The Great Martyr: Sermon on Low Sunday and the Feast of St George, Parish Church of St George, Hanover Square, London W1, 24th April 2022

Christ is risen!

So little is known of St George that in the 1960s his feast was downgraded in the Calendar of the Roman Church and it was even suspected that he may have been legendary. But surely that is the point of our following Jesus Christ, that it is not for our achievements and significance that we are remembered, but simply for taking up our Cross after him, faithful unto death. So it is for this that he is venerated in the Christian East, as one of those known as the Great Martyrs on account of their exceptional witness to Christ, in the face of exceptional barbarity.

This was a career-soldier of such great skill, integrity and loyalty that he served in the elite guards of the Emperor Diocletian in the late third century. Diocletian was an able ruler and military leader, bringing peace and stability to the vast empire under tensions within and from without. Yet economic and political problems shadowed the image of an all-competent autocrat, and it was convenient to blame religious minorities for supposedly undermining the imperial administration. You can imagine George’s pride in his part in restoring law and order in the Empire, and the despatch of its external enemies under Diocletian’s generalship. George would have been a man set for great things, as his service record extended with further honours and rising prospects for promotion in the Praetorian Guard. Except, that he was a Christian. Previously his problematic religion may have been tolerated; but now it was to blame for poor government performance, according to those who spin popular opinion. It seems that George had earlier come to Diocletian’s favourable attention, since, after the official exclusion of Christians had begun in earnest in 302, followed by outright persecution in 303, Diocletian and his officials may have sought to retain him, while others were put to the sword. Privations and tortures in mounting severity were meant to deter him from his Christianity; easing them an incentive to embrace the official Roman religion and its cult of the Emperor. You may imagine his protest of unimpeachable loyalty, and his appeal to his exemplary service record. There is even a story of the Empress Alexandra, and how the brutality led her first to admire the dignity and loyalty of the soldier who had done nothing to deserve such dishonour, and then to recognise the power of his faith in Christ as her own.

Not more than a few hundred yards from this Church is the road along which Christian martyrs were carted for many decades from Newgate prison at the City of London to their cruel dismemberment and execution at Tyburn, protesting their loyalty to England and to Queen Elizabeth I, but rejected as traitors for being Catholics and priests, such as I am. We know from contemporary accounts how many of them were loved as pastors and holy people by the wider population, not just the Catholic community. We also know that these martyrdoms, whatever the exuberance of some elements in the crowds, were also observed with silence and grave respect by others. I should recall that the executions of Protestants under Queen Mary were no less ill-advised and repellent to humane Catholics, who no more sought for the Reformation Protestants the violent repression that their co-religionists had endured under Henry VIII and Edward VI and would again endure under Elizabeth. By the time St George’s was built, England had exhausted itself of religious blood-letting and civil war. St George’s was to provide a new sacred space of godly learning and glorious music, especially that of Händel, that has been part of the shaping of our nation’s culture and Christian civilisation. Even while penal restrictions on Catholic Christians persisted, another nearby sanctuary of God’s adoration and freedom in the Holy Spirit arose for Catholics, at the Church of the Assumption and St Gregory on Warwick Street. Today we address our differences with the honest reconciliation of memory, and the practice of ecumenism and friendship, as well as in united service of those in need. We realise that we do not defend separate sides but are heirs to a history held in common. We are able to love, because we have been all been brought to our knees by the suffering of those who went before us, whose lives were called out of their bodies for being faithful to Christ, and because the hardness of heart in all of us has been melted by beauty and forgiveness, in worship and its music.

Both St George’s and the Assumption quietly stand in monumental witness to what has been sacrificed for faith in the past, and what is held in store for those who hope and trust. As St James has reminded us this morning, “The trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire” (James 1. 3-4). St George was certainly patient in his faith sorely tried in 303. His remains are venerated to this day in the Holy Land, and the crown of a life made perfect and entire is his. In his company are the martyrs whose relics are enshrined at Tyburn Convent, St John Southworth at Westminster Cathedral, and those Reformers whose memorials stand close to Smithfield at St James’s, Clerkenwell.

Yet these are not remembrances of death, but of life. The feast of St George that we celebrate today has fallen in the Octave of Easter; and he and they are witnesses that all who have been baptized into Christ, were “baptized into his death, thus buried in order to be raised with Him from the dead through the glory of the Father, and walk in newness of life” (Romans 6. 3-4). The remains of St George at Lod and of the saints in all kinds of other shrines, together with all the Churches raised in their honour, are not memorials to a life that receded into the past, but they are, so to speak, relics of Christ’s act of resurrection and edifices of the Kingdom that is now and for ever. For “every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit” (John 15.2). Our holy and honoured martyrs and heroes were not destroyed, but made fruitful for more vigorous growth and enduring life: life that is not mere survival in this world, but the fulness of life in eternal heaven lived now upon temporary earth.

Today in our Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, owing to ancient calendrical calculations by which we and the West over time fell out of step, it is Pascha, Easter Day. We sing, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs giving life.” We are singing this dozens of times today because yesterday we sang, “Today the Abyss sighed and cried out, My power has been destroyed. For I received a dead Man as one of their dead, but I could not hold Him. Then I also lost with Him all those who were under His power. From the beginning I held the dead, but now this One raises them. Glory to Your Cross and resurrection, O Lord.”

I cannot fail to recall those people who are our fellow Christians in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Reformed Baptist Church, Ukrainian Jews and Muslims, and other Ukrainian people, all of whom have done nothing wrong and provoked nothing, but only served and lived, like St George, with faithful love, integrity, and loyal virtue. This week we have heard of horrific sexual attacks inflicted upon children, women and even young soldiers taken captive. Several of our churches around the world have been desecrated, and a priest managed to save his children with only moments to spare after his wife was woken and saw an intruder light petrol poured through their door while they slept. At the beginning of Lent, a priest was confronted at gunpoint by a soldier pretending to be a monk ordering him to abandon his Catholic faith by either becoming Russian Orthodox or a pagan, saying, “It makes no difference”. And at the end of Lent on Good Friday, a car was driven at speed right into our cathedral at Ternopil, destroying the Cross and the Shroud of Christ that we lay out for the people who pour out their love and devotion before them.

We have no argument with our Russian and Russian Orthodox friends - our people wish they had no argument with us. What we cannot understand is why Christian hearts, after the receding past of enmity and estrangement, should abandon the dialogue of love and instead turn on other Christians, harming the innocent on the days of Christ’s own trials, even on the feast when He brings nothing but life and peace - and not destruction, but salvation and his own divine beauty. St George’s is a haven of this beauty that saves the world, a potent symbol of faithful discipleship in the footsteps of Christ, and the beacon of St George its patron who followed Him as far as death and into the kingdom of life that is everlasting. So may St George, who is also the patron of this our beloved homeland, as well as patron of the City of Moscow, by his patient endurance, by the perfection with which he was crowned, pray for those entrusted to his intercession, break the hearts of those who have chosen to be evil, and share with them the gift he himself has received – peace and resurrection, and the life of a Kingdom that is not of this world but which we pray every day will come on earth as it is in heaven.

