Glasgow as the ‘second city of the British empire’ was its location on the river Clyde. Glasgow had a competitive advantage compared with London or the major centres of trade in Europe: the travel time for ships going to and from North America was around three days less going from the ports on the Clyde. That meant it was cheaper and easier for industries to set up in Glasgow. Central Scotland also had cheap natural resources such as coal and iron ore to fuel the industrial growth of Glasgow, which became a powerhouse of one of the world’s first industrialised economies. The merchants of the city made their money in trading tobacco, cotton and textiles. Just as today, land was a solid investment with a great potential for making a good return on investment. The merchants invested their money in buying up marshy land, draining the marshes surrounding the medieval city of Glasgow, so they could build on the land. It was typically unskilled Catholic Irish immigrants who were employed for the heavy manual labour of turning swamps into solid ground to expand the city, and to improve the farm land to feed the ever-expanding population. These merchants of Glasgow were some of the first capitalists who acquired this ‘new money’ from trade, and spared no expense in building their luxury mansions, wearing the best clothing made in the textile factories, smoking tobacco from their plantations in Virginia. As Glasgow expanded as an industrial hub, larger factories producing more technologically advanced goods were opened, for an expanding industrial era. Money was to be made in buying raw materials from abroad and turning them into high-value products to sell across the world market. It was the growth of the British Empire which enabled Glasgow to have this access to raw materials and a market of buyers at home and abroad. The engineering expertise that Scots are known for aided the expansion of heavy industry. It was the need for cheap labour in shipyards, factories and dockyards which led to an influx of Catholics moving to Glasgow - much of the immigration came from Catholic Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, England and later Italy, Poland and beyond.

The Doulton Fountain, Glasgow Green. The fountain depicts four water-carriers, representing parts of the British empire - India, Australia, Canada, South Africa

History matters to the Dominican mission. Around 30% of the population in Glasgow identify as Catholic. This puts Glasgow and the surrounding conurbations proportionally higher in Catholic population than most of the United Kingdom. The Dominican friars currently run the parish of St Columba’s in Woodside, in the city’s West end. One of the friars is Catholic chaplain to the University of Strathclyde, with the chaplaincy centre also a hub for the city centre higher education establishments. One of the other friars is involved with prison chaplaincy, and the other friars also help with parish duties and have their own academic work.

The Parish of St Columba's

The Dominicans started running the Parish of St Columba’s in the mid 2000s. The church and presbytery are examples of the early work of the architect Jack Coia. It is one of the only buildings still under construction during World War II, with the sanctuary holding a marble reredos and carved crucifix by the sculptor Benno Schotz. 

For the Dominicans, the city of Glasgow is an important place to be. With such a large population of the city identifying as Catholic, but a comparatively small number of the population actually attending Mass, there is a considerable evangelical mission to bring Catholics back to Church. There is a huge task ahead, in meeting what is asked of the ‘new evangelisation’ that Pope Francis speaks of. This involves educating people in a core Catholic theology that is fit for purpose in a postmodern context, a liturgy that will nourish and sustain our faith, and hopefully being able to answer the questions that people want answers to. The Dominican mission also includes practical support for initiatives such as pro-life or social justice projects, as well as lay evangelisation. The demographic of Catholics in Scotland now is hugely different when compared with the origins of the Catholic Church in Scotland after the hierarchy was restored. This new demographic of Catholics who have opportunities that were previously never possible is an interesting challenge. How do we engage with where people are at now? People who wish to maintain and strengthen their Catholic faith whilst working in all sorts of spheres of society.

"Our Father"

It is an act of audacity to call God ‘Our Father’. Although God as creator is in a sense ‘Father’ of the whole world that proceeds forth from his creative word, we can claim no natural right to address Him in the intimate and familial way in which the fatherhood of the Pater Noster speaks. It rolls off the tongue as perhaps the first prayer we memorise as children, but we only dare to make it our own because we have first been authorised and commanded to do so by Jesus Christ, who is the personal revelation of the Father in our world. To address God with such filial boldness is an act of fidelity to Christ, who instructed the disciples to pray in this way in response to their recognition of dependence and insufficiency. The Lord whom they seek is already the one who causes their seeking, and it is in response to their petition (itself already a prayer)—“Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk 11:1)—that Jesus teaches them the Our Father as an invitation into his own prayer life, a route into that communion which alone fulfils their deepest desires, the Son’s own relationship to God the Father.

The ‘Fatherhood’ which the Our Father speaks of is, therefore, not a generic image of Fatherhood, but the specific Trinitarian relationship of the Father and the Son, into which we are granted participation by the Holy Spirit. For this reason, Aquinas speaks of the words ‘Our Father’ as a nutshell summary of the entire Christian faith, words which cannot be uttered authentically without faith in the Triune God and the incarnation of the Son. Yet if they are a summary of the authentic doctrine of the faith, they are also a summary of the essential attitude and emotional disposition of Christian prayer (which Aquinas sees as the “interpreter of desire”): by addressing God as Father, we place ourselves in joyful obedience, humbly recognising the wonder of our own being and resting in the simple assurance of being loved into existence and loved into new life in Christ.

To pray Our Father, then, is part of our baptismal vocation. It is something given to us in that moment when we receive faith and are re-born anew by engrafting into Christ. It is not only because the Son alone can address the Father as ‘my Father’ that it is given to us to pray in the plural to Our Father, but also because our re-birth into the Son’s relationship to the Father is also the moment of our entry into the Church as the community of faith. For Christians, to be most fully a person is almost the opposite of being an ‘individual’. Baptism radically de-individualises us by drawing us into the communion of the Church, and the Christian always prays as a member of the Church, even when they do so in private. To pray Our Father is a reminder that we cannot ‘go it alone’, that wherever we go our connection to Christ and his Church abides, for we have been made an irreplaceable part of something bigger than ourselves upon which we depend for our own innermost identity. It is, therefore, most fitting that we pray Our Father at each celebration of Holy Mass, as the people of God are gathered—with the angels and saints—around the Eucharistic Lord, in anticipation of the Kingdom to come.

The Rosary: O My Jesus

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy. Amen.

The ‘Fatima Prayer’ given by Our Lady to three young visionaries at Fatima, Portugal, has been included in the recitation of the Rosary since those visions in the early 1900s. Though the entire Rosary is a meditation upon the life of Christ this is the only prayer directed expressly towards him.

Each mystery of the Rosary unfolds the glories, joys and sorrows of Christ’s life. But more than this, through meditation the Christian soul is raised up into that Divine Life. It becomes an actual witness, seeing through the eyes of faith, to those miraculous things which happened long ago or beyond this world.

However, this lofty engagement is not always achieved. Sometimes the Christian uses spirituality as escapism from the world because it is a difficult place to be. This ‘failed’ spirituality feeds the image of the spiritual person as someone slightly ethereal someone who appears rather untenable. Spirituality, in this later sense, becomes less about God and more about us.

The Fatima Prayer can head off this false spirituality of escapism by appeal to the personal encounter with Jesus, the Word-Made-Flesh. When we speak to Jesus we speak to the one who bears his own wounds. How then can we try to hide ours? In speaking to Jesus we find that it is not just necessary, but good, to acknowledge the world around us and all its trials. In Jesus we see the immense importance the Father has placed on the world, which is the road we walk back to him.

Fifth Luminous Mystery: Institution of the Eucharist

“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15).

The fifth and final Luminous Mystery recalls the institution of the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life. This sacrament is a sign of God’s self-sacrificing love for us and His desire that we should be united with Him. As Pope Benedict writes, “In this eager desire of Jesus we can recognize the desire of God Himself – His expectant love for mankind, for His creation. A love which awaits the moment of union, a love which wants to draw mankind to itself and thereby fulfil the desire of all creation, for creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God” (cf. Rom 8:19).

Beautiful and comforting as God’s infinite love for us is, it can also be overwhelming. In the face of such love, if we reflect on our lives properly, then we may well feel distinctly unworthy. This is not a bad thing, the words of the Mass (“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you...”) acknowledge this, yet we are encouraged by the Church to make whatever reparations are necessary and go forward to receive our Lord, and grow in communion with Him and those around us.

The French writer, Francois Mauriac, expresses this beautifully:

There is a mysterious mingling of conflicting feelings in the man who is about to receive Holy Communion: fear and confidence, open-heartedness and remorse, shame and love. The small Host which the sinner approaches throws an impartial and terrible light on irretrievable deeds: on that which he has done, on that which he should not have refrained from doing. No man knows himself if he has not looked at his soul in the light of the Host lifted above the ciborium…

Salvador Dali's, Last Supper

Yet all the misdeeds that the communicant sees at a glance are no longer his; someone else has taken them over since the pardon of Christ has come down on his soul with the absolution of the priest. His misery, far from driving him into despair, helps him understand how much he has been loved…

What is almost always obtained through frequent Communion is a grace which surpasses all perceptible favours; an increased light and, better still, a new strength in God."