St George the Great Martyr, pray for us. Glory to England. Glory to Ukraine. Glory to Jesus Christ. Glory for ever. Christ is risen.

All Saints of Britain: Homily at the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 10th June 2018,

A wonderful project among the Orthodox Churches established in Britain is to list the saints of these western islands that the East shares with the West from the time of our complete communion in the One Body of the Lord’s Church.

With the coming of the people of the Eastern Churches to Britain, obviously their treasured memory is of saints in the lands from which they came and would possibly never see again. We can think of St Sergius of Valaam, St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt from the Russian tradition; St Charalambous and St Silouan of Athos from the Greek Church; St Sava from Serbia; St Charbel from the Maronite Church; desert fathers St Shenouda  and St Bishoy from the Coptic Church; St Gregory of Narek from the Armenian tradition, now a doctor of the universal Church; St Olga and St Volodymyr from the Kievan Church to which our Ukrainian Catholic tradition belongs, as well as new martyrs such as the ecumenist Blessed Mykolai Charnetsky. Only recently the Cathedral in Preston of the new Syro-Malabar eparchy has been dedicated to St Alphonsa of Kottayam-Travancore. This is a cause for joy, because it enriches our awareness in Britain of the great cloud of witnesses in the Church from across the world; and western Christians can come to love, venerate and learn from them as our own. There is nothing new in this. The Church in England in the last two hundred years has embraced the saints of Ireland, from St Brigid of Kildara to St Kieran, St Kevin, and St Brendan the Navigator. By the same token, Anglicans who recently brought the Church of England’s patrimony and historical memory into the Catholic Church can now celebrate as their own the post-Reformation saints of Catholic Europe: not only England’s St Edmund Campion and Blessed John Henry Newman, but St Francis de Sales, St Margaret Mary Alacoque, St Alphonsus Liguori and St Maria Goretti.

In the same way our beloved Orthodox brothers and sisters whose Churches have living roots in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine and so on, as well now as here, have taken to their hearts St Columba, St Aidan, St Bede, St Cuthbert, St Chad, St Hilda, St Wilfrid, St Etheldreda, St Erconwald, St Edmund, St Ethelburga, St Dunstan and St Hildelith. This makes immediate sense when you consider that St Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury 668-690, was a bishop from the patriarchate of Antioch.

A shared martyrology from the first millennium is not, however, the end of the story. As St John Paul encouraged the Christians of the West divided on Catholic-Protestant lines, and of the East divided along Catholic-Orthodox lines, there needs to be a healing of our highly charged memories. It then needs to lead, said Pope Benedict, to a reconciliation of those memories. For the saints and martyrs are not holy because they stood up for one side against another, but because they stood for Christ, obedient even unto death.  In the First World War, Christendom went into collapse because the home of Christian civilisation in Europe tore itself apart, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant states fell upon each other claiming that the Lord was on their side. But the resounding question of the Scriptures is, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” Pope Benedict XV pleaded for peace and reconciliation among Christians, only to be rebuffed by the combatants, even Catholics. A hundred years on, we are still dealing with the consequences of our European shame, since we placed ethnic, imperial and national interest above the imperatives of human virtue and divine law, of the Kingdom  of justice and peace on earth as it is in heaven. Thus our continent came to endure 70 years of atheistic materialist communism, which brought the Churches under its sway to their knees, It was also sucked int the twelve-year hell of the no less atheistic death cult of Nazism. And now, the nations that prided themselves as little as a decade ago as the defenders and restorers of Christian peace, civilisation, and ethical values regard the following of Christ as itself unjust and immoral, as country after country dethrones the sacredness of humanity in God’s image to promote the destruction of life in the very womb in which it was conceived, and the legally enforced liquidation of the terminally ill. It is hard to compare favourably what this is making of our humanity with our western liberal values of human progress and enlightenment. It seems to bear out the necessity of the view of the Fathers of the Church - that the spiritual reality of our existence is superior to the earthly life that we can touch. We think that here is what reality is, and that what lies beyond is somehow less real because less tangible - an inspiring ideal maybe, but not quite substantial. Yet it is the firmer reality; for it is beyond the power of death to destroy it. It has the power to enter our world and connect with it, through making physical beings spiritual, through giving temporary minds the vision that they are eternal souls, through making lives that are not yet completed holy.

In seizing this higher existence as the true reality now, the healing and reconciliation of memories means taking to heart the loves, the beloved and the vision of those with whom we disagree for the earthly moment – and also seeing our own limitations and lack of perfection as the raw material for our repentance and forgiveness, and thus for our recreation raising us up to heavenly living. Yet a few hundred yards from this Cathedral is the site of the Tyburn Tree, a gibbet on which dozens of faithful Catholic priests and lay people were hanged, then drawn and quartered by a sword while still conscious, as traitors to the Anglican state. A few miles in the other direction at Smithfield, Protestant clergy and lay people, faithful to the Christ they saw in the words of the New Testament freshly available to them in English, were burned to death as heretics to the Catholic faith. Above our heads in the Holy Place is the icon of St Josaphat, who was murdered in 1623 in an insurrection of those opposed to the unity of the Eastern Church with the See of Peter at Rome for which he as bishop stood. In turn, 93 Orthodox were sentenced to death in punishment. The wounds are still open and there are other stories in other regions, where division between Christians has led to violence and the shedding of blood, supposedly in the defence of faith.
It was the Lord Jesus Himself who foresaw that the disunity of Christians would be a scandal causing the world to disbelieve in God: “May they all be one as You and I are one,” he prayed to the Father, “so that the world may believe it was You Who sent Me.” So we realise that the once Christian world has turned from life and trust in God, not because it has lost interest in God but because we Christians by our persistent disunity and self-interest have made our protestations about God’s sovereign rule, the reconciling power of His love, the prevailing power of His justice in the face of evil and human adversity, and the healing of His goodness, simply unbelievable.

Pope Benedict on his Apostolic Visit to Britain in 2010 reminded us that we must give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us of the Christ who died on the Cross, is risen and ascended over all. He called on us not to see our Churches as competing monopolies on the truth, but the reliable vessels for entering ever more deeply the mystery of the Church, which is none other than one life in one Lord. In the profound commemorations of the martyrs of English Christian divisions we have come to realise that we belong not to different sides but to a history that unites us. Moreover, when those martyrs, Catholic and Protestant alike, died for fidelity to Christ as they saw it, they did not die in separation and go to a separate purgatory or a separate heaven. They died in union with Christ, and their holiness was not their own but His alone.