The First Luminous Mystery: Our Lord's Baptism

Baptism is the basis of our entire Christian life; it is the gateway the Lord opens into the life of the triune God of grace. We know baptism as the Sacrament of Faith that has been established by God as the normative means through which we are freed from original sin, re-born by Water and the Holy Spirit as daughters and sons of the Most High. But all this leaves us with a puzzle when it comes to understanding Jesus’s own baptism: what need had Christ, the spotless and perfectly sinless Son of God, for baptismal grace? What need had Jesus, who enjoyed the vision of God throughout his life, for the sacrament of faith? What need had the second person of the Trinity for initiation into the life of the Trinity? Are we to conclude that Jesus’s baptism was just an empty gesture, a redundant sign of deep significance and profound aesthetic value, but which nonetheless changed nothing?

Christ’s baptism is, clearly, of a different type to our own: Christ’s baptism by John inaugurates Christian baptism as an efficacious means of grace; our own baptisms are dependent, derived, actions that baptise us into Christ’s own baptismal life. It is by being baptised, submitting himself to baptism at the hands of a man, that Jesus creates and establishes Baptism as the Sacrament of Faith in Himself. Yet Baptism is no individualistic event that cleanses our souls as if God intervened surgically by dissecting us away from others. Rather, baptism engrafts us into the Christian community, making us members of Christ’s own body. Christ’s own baptism manifests his status as the head of the community of the baptized.

Indeed, Christ’s baptism is a moment of revelation—the dove, representing the Holy Spirit, descends onto the waters and the voice of the Father reveals Christ’s identity as Son (all of which resonates with the creative imagery of Genesis, in which the Spirit of God hovers over the waters and the world is created by a spoken word of God). At this moment, Christ’s true identity—revealed to his mother Mary at the annunciation—is made manifest on the public stage. It is in our own baptisms that we too discover our deepest identity as those claimed for Christ, and—over the course of a lifetime—it is in the outworking of our graced baptismal vocation that we discover who God created us to be and the tasks that he has bestowed upon us. The waters of Baptism are the short, sharp, shock that wake us up to our most essential identity: "Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him" (Benedict XVI).

Second Glorious Mystery: The Ascension

Even after enduring death, and overcoming it in the Resurrection, Christ does not do away with his humanity. Christ’s humanity is not like a garment that is discarded once it has been worn. The real and enduring reality of Jesus’s humanity remain the point of connection between man and God, just as it was in his earthly ministry so it remains today: the Sacred Humanity is the organ through which redemptive grace flows to us (especially in the Sacraments). Christ, then, continues to relate to us in and through his humanity, even though we do not see it (except sacramentally). Thus the Ascension is not a moment of sadness—the definitive disappearance of the Messiah from the world that He has redeemed—but the glory of a bodily ‘withdrawal’ that is enacted precisely—and only—so that the Lord can be present to us in a new and more intimate fashion. The coming of the Holy Spirit (the Third Glorious Mystery) casts this in stark relief. 

In the context of the Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, however, the link between Christ’s Ascension and Mary’s Assumption is particularly evident. Christ’s Ascension, and the bodily Communion with God that the Incarnation makes possible, does not merely return the world to a pre-incarnation, or even pre-fallen, state. Rather the Ascension is a creative act, one that inaugurates something new: a new for humanity to ascend, through the gift of participating in Christ’s own life, to bodily communion with God. This is communicated pre-eminently to Mary, attested in her Bodily Assumption (the Fourth Glorious Mystery).

Ordination of Fr Nicholas Crowe, O.P.

After seven years of education and life in the Dominican Order, our Brother Nicholas Crowe was ordained Priest last Saturday July 5th 2014.

Fr Nicholas had his hands anointed with holy oils and was ordained Priest. Family and friends came to Blackfriars for the Ordination by our Brother Archbishop Malcolm McMahon OP.

Hundreds queued for their first blessing from Fr Nicholas, who will be moving onto new pastures at the start of his Priestly ministry.