In the years to come, we who look on the icons that gaze out from heaven to put us into visual and physical contact with holiness will be saints too. And the saints of Britain will not be those we recognise from the backgrounds and sides to which we belong for the moment, but those people made perfect by the sheer love and dwelling of the Holy Spirit within them. Already in our Catholic Church we venerate saints from the Orthodox Church – notably St Gregory Palamas – just as we honour the spiritual leaders of the non-Catholic west, such as John and Charles Wesley. In parts of Orthodoxy, there is love for Catholic saints like St Francis, St Thomas Aquinas, and St Therese of Lisieux. All this is telling us that the Lord, whose very teaching cured every weakening and dividing sickness among the people, and united us all by His declaration of the Kingdom (Matthew 4.23), is indeed the Perfecter of a faith weighed down with sin in the world, the Pioneer who causes us to run on into the cloud of witnesses (cf. Hebrews 12.2), until we run into each other when finally come to a stop at Him – finding ourselves at last on the Lord’s side and never against anyone else’s, at last holy as He is holy.

Mother of The Church: Sermon at Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage, 5th May, 2018

In a few weeks’ time we shall be keeping for the first time the feast of Mary Mother of the Church. The history behind this new commemoration is significant for those desiring the Church’s unity.

Following Pope Pius XII’s definition of the Assumption as a teaching of the Church necessary for salvation - because it emphasised the sanctity of physical life in the hope of resurrection, in the light of Nazi and Stalinist evils - there was a powerful movement for a further declaration on the role that Mary plays in our redemption. When St John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, numerous bishops promoted the dogmatic definition of Mary as Co-Redeemer and Mediatrix of All Graces. Now, it is true that without Mary’s assent, Christ our Redeemer could never have been born to her, and thus go on to effect our salvation on the Cross. And it is also true that none of us receives the fruits of that sacrifice without co-operating with the grace of God and, as St Paul puts it, working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. So, in that sense, we are all co-redeemers, co-operators with the grace of redemption, bringing about the power of Christ to save us by turning to his love and mercy in repentance, and by seeking the gift of faith to grow ever closer to Him in love and holiness.

And Mary has been called Mediatrix for two reasons. First, not because she is the gate-keeper, but because she is the Gate, who willingly opened for Him to come to us and we to Him. Secondly she is called Mediatrix, because Christ is the sole mediator of our salvation - he alone died and rose again for our sake - and all Mary’s graces come from Him. Thus Mary is mediator of all graces not because she makes or supplies them, but because she is the foremost to pray for them - just as she prayed her Son to give the new wine of the Kingdom at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, and just as she stood at the foot of the Cross to the very end, praying silently before her Son as He worked for the forgiveness and restoration of the whole of humanity. Christ the sole mediator of our salvation; Mary the foremost in the mediation of interceding for us.

Devotion to Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix has deep roots in the Scriptures, in the Fathers, in our spirituality in the western Catholic Church and in our liturgy. For instance, in our Mass every day, we offer the gifts bestowed by God as oblations to the Father in Christ’s communion with the Blessed Virgin and the apostles, martyrs and saints. There is even an optional feast of Our Lady under these titles on May 31st. But to insist on this one particular way of looking at our approach to God - or rather His approach to us – as a teaching of the Church necessary for salvation?

Yet at the Second Vatican Council, the urge to proclaim it gained momentum. But so did a richer way of describing the mystery of the Church as not only the Body of Christ, but also as the faithful People of God established by communion in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our Lady’s significance came to be understood as the foremost intercessor among the faithful, as the prime example of those who have been redeemed by Christ, as the one who is full of grace from the Spirit of God so that we in turn thanks to her prayers may receive grace upon grace. Therefore, it was decided that there would be no separate declaration about Mary’s role in our salvation at the Council. Instead she is placed within the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, as its crowning section about the Church’s meaning for and about all humanity.

But how to describe her? A declaration of Mary as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix seemed out of context. The terms were mentioned, but it was clear that the thinking behind them was alien to Protestants, who were respected observers at the Council, and for whom they would cause more questions than explain if used as the main titles, as some had hoped. The Council’s advisers dug into the Church’s tradition and asked, “What about Mary as Type of the Church - she who is typical of the Church and everyone in it?” This too is mentioned, but it was felt to be too technical to be the declared title. Nowadays we might have suggested “Icon of the Church”, but this was not as imaginable in those days as it is today.

Eventually, thoughts turned to the words of Christ to His Mother from the Cross, “Behold your Son”, and to St John, “Behold your mother”. The experts and bishops asked, “What, if we were to describe Mary as Mother - of the Church as one Body of Christ in the household of faith?” The notion won assent, but there were new objections.

[Catholic critics pointed out that the Church already had the Virgin as Patron: Our Lady of Victory. But this description dates from the moment in 1571 when the naval power of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which had overthrown the Greek Orthodox Eastern Roman Empire, was defeated at Lepanto. The victory prevented the invasion of Italy, the Islamic capture of Rome, and the extension of Islam further into Europe and the Atlantic. Pope Pius V attributed the prevention of western Christendom from suffering the same calamity as the East to the intercession of Our Lady and the Rosary. We still keep the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, or of Our Lady of Victory, for this reason in October 5th. But it did not fit what the Fathers of Vatican II were trying to express concerning the life of the Church as heaven on Earth, and how Mary serves in God’s scheme of all humanity’s salvation. Moreover, it was couched in terms of past history and strife between religions, states and individual persons. Could there not be a more positive account of the Church? Besides, Our Lady as Patron, whether of Victory or the Rosary, is a masculine term. The Council was seeking after a Matron instead: the Mother for our Mother the Church.

Greater anxiety arose from an even more unexpected quarter]: the Eastern Catholics and the Orthodox observers at the Council. They said, “If you speak of Mary as Mother of the Church, you exalt her above the Church, as though she is outside it, as though it came out of her as if she gave birth to it, which is not true. Yet she is not above the Church, as she watches, prays and hopes for it. She is an essential part of it within it. She is nothing if she is not a disciple too - if she is not the first of those to hear the Word, if she is not first among those to be redeemed, if she is not the first to be united with God in Christ.” Furthermore, they explained, numerous times every day in the East in the services, Mary is referred to as Mother of God. The title is crucial is crucial and must stand pre-eminent. It became common currency at the Council of Ephesus in the third century, when it became essential to make it crystal clear that Mary’s human Son was none other than God Himself taking flesh. For if God does not become human, how can His salvation work inside of our human nature; and how can we become one with Him as He said we are to be? So, to the East, Mary’s being Mother refers primarily not to us, but to her Son’s work in our flesh for our sake. For a moment, then, it seemed that the Catholic Church’s relations with Orthodoxy might stand or fall on using this one phrase: Mother of the Church. If Catholics enshrined it at a Council, would it be teaching that the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics could never express? Was it such a distorted of our shared faith as to be heresy?

Swiftly, however, the text was finalised to declare Mary as Mother of God "within the mystery of Christ and the Church". It shows that Mary is not interceding and standing as Mother above the Church, but within, praying and loving at its heart, for ever serving as a vessel for grace to flow to us from Christ - always the Mother that is the one who gave birth to Him who in turn bestowed her on us as our constant Mother at the foot of the cross that we daily take up in turn, never leaving our side as we follow Him, just as she never left Him.

If you look at the image of the Crucified, you will often see this mystery expressed by the Lord speaking to St John on the left and the Mother of God on the right, and thus founding the first household of faith within which she is Mother too. But Pope Francis has set the feast of her Motherhood in the Church not in Passiontide, but on the Monday in the old octave of Pentecost. If you look at Eastern Church icons, you may understand why. In icons of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, you will invariably see present the Mother of God, often holding forward the protective veil by which her intercession covers the people of God in their needs. You could also bear in mind the western mediæval image of Our Lady of Mercy, in which the Virgin’s head-veil is capacious enough to extend around all the saints and faithful who shelter beneath it, turning to her for prayers for mercy from God - Who will freely grant then out of such pure exchanges of love for love. Look more closely at how each of these images is set out – Christ lifted on his Cross and the Virgin and St John at its foot either sides; the Mother to St John and the Apostles either side holding out a veil; Our Lady of Mercy extending her veil with her arms around God’s children - and you might see the form of The Dove, His wings outstretched to encompass all those whom He is making holy.

And this is why Pope Francis, I suspect, has chosen the day immediately following Pentecost: Not only because Mary was integral to the fellowship of the apostles when the Holy Spirit brought His power upon the infant Church, but because, overshadowing her from the moment of Christ’s incarnation at the message from archangel Gabriel rendering her full of grace, truly she is filled with Him. And, if she is Mother to the Church, Mother for the Church and Mother in the Church, it is only so because most truly it is from the Holy Spirit that her Motherhood to, for and within the Church has come.

The approaching feast of Our Lady Mother of the Church comes from an idea 50 years ago that unexpectedly caused ecumenical commotion. It drew on reflections by previous popes and even going back to St Ambrose, but always seeing the Mother within the Church, "co-operating with the birth and growth of divine life in the souls of the redeemed" as the first among their number, as Blessed Paul VI confirmed when he declared her Mother of the Church in his Credo of the People of God a few years after the Lumen Gentium in 1968. Thus, there was to be no proclamation of a dogma that could divide us further, but there was a steep learning curve that taught the Catholic Church to be precise about how it teaches about our redemption in Christ, what we mean by our faith in the sacrifice of the Eucharist, the mediation of Christ and the intense intercession of the Virgin for Christ’s people in union with her Son. But it also enabled a profound realisation that everything that we love about Mary - and turn to her for - comes from none other than Christ as the gift of the Holy Spirit – the Spirit Who would fill us as He filled her, Who leads us into all truth as she in turn leads us to do Whatever He tells us to, the Spirit Who is placed within every prophet of God, just as she is placed in the Household of Faith as its Mother. 

And when our unity in that Household comes, because it is the only one that Christ ever founded for us, it will be at the intercession of its Mother filled with same Holy Spirit Who alone was with Christ in the night of His agony, when He prayed, “Father, may they all be one as you and I are one.”

Mary, Our Lady of Mercy, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, pray that we may all be one as the Father and the Son are one, in the Holy Spirit – “that the world may believe.”

Sermon at the Re-Dedication of the Fynes Clinton Chantry Chapel of the Holy Cross, Our Lady of Victory and St John, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, 22nd February 2018

Every so often in the Holy Land, the archaeological survey uncovers an intriguing find that makes you think, “Of course, that makes sense.” Once I was taken to the museum at Hazor, where there were dozens of little metal and golden animals, each with a minute saddle on it. A remarkable scholar-priest of the Society of the Sacred Mission, Brother Gilbert Sinden, was our guide. He said, “These are golden calves.” He explained that the great story in Exodus (Exodus 32) of the Hebrews melting all their coin and jewellery down to fashion a great model beast, was not so as to worship it in place of the Lord their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, but so that they create a situation, a designated place where they could bring God down and make him sit, some throne where they could locate God and hold him to: hence the saddle. You will remember how Moses eventually comes back down from the mountain with the tablets of the Law and is so incensed that he drops the two stones and rushes to destroy the most profound misconception of God. For Moses has been in the ground of the Burning Bush, taken up into the mountain and brought into God’s sphere; he has encountered Him not face to face but face to mystery, face to intriguing, inscrutable but revealing mystery. It is not for us to bring God down to our size, to have Him in a position where we can corner Him, even on a throne. It is for us to be drawn out into Him. “There will come a time,” says the Lord in the Scriptures (John 4), “when people will not worship the Lord in this mountain,” and its wild expanse , “but in spirit and in truth.” (John 4.21-23.) So we have the beginnings of what we recognise as our own tradition. Not a golden representation of a divine being on which God is to be positioned and pinpointed, but a recreation of that desert and mountain top wilderness, the tent of meeting, where God comes to be present among His people - yet found in His ways, not at our behest.

We are told by C.S. Lewis that Aslan is a wild lion; and so, it is not we who create the conditions for His presence, but He who makes the conditions for ours. Thus in our churches, an altar is set within a house where no being or representation from another dimension is turned off and on - not even hints of the “magical supernatural” that we can grasp on to, but only the sacred patterns of acts and tangible things of this creation in among which our God slips in, and beyond, saying, “Behold the dwelling of God is among men and women!” Here we see not artefacts set up to be our objects of adoration, but Crosses, icons, pictures and images that are signs drawing us out from our own minds into the mind and mystery of the Spirit of God - whose presence, which they indicate and even convey, we have come into. Here we see no golden-calf containment of the whole Divine Existence, but a tabernacle, a tent-of-meeting-us for God on the move - across the desert, by the mountains, into cities and over time and space. Within is nothing more otherworldly than daily bread, to the world a token or memento, but from heaven’s perspective the means time and again (and never permanently locked down by us) that the Lord chooses for his point of entry into our midst, in among the patterns, rites and signs that He has set by grace through our nature in our creation.

Another archaeological wonder lies beneath St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Behind the wall that cuts across Peter’s grave beneath the shrine in the crypt is an old passage along one side of which is a stone row of seats, then a gap where the western end of the grave is cut in two by the wall, and then another stone row. I often wonder if that gap was left, not just to respect the grave, but to place the famous chair now lost to us, the chair on which Peter had once sat to inspire and teach the first church in Rome of the Christ he knew and loved, the chair which it took a generation for his successors to say they would sit on, the chair the idea of which we celebrate today, as the focus of our bond and dream of unity in the Catholic Faith, in but one Church inseparable from the successor of Peter. I wonder.

Yet another archaeological find last year was the foundation of a building with a large room in Nazareth, bearing hints of ancient Christian usage. Was it the synagogue in which Christ had said the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him; or was it the house of an apostle, or even of the Holy Family, where the first Christian disciples had still gathered for ages after, to hear again and again the stories that Jesus told, to honour the Divine Mother and St Joseph, and to praise Our Lord for His saving Cross and Resurrection? We will never know.