As mentioned in the bidding prayers during his first Mass, we pray for Fr Nicholas Crowe who was ordained to the Priestly ministry. May the Lord give him a deep faith, a bright and firm hope, and a burning love which will ever increase in the course of his Priestly life. 

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.

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?”

Solemnity of the Ascension

Fra Angelico's Noli Me Tangere

Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 46:2-3,6-9; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20

Some 40 days ago we heard how Mary Magdalene, on encountering the Risen Lord by His tomb, sought to cling on to Him, and Jesus told her: “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). Mary’s seeking to hold on to Christ is natural. She thought she had lost her Lord and did not know where to find Him, she does not wish to lose Him and be separated from Him again. It would be strange if we were to act differently in the same circumstances. And yet, the Solemnity of the Ascension is marked as one of the great feasts of the Church, it is a time for celebration. But, why? That the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us is clearly cause for great joy, but that He should no longer continue to live bodily among us . . . that seems harder to be happy about.

However, we have it on Christ’s own authority that His Ascension is good news for us. Earlier this week, we heard Jesus say to his disciples:

“Now I am going to the one who sent me.
Not one of you has asked, “Where are you going?”
You are sad at heart because I have told you this.
Still, I must tell you the truth:
It is for your own good that I am going,
because unless I go,
the Advocate will not come to you;
but if I do go,
I will send him to you.”
(John 16: 5-7)

So our sadness is understandable, and yet we should rejoice because Jesus Himself has told us that this His Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit is good news for us. And accordingly, next week we will celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit with great joy, The Solemnity of Pentecost. However, it is important that we don’t conceive of today’s Solemnity as marking some sort of Trinitarian trade-in, of thinking that Christ is now absent, but soon we will have the Holy Spirit instead so we’re not to worry. It’s much better news than that. God’s love overflows. The disciples understood this as is evidenced in Luke when he tells us that after He had blessed them, parted from them and been raised up to heaven, “they worshipped Him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God.” (24:50-53)

For Christ continues to be present to us. And again, we can say that on His authority, for at the end of Matthew’s Gospel He tells us:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

So we have Jesus’ word that he will be with us always. We have not lost Him, He is with us still, but He has also given us the Holy Spirit and we have only to reflect on the great things the previously timid Apostles did after Pentecost to know what a great gift this is.

Yet, some might question whether this ‘being with us’ is just semantics; is it not just a nice way of saying, I’ll always be with you because I’ll always be in your memories? And our answer, as Catholics? An emphatic, No! His presence is real! Heaven is not some far off place, where God gazes upon us from great distance, occasionally meddling. We should not think that because Jesus is now in heaven at the right hand of Father, He is somehow shut off from us here on earth. The Church is the body of Christ and the sacraments are a place of genuine encounter with Christ. Truly, He is still with us.

Chapel of The Ascension, Mount of Olives

The disciples who went back to Jerusalem so joyfully, evidently understood this. They knew that Christ was now present to them in a new and powerful way. They could start to make out the trajectory of His life and see his ascent in its true context.

For Jesus’ ascent had begun earlier, it had also been his self-offering on the Cross on which he was raised up. This offering supplanted all the old sacrifices. The same ascent is described in the Letter to the Hebrews as Him going up, not to a sanctuary made by human hands, but to heaven itself, into the presence of God (9:24). This ascent into God’s presence leads via the Cross – it is the ascent toward “loving to the end” (cf John 13:1), which is the real mountain of God. The sacrifice had been offered on the Cross and its acceptance is shown in the Resurrection and Ascension.

And this mountain, to which He is ascended, is not some far off place, set apart from all other places. God’s presence is not spatial, for he is immaterial, and His Divine Presence is everywhere. So now Jesus is returned to his Father, and He is no longer geographically located in one place, but exercises His Divine Dominion over Creation, present to all and present everywhere. This trajectory is also the one which we must follow; it is our ultimate goal. Humanity was offered to God in Christ the Victim, who is now forever at the right hand of the Father and the path has been made for us to follow. The path well-trodden by the Saints.

The Ascension of Jesus Christ, a miniature from the Syrian Gospel, 6th century

So today we should rejoice. We should rejoice at Mass when we recall that Christ is present to us in His priests, in His Word in the readings, in our joint prayers and song, and most especially in the Eucharist. Christ is present and the Faith is a present to us, but it is both gift and task; we receive the gift of God’s inner closeness and then must carry out the joyful task of bearing witness to Jesus Christ as he commanded us.