Yet here today we find ourselves in the midst of a captivating sacred geography of our own. There to the west is the Holy House of England’s Nazareth, and to its north east the chapel of St John. Within a few steps, then, we find ourselves at the same moment at the Incarnation and in its inevitable outcome at the foot of the Cross. The Mother of God, who speaks her consent to the archangel Gabriel, signals her consent to her Son and Lord, when He gives to her St John the Beloved as her own son too. Within a few steps, we move from the House of the Holy Family in Nazareth to the new Household of Faith that is the domestic church begun that first Good Friday in Jerusalem. From this house of St John, the young disciple who had remained with Mary at the Cross ran to see the emptied Tomb; and then he ran back with news of the resurrection of her Son (John 20.1-10). This sacred space of St John’s Chapel, whose renovation by the Catholic League (whose chapel it has always been) we give thanks for today, is thus fittingly the Chapel of the Holy Cross too - and a Chapel of our Lady of that Cross’s Victory, as well. We stand physically at this moment within the patterns God has set to enter into our lives and existence, to draw us into His presence and its purpose - our salvation. Here we are in among and between the moment of His Incarnation, His death on the Cross, His foundation of the Church to be the Body that brings the presence of His Body into the midst of the world, His resurrection, and the dwelling of God among men and women on earth, and thus the dwelling of men and women in the midst of God in heaven.

But there is one coordinate of the pattern of our sacred geography missing. Where is Peter, who ran with John to the tomb in all this. We hear the Lord’s commission to be the one to feed Christ’s lambs out of love for the Master. And we hear that Peter is to be the very rock on which the household of the Church is to be built. Where is he in this place of sacred interwoven times and patterns?
When Henry Joy Fynes Clinton, who was such an influential supporter of the restoration of the pilgrimage to this Holy House, founded the Catholic League, he set down an imperturbable principle: that the command of Christ “that they all be one” had to face the hard fact that there could be no unity between Christians and their churches that was not a unity of the church in its wholeness. There could be no unity to the exclusion of others, no reconciliation with Christ that allowed for a Church divided. There could be no Catholic unity that countenanced a Church without Peter. His idea was resisted and suspect, as it remains; but it would never go away. In the end, it became the basic purpose of the Anglican-RC dialogue to find how our divided churches could again be one - with integrity - and not without Peter to feed the lambs and to be the rock-foundation to all we say of the hope that lies within us, our hope in the Cross and resurrection of the incarnate Lord who is God among us.

We who have been drawn into the presence of God in this place on the feast of St. Peter’s Chair bear witness that we have been walked among by the Lord, who was incarnate at the house in Nazareth, who claimed His victory on the Cross, and who burst with news of resurrection into the house where Mary lived with John, giving new life and meaning on the brightest day to those who had stood by Him in the darkest hour. We walk thus in turn at this moment in many places in time and space - the place of the Annunciation to Mary is the place of Christ’s annunciation of Himself to us; the foot of the Cross is our place, too; and the Tomb emptied in expectation of ascension to heaven is our own natural habitat. And sustaining it all is the rock, the apostle Peter, who guides the Church in history to return constantly to the Lord, as the sheep that listen to His voice, the lambs to be fed and loved by Him into the kingdom.

On this day we find our place in the divine pattern - there is Mary; over there is John; and on Peter we are standing. But above all, it is the Lord who is present among us, for behold the dwelling of God is with us!

Address for the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament from the Church of Our Lady Immaculate, Farm Street, visiting the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family for Benediction, Latin Feast of Corpus Christi, 18th June, 2017

Today, before the Sacrament of the Eucharist, our gaze is held by the vision of the Universal Church: one, holy, Catholic and apostolic. Today we are all one, in the same anticipation of that moment immediately before Holy Communion, now repeated in this ceremony of adoration, and of hope. Today the most precious Gift of the Western Church comes in solemn rite to the Eastern Church, and this Blessed Sacrament conjoins us in Its Presence. Today we stand on the imminent edge of the perfect union of eternity; we see the end to our divisions, between Catholic and Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican, nation and nation, between race and race, the rulers and the ruled, rich and poor, between rival principle, ideal and passion; and between earthbound preoccupation and heavenly peace, good will. Today we see before us the resolution of everything in the Kingdom of God that has come among us.

For God is with us! The Latin Church’s adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and the rite of Benediction, is not part of the custom of the Byzantine Church. But, like you, who have brought the Lord in His Presence here to us with such honour, we also reserve the Sacrament upon the Altar in the Ark, so that we may bring the Lord to the sick and dying, and to those newly reconciled to Christ after Confession. Yet it is untrue to think that we adore the Presence of God among us any less than our Latin fellow Catholics. Indeed, every Divine Liturgy that we serve contains the rites and customs that are resemble yours at the rite of Benediction.

Immediately after the Eucharist is consecrated, we bow down in worship and cover it with clouds of incense. And in that moment of high anticipation before Communion, we pause to contemplate His Presence and we pray to the Lord, who is God with us,

Attend, O Lord, Jesus Christ our God, from Your holy dwelling place and from the throne of glory in Your Kingdom, and come to sanctify us, You, who are seated on high with the Father and invisibly present here with us.

Then, at the end of the Holy Communion, when the Lord returns to the Holy Place, the priest holds up the Holy Gifts of Christ’s Body and Blood in the chalice, and he blesses them with It in the sign of the Cross, saying,

Save Your people, O God, and bless Your inheritance.

At once, the people acclaim,

 

We have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith. We worship the undivided Trinity for having saved us.

So, in a way, the rite of Benediction is a treasure of the Church of the East that is shared and loved in the Latin West. For us, it is integral to our Divine Liturgy, heaven amid the world; for you, it takes the Liturgy out and beyond. It is all the same mystery, approaching us in different ways, and drawing us into the same Kingdom of Heaven according to the different roads the Lord has provided for us to walk with Him - from your part of Jerusalem and our part of Jerusalem - to His Emmaus where He makes Himself known in the breaking of Bread.

 

On this your Feast of Corpus Christi, the most precious Thing that heaven affords you have brought on your path as the Church through this world. In the western Tradition, the Sacrament is exposed and adored, for moments, for hours, perpetually. Thus, praying without thinking, prayer without words, unites the adoring soul into the prayer of Christ Himself, into His intercession. It bonds us in His work of mediation, and brings to fruition the prayer of the night before He died that we may all be one, as He and the Father are one in unbroken and eternal communication of self-giving love. In the East, such an act of adoration is not the custom. Yet we can add a "take" of our own.