Catholic Social Teaching: Marriage and the Family

Betrothal of St. Joseph and Our Lady

It is often declared that the family is the basic building block of society, yet according to the National Office of Statistics the divorce rate in the UK has more or less stabilized at around 1% of the married population divorcing every year with about 1/3 of all marriages ending by their 15th wedding anniversary. This inevitably has consequences for the environment in which children are raised and suggests that whilst the Christian vision of the family remains the social ‘norm’ in an ideological sense, in practice it is increasingly abnormal. Indeed, as Richard Conrad OP once pointed out in conversation, it may be the case that the Christian family is acquiring some of the ‘iconic’ value of eschatological sign that has traditionally been the sole preserve of celibate religious. 

If Christian marriage has indeed become a counter-cultural sign of the Kingdom of God in our world today, this should alert us to the danger of assuming that wider society will provide by a kind of cultural osmosis the moral and spiritual formation necessary to live out the Christian vision of family life. We should instead begin to take married life – and thus family life - more seriously as a vocation. The newly married couple are in some respects like a novice in a monastic community: they have entered into a new and very specific kind of community life. Like the novice, the newly married couple will need formation if they are to live this life well and help others, i.e. their children, to live it well. 

Against this backdrop it is perhaps unsurprising that our theological understanding of married life has undergone something of a transformation over the last one hundred years. For both Augustine and Aquinas, the primary good of marriage is the propagation of the human race, which is bound up with our natural desire to live. An explicit link, then, is made by these two theological giants between marriage and the family: marriage is for a family. The good of friendship, for example between husband and wife, or the fulfillment of both partners through living a married life well, are very much second order goods in their understanding. The Council of Trent maintained this distinction of primary and secondary ends although, interestingly, the two orders are reversed: where offspring was the primary end of marriage for Aquinas, Trent makes it a secondary reason to marry. Trent instead proposes what Aquinas considered the secondary goods of friendship, and fidelity, and growth in virtue and so on as the first reason for a person to marry. In the twentieth century this trend toward considering marriage as a good in itself developed even further: Vatican II, for example, did not particularly emphasize the instrumental goodness of marriage but rather chose to underline the intrinsic goodness of the married couple and family as a life-long community. Gaudium et Spes is keen to emphasise that the married couple and the family are a “community of love” (GS 48). The fruitfulness of marriage, then, is seen as the fulfillment of conjugal love (see GS 51) In this way the council hopes to present the family as continuous with marriage which of course has particular significance when we remember that marriage is a sacrament. 

The Holy Family in Nazareth

The sacramental bond between husband and wife conforms their relationship into a symbol or sign of Christ’s love for his Church. The normal characteristics of natural conjugal love therefore take on a new significance which purifies them, strengthens them, and elevates them into an expression of specifically Christian values (Familiaris Consortio 13). This makes marriage, according to John Paul II, the ‘natural setting in which the human person is introduced into the great family of the Church’ (FC 14). Married life, in this view, becomes a co-operation with God in creating persons: it is a sacred share in the divinely assigned mission to raise children for God. The family must therefore be a kind of school of love, that is to say a school of humanity through which the child can reach the fullness of life and love and live as a true friend of God and neighbour. 

This is indeed an inspiring vision, but at this point we must ask an embarrassing question: if the Holy Spirit works so profoundly through the sacrament of marriage and sanctifies the whole of family life, why is it that the Christian divorce rate, for example, is the same for Christians as society as a whole? Why is it that Christian families are often places of oppression and abuse? Or to borrow John Haldane’s comment in the Catholic herald: Why doesn’t the grace of God bear fruit in our lives? The simple answer, of course, is that we can resist grace and we do resist grace whenever (to varying extents) we reject God and (again to varying extents) worship instead what is not God. John Paul II’s reflections on marriage and family dwell extensively on Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve decided to put knowledge of good and evil ahead of the worship of God. Family life, both Christian and non-Christian, still bear the scars of this fall. The family, as Robert Ombres OP puts it, is ‘eroded from within’ when the common unity of the family is found in something other than God, something other than love.