 

You see before you the Iconostasis, bearing the icons of the Lord, the Mother of God and the saints, looking out from the Holy Place where the Blessed Eucharist now stands enthroned. We constantly venerate these icons. But they are never the mere objects of our devotion. For it is not we who look at them, but they whose image looks out on us. It is as though here, in the Temple, the veil between the Kingdom of Heaven and the kingdom of this world is very thin. This is what we mean by the reign and the Kingdom of God. Here, against this very thin veil, the Lord and His saints, and "The One who Bore Him", press their faces, transfigured in glory, to look upon us, to hold our gaze, to attract our hearts into the mysteries of the Divine Majesty that lies beyond, to ensure that the Divine Majesty transfigures us too, and adorns every aspect of our faith, our hope, our love and our living as His disciples. So, while we look in adoration upon the Church’s Most Blessed Sacrament, to the world we are regarding nothing more than a symbol, an object, a work of spiritual imagination. Yet thanks to the gift of faith, we see that quietly, insistently, almost unnoticed, we are being surveyed by one Thing in our midst that is constant and unmoving in a life of constant change and re-arrangement: we are being measured for the Kingdom of God, we are being asked by the Lord to stay with Him, to persevere, and to allow grace upon grace to take its effect. So it is not just that we venerate the Lord, for our Creator in His humility and mercy has chosen in the Lord's humanity to venerate us and raise us up. It is less that we adore and pour out our hearts to Him, and more that He adores us and pours our His heart upon us. It is less that we hope for heaven, and more that He hopes for the world. It is less that we are sinners, and more that He is Mercy Itself. It is less that we hope to come to the Kingdom of God, and more that He is our King. For God is with us.

 

And so we declare, “we have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith. We worship the undivided Trinity for having saved us.”

 

The address was followed immediately by a recitation of the Prayer before the Ambo from the Divine Liturgy of St John Chryosostom, and Benediction in the Latin rite.

Can the Ordinariates represent Christian Unity

This paper was delivered at the Third Receptive Ecumenism Conference at Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, in June 2014 and then substantially developed at the suggestion of Professor Paul Murray to set the discussion of historical origins, Anglican patrimony and ecumenism of life in the context of the crystallised and phased method of receptive ecumenical learning that he had set out in 2011 at Bose, for the inaugural session of ARCIC III.

It also draws on two earlier talks given to two "groups of Anglicans" in early 2010 - the first on the ecumenical significance and potential of the Anglicanorum Coetibus, and the second reflecting more on what constitutes the Anglican patrimony and the mutual enrichment of Anglican becoming Catholics and Catholics drawing from Anglican tradition in a forthcoming ecumenism of life together - and contribute to the ongoing ecumenism of the Catholic Church with the Anglican Communion.

The full paper can be downloaded here.

St John the Theologian on a Sunday of Tone 7, Homily at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, 9 October 2016

We remember the Beloved Disciple John today, above all the apostle of the eternal life and love of God. But, being Sunday, we invariably commemorate the Resurrection, for week by week we are given a constant experience of the reality that we enter into and that enters into us. To this end, we have eight sets of hymns, one for each musical tone, that we sing each week in turn over a couple of months. This Sunday we sing the hymns of the seventh tone, last week the sixth and next week the eighth. In this way, the hymns are always familiar when they come round; but they are always fresh, too, because each week we move from one perspective to another. We do not get used to just one set; and with each new week we are surprised by a different angle upon Christ.

In this week’s troparion, we say to Christ our God, “You opened paradise to the thief, You turned the myrhhbearers’ lamentation into joy.” We go on to proclaim that this is because He is risen, and He replies – through the apostles and the Church’s songs – “Yes, I am risen, for I am merciful – that is the reason why.” In the kontakion, we go on to imagine the Saviour saying to us, “Now come forth to Me – Come to the Resurrection.” So it is not just that the Merciful Lord came to us at Bethlehem, went up on the Cross to bring mercy to us, or came up out of the Tomb to bring the Kingdom to us. His outward movement towards and into us is also about our coming to Him, being brought in our movement towards and into Him: “Come into the Resurrection!”

In a talk at the fascinating conference on paths to Christian Unity that has preceded this Liturgy, we heard how our shared Christian faith is not just a matter of body and soul, but of heart and imagination too. In the beautiful and striking hymns that we have sung in turn since the first millennium, we in our eastern Church for our part are taken, then, into this realm of imagination by which we enter the Kingdom of the heart of Christ Who adores us more than we can possibly adore Him. Here, we can meet, and love and worship together, with and in the Church of heaven which is invisible to us but where there is no division from Christ. As the Orthodox Metropolitan Platon (Gorodetsky) of Kiev, said, in words of pioneering mystical ecumenism that inspired Father Paul Couturier to reimagine the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, “The walls of separation do not rise as far as heaven.” So, perhaps the eastern imagination of the life of resurrection and being brought into it week by week – “Come into the Resurrection” – with our very visual worship and its movement of colour and image, and fragrance and sound – is something we can humbly offer to our fellow Christians, adding to the dimensions of body and soul, heart and imagination in the Life of Christ that we lead in His Body.

For the power of the liturgical and spiritual imagination – which is of course something that belongs to all our traditions in different ways – takes us back to reflect on the meaning and nature of God’s love with St John the Beloved. In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches of the East we often call him St John the Theologian, not just because of the words and mysteries he wrote out, but because it was the disciple whom Jesus loved that spoke to God, who has as a result spoken of God, and whom God has spoken to, close to Him, right to the heart. St John thus says, “No one has ever seen God” (Epistle – I John 4.12-19); and then he meditates profoundly on the perfect life of love in Christ as nonetheless the very vision of Christ in God. We have not seen God, but God has seen us. We have not loved God before He first loved us. We are to be seen, then, as those who are loved by God. More than that, what is seen us is none other than the love and eternal life of God, none other. “No one has ever seen God”; but they can see us.

And so, this angle that we have on Christ that I spoke about before turns out really to be His angle on us. We imagine we behold Him in His risen glory – and we are excited by love and life to the full. But while this is so deeply true of the nature of things even in this world, what we are really seeing is Him beholding us out of mercy. It is the Merciful who is risen from the dead, and our own resurrection from Him will be because we too have been changed into Mercy, that is the living vision of God’s life of eternal love. For when we say, “Save us,” it is from being merciless, being unloving, and thus unliving in Christ that we cry to be kept.

May this Christ, who is that Mercy Itself, save us; for He is good and He loves mankind.

Sunday 24th January, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, St Stephen's Anglican Church, Lewisham

When Pope Benedict came to Westminster Abbey in 2010, he called for unity between Christians in their life and faith in the Risen Christ, so that we could give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us. (I Peter 3.15)

In other words, everyone expects there to be rival supermarkets, rival football teams; and no one would stake their life on any claim their fans and advertisers make. But religion is different. Everyone expects the Church to be one. Religion means “tied up with God”, so people of religion are supposed to be people of peace and goodness, people of love and unconditional forgiveness, people of brave hope. Most of all they expect our prayers should get through to God, because God has got through to us, and made us different as human beings. Not better, but capable of seeming to look like the one Lord we worship, the Christ we recommend as the truth and the hope of the world. They are telling us, ‘You pray every day “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. But on earth, you live in separate heavens. You have your Anglo-Catholic heaven, your Roman Catholic heaven, your Pentecostal heaven, your Evangelical heaven, your Orthodox heaven and many more. Which is the true one? Where is this Kingdom come on earth? How do we find our way to it?”

Pope Francis has been very blunt about this. He has noticed that when the criminal gangs currently posing as Muslims come to murder our Christian brothers and sisters in the ancient Churches the Middle East, as well as in parts of Africa and Asia, they never ask, “Are you Anglican?” , or “Are you Coptic?”; “Are you Orthodox?”; “Are you Protestant, or Catholic?” They just ask, “Are you a Muslim, or a Nazarene?” Pope Saint John Paul, Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have each said that what unites us all is the martyrs for Christ’s Name. Following Christ to the end and what He called “No greater love than to lay down your life for your friends” (John 15.13) achieve complete communion in His own sacrifice, for the martyrs first and the fruit is for us. Pope Francis calls it the “ecumenism of blood”. It is true that it brings us very close in concern for each other, even thousands of miles apart; it makes us realise that what counts before the world is the common account we give, not of our rival institutions, but of one Church, our One Lord, the One Faith, One Baptism and the One God and Father. (Ephesians 4.5)

In today’s Epistle (I Corinthians 12. 12-30), Saint Paul imagines an argument between the parts of the body in which the eye tells the hand, “I have no need for you”, and the head says to the feet, “You are no use to me.” He says, “Instead, God put all the separate parts into the body for a reason”. But we Christians behave as if St Paul really said the opposite, “God put the body into separate parts for a reason.” Yet, the night before Jesus died the Lord prayed, “Father, may they all be one, as you and I, Father and Son are one, so that the world may believe it was You that sent me.” (John 17. 21) He did not say, “May some of them be one”, but all. He did not say, “Anglicans have no need of Catholics,” or tell anyone to believe that their institution was the “one, true Church” to the exclusion of others. He told Saint Peter, out of love for Him, to feed His sheep. (John 21.15).  And He told the sheep, “Listen for My voice and follow Me” (John 10.27) and thus “become one flock with one shepherd, for I lay down My life, which is why the Father loves Me.” (John 10.17)

It is clear then that, to Jesus, the unity of His disciples - the complete and obvious wholeness of His Church - is not just a matter of obeying His words, however much it costs us. It is about the laying down of His own life as the price He paid to gather us into His Kingdom, and give all humanity a vision of its blessed living that lies not in an after-life, but from here and now. The Catholic Church has therefore set itself the task of putting back together again the visible and organic unity of the Church as Christ intended, so that it could really be a genuine picture of God’s own unity, Father, Son and Spirit; so that the world might believe us when we talk about a new life this side of death, real and physical, but also spiritual and already risen from the dead with Christ. Yet even the Catholic Church feels deeply that divisions among Christians make it difficult for her to attain in actual life what it is to be completely Catholic in every way. (Unitatis Redintegratio 4, Vatican II, 1964). So what is to be done?

It all reminds me of a book called Lilith, by George Macdonald, the writer who inspired C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, where a horse and carriage full of people, find themselves dead. A rich man and his wife behave with cruelty to the coachman they employed; the coachman kicks the horse; the horse refuses to move; the others argue, blaming each other in their terrible predicament. As time drags by, they realise that every time they hit out at each other, every time they do something nasty and selfish, a bit of their bodies falls off. Finally, the coachman kicks the horse again and, both reduced to bones, they collapse in a heap. But meanwhile, one of the party has noticed that when there is a word of kindness, a shared difficulty, help and compassion, somehow their sinews seem to grow stronger, the bones knit up, the flesh becomes firm and faces regain their brightness. The selfish man and wife quickly go back to their old ways and start to fall to pieces once more. But one re-learns the lesson and, slowly, comes together again. The other, as the rest resume their journey, is left behind, cursing from his heap on the ground. But what’s this? As the coach moves off again, it too starts to fall to pieces and the party realises that it cannot leave anyone behind. So they return and help the one who is not ready, to find his new life and be put together again. Then, in their resurrected new bodies, they move on from death into the Kingdom, no longer dead but alive.

So it is that the Church, feeling incapacitated in many ways by Christian disunity, urges each body of Christians to be very close to one another, whatever our disagreements, our past history together, our estrangement and such different styles of living in Christ’s Church. Seeing the riches in each tradition, it desires for them to be shared so that all may benefit, not locked up where the others cannot reach them. It presses us to be indivisible in service of humanity in the relief of poverty and the construction of peace and justice in a society that is a manifestation of the Kingdom of heaven.

But, when you look round the world and the Churches, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are getting further apart, with our distinctions getting sharper, with our unity, that once seemed so close we could touch it, now slipping further away as we react to conditions in a fast changing world. But we should not allow this. For there are signs that unity makes progress still. Look at the concerted effort of the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church to confront human trafficking and slave labour, especially of vulnerable women. Think of the many ways in all our parishes and dioceses, Catholics, Anglicans and Free Church people work together to be of service to the poor. A job of mine during each week is to work with those who help prisoners to overcome their past. One of the best things I know is a wonderful house in Streatham called Nehemiah, run by an Evangelical group helping ex-prisoners to leave drugs and drink behind and make a safe return to society free from the causes of their crime, so they never reoffend. It is very successful at this. Most interestingly, it also relies on a friendship and partnership with the Catholic community, who are seeking to set up more of these wonderful, hopeful houses in other parts. Another example is the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage which takes place every two years going to Walsingham for a few days, and in the other years making  a day pilgrimage to some other place of pilgrimage. This year in May we will go to Marian Oxford, visiting Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Methodist sites. Your own Father Philip Corbett and I, a Roman Catholic priest, are fellow trustees of this pilgrimage; and it is amazing how, despite everyone’s different Churches and beliefs, how close a spiritual bond is formed, as we go deep together into the mystery of our One Lord’s Incarnation.

At the present time, some of the Churches seem to be determined to set themselves goals that surely cannot be reconciled with unity of faith and life together in the one Universal Church. Your own Church has a famous history of dedication to the Catholic faith, and of love for the good and future of the Church of England, as you witness to the larger Church, the Universal dimension of Christ’s Body, and as you seek to persuade your fellow Anglicans of the vital importance of the communion of the whole Church with the successor of Peter, the Pope. I know that differences within Anglicanism are potent forces seeking to persuade people that is best to live apart from one another, let alone from other Christian Churches. For the Catholic Church people, too, we wonder how union between our Church and the Anglican Communion can ever be achieved. You feel this too, and the same situation applies to the unity hopes of other Churches as well. But it is at precisely such points, where all appears futile and impossible, that we need to be closest to one another. Families disagree and relatives do the opposite of each other all the time. But they are still related; they still love each other; they still keep together. “Blood’s thicker than water”; and another dimension of that ‘ecumenism of blood’ about which Pope Francis speaks means that we are meant to cleave to each other the more we veer apart and seek only our own company. For what Jesus prayed, he commanded: we are not allowed to be separate. The world cannot see us making other plans. It cannot see us like that. It needs to be convinced when we speak of one Christ and one heaven, one Kingdom.

It is for God to bring about His miracle of unity, for that is what it will take. But it is for us to remove all obstacles, and to be as close as we can in love, service, faith and honest hope. In this Anglican parish, part of the great historic Anglican Catholic movement, you believe in the fullness of life in Christ given in the Catholic faith, and, even though we cannot yet share the Eucharist of the Lord together, it is a vital bond that unites us on the way. Fullness of communion is for God to bring about;  but in the meantime, as St Paul reminds us, we cannot say we have no use for each other. We persevere in our faith and witness, but never in a spirit of isolation. Even if it is a lonely path at time, on our journey through this world towards the Kingdom, as the coach and horses people realised, it is heartening that we are going nowhere on our own.