Catholic Social Teaching: Right to Life

Christians are not the only ones who can claim ownership over the values that form the basis of the right to life. After all, it is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art 3), “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. Such a declaration was written after the atrocities of the Second World War, where it was revealed Nazi Germany ran death camps for the routine and industrialised murder of millions who were opposed to the Nazi ideology, or happened to be Jewish or Roma gypsy. This is not to mention the millions who were killed for ideological reasons in Soviet nations in the 20^th century, who were either worked to death, murdered, or ‘disappeared’. There was a clear need to enshrine human rights into law. Through human history it is pretty obvious that we have an original sin as human beings. We always seem to have a tendency to descend into a state of barbarism. Destroying everything that has been built up often seems to be an easy option for humanity. Events in the 20^th century show us the atrocities that we are capable of, the denial of a fundamental right to life. Evil seems to spread where there is a lack of the good, no hope for the future, and where extreme poverty and food insecurity prevail. 

When it comes to the right to life, we have a framework in a liberal democracy which sets out the basic principle that we cannot exterminate populations, or murder any individual. Despite this universal declaration, we continue to see overt breaches of the most basic of human rights, the right to life. State-sanctioned murder in Africa and the Middle East is happening to this day, for reasons such as apostasy from Islam or refusing to renounce Christian beliefs. Flourishing in the poorest parts of the world, groups of fundamentalists deny innocent people of their lives in an ideological pursuit, or for the goal of conquest, money or power. The spread of evil worsens when there is no intervention by good people, and evil takes a grasp when there is seemingly no other choice for those who do evil deeds. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was martyred during the El Salvador civil war, said “For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God’s rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God’s images. There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God’s image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.”

Of course, there is the old trick of redefining what a human being actually is, to get around the universal declaration on human rights. A pervasive argument in Britain and developed nations today, is in the debate over abortion. At what point in a pregnancy does a human life begin? If we take the Catholic doctrine that life begins at the point of conception, then there is no termination or other biological intervention after a certain point that does not end up killing a new human life. Is the West, in its pursuit of liberty and emphasising the ‘choice’ of a pregnant woman over her quality of life, actually turning into a regime that is committing mass murder? It is understandable to see why the matter of abortion is so divisive. Our entire reasoning in Western thought is geared toward individual liberty, the right to choose how we live our lives and not be stifled with the supposed burden of a pregnancy. Pope Benedict XVI highlighted in Caritas in Veritate that Western society often portrays a paradigm of the ‘risk’ of becoming pregnant, the ‘risk’ of having children at an earlier age than we would want. But what we need is a paradigm shift to a more human way of looking at the whole area of the right to life, to shed a positive light on being a parent in less than ideal circumstances.

One argument that ‘pro-choice’ advocates make is that ‘pro-life’ is about protecting the unborn, but only until they are born. The pro-choice point here is that some activists in the political ‘pro-life movement’ lose interest after the point of birth in the human life, and are not interested in the welfare, health or education of the individual. To be for the right to life in a Catholic context in relation to abortion, means the ability of an expectant mother or couple, to fall back on their support mechanism which is the family, the wider Catholic community, and those providing welfare and other support for a new life that is brought into the world.

The pro-choice feminist writer, Germaine Greer once commented that the Cardinal Winning initiative in Glasgow was the first real alternative to abortion for pregnant women. The Cardinal Winning initiative helps women facing a crisis pregnancy, providing assistance to women and their families practically, financially, emotionally and spiritually. In England, the Life charity is a similar initiative. In her book The Whole Woman, Greer condemns the ‘victory’ of self-congratulating pro-choice lobbyists in securing the right of women to have abortions. She argues that women have won little and become enslaved by an abortion culture whose chief architects are "hyper fertile" men, politicians and corporate drug giants. In other words, a ‘choice’ is only possible if there are genuine alternatives. It’s just that in a Catholic context, the choice is an illusion. We can choose to do many things, like choosing to pay a sniper to kill off someone who makes my life difficult; but it is simply wrong and immoral, and is an evil act.

A warning from Pope Benedict XVI before his Papal visit to Britain in 2010 was that a dictatorship of relativism is creeping into Western society. Relativism is the belief that there is no such thing as a difference between good and evil, that there is no such thing as an absolute truth or valid argument. The 'dictatorship' is that in the public sphere we are no longer allowed to say anything that might offend anyone; Christians are pushed aside for claiming we have the truth on morals and what is wrong is always wrong. Isn't it said that the devil's greatest victory was to convince people that he does not exist?