Walking Together: Second Interview for "Both Lungs" at Royal Doors

Brent Kostyniuk came over to London in early 2014, attended our Liturgy, and later interviewed me for his column, Both Lungs, which is about Christians of East and West needing each other and learning from each other. It is syndicated to the English-language Ukrainian resource page, Royal Doors. Part one (Here: Bi-ritual Faculties) looked at serving in two rites. Part Two considers how the different sides of the Church, east and west, Catholic and Orthodox, need each other and must come together:

http://www.royaldoors.net/2015/02/walking-together/


For six years now, this column has worked at spreading the message of St. John Paul II who proclaimed that the Church – that is you and I – should breathe through both lungs, East and West. One who breathes through both lungs is Fr. Mark Woodruff a priest with bi-ritual faculties serving both the Latin and Ukrainian Catholic Churches in London, England. Having previously explained how he came to his deep appreciation for the East, Fr. Mark now offers his views and experience of East and West. Moreover, based on that experience, he challenges us to go beyond simply breathing with both lungs.

Fr. Mark was asked what East has to offer to the West. “In my view, this is the wrong question. Too much ecumenism is about how we can make others come round to our way of thinking and so be more like us as the precondition for rapprochement. This is not standing up for principles; instead it’s forcing ourselves on others, actively and passively – it’s manipulation and even bullying. Pope Francis has just said that evangelization is not proselytizing, with its undertone of pressured persuasion – the Gospel gains its response by attraction. So, instead, it is important for the West to identify what it can learn from the East and thus what it lacks at the moment to be more truly itself. Christianity is, after all, an Eastern religion in origin. By the same token, the East needs to identify what it can learn from the West. We talk about Orientale Lumen a lot – but some of my Orthodox friends also say, at least privately, that they need some Occidentale Lumen.

Fr. Mark next considers how East and West might grow closer together. “The more we go on saying, ‘they have nothing to teach us,’ or ‘all they need to do is to acknowledge they are heretics, give up their error and conform to the true faith,’ whether that comes from Latins or Orientals, the more fixed will be our separation. I believe that, largely speaking, the matters of dogmatic difference between East and West have been addressed thoroughly through dialogue, and if they have not been resolved then they are still being talked through towards that end, or else they are not necessarily Church-dividing. Sadly, the perspective of some on one side or the other can be that they alone must prevail to the exclusion of the other. This gets us nowhere other than confirmed in an opposition that is native to neither Catholic nor Orthodox traditions.”

“Neither Orthodoxy nor Catholicism as we understand them now is an end in itself but aspects of the same, single reality of the universal Church that both are to manifest. We tend to use these terms to describe the distinct Church communions contained within the boundaries of ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Orthodox.’ But Orthodoxy should explicitly be a mark of the Catholic Church no less than Catholicity should mark the Orthodox Church. A very eminent Orthodox priest made this point very strongly to me a few years ago, saying that the trouble with the schism meant that he could not describe himself as ‘a Catholic priest’ in England because that would be misunderstood. Yet, he said, being a priest of the universal Catholic and Orthodox Church he was indeed a Catholic priest, but in no exclusive or denominational sense, just as by the same token I am an Orthodox priest. This brought me up short and I found it quite humbling.”

Our respective Church organizations seem to be making exclusive truth claims; but I often think that these only make sense in terms of the unified life we will have after reconciliation and reunion, and which were the conditions for existence prior to the emergence of Byzantine and Latin, Catholic and Orthodox as distinct traditions and ecclesiastical realities. Pope Paul and Patriarch Athenagoras removed the anathemas between the Roman and Constantinopolitan patriarchates – so even though we have not finally resolved our theological differences or achieved the restoration of communion, nonetheless we have said what holds us apart is not, in the end, necessarily church-dividing – the mutual out-casting has gone.” Fr. Mark adds our distinct ritual and spiritual-theological approaches can be preserved as full manifestations of the Gospel and the life of the one Church. “We have much to learn from each other because God has given his gifts within each of the Churches for the benefit and perfection of all.”

The road ahead, however, will not be without difficulties. “What we have yet to learn is how to take down the barriers erected through human failure, so that we are no longer prevented from freely and fully receiving what he has given, as well as freely and humbly offering everything that we are in the hope that it will be fully accepted. There are principles, and as the faculty for bi-ritualism points out, there is no place for syncretism and mixing everything up – we must respect each other’s integrity too. Diversity is the measure of the universality of one Church with one faith.”

“The image of the two lungs East and West is very striking, and it instantly makes its point – that we are self-incapacitating by separation. But I have never felt it was figuratively accurate. But what of the lungs of the Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopic traditions? I prefer the image of Paul Couturier, the great and holy French Catholic priest who encountered the Russian refugees in camps around the city of Lyons after World War One and was so moved that he transformed the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from being an Octave of well intentioned, but counterproductive, prayer to get others to conform to Roman Catholicism, to an exercise in seeking ever greater sanctification by imitating the holiness of other Christians in their pursuit of union with and in Christ. He called it ‘spiritual emulation’ and this is what is meant by ‘spiritual ecumenism,’ also a phrase of his that found its way into the Decree on Ecumenism at Vatican II.”

“How is this achieved, he asked? He made up yet another word: parallelaboration, by which he meant working things out together as we hurry eagerly along the road together side by side to the same destination: two close tracks alongside each other that almost unnoticed converge in effective reality now, as they do from a distance, at the same place, namely in the same Person – union in and with Christ. Christ prayed for us to be one so that the world would believe it was the Father who sent Him, after all.”

“But rather than speaking of each side struggling with one lung with all the depleted effort that implies, I’d rather think of the two as the excited disciples who were so inseparable in their discussion and zeal as they made their way to Emmaus consumed with the news of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, that they did not realize that their twin paths beside each other had actually converged upon the Risen Lord Himself, making Himself know to them in the Breaking of Bread. So – not so much two lungs, as two disciples who race after and fix their eyes on the Pioneer, and who meet in him – even collide – as the Perfecter of their faiths” (Hebrews 12).

“Ecumenism is not a diversion from the main business of being the Church where God has set us. It is the joy of being free of the encumbrance that keeps us apart and of the sin that tangles us up.”

Breathing through Both Lungs. Walking together. Will this column have to change its title?

Monastery of Chevetogne, Belgium

My good friends at the Monastery of Chevetogne, of which I am an oblate.

Sermon for the Annual Feast of the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina, St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge

20 September 2014

In early twenty-first century England we think of the Queen as a person of immense public and international esteem, a lifelong servant of the people, a model and guardian of constitutional democracy, and the embodiment of the rule of law. We are proud that in this kingdom, we are the last on earth to anoint our sovereign, not just crowning her head for the supreme office of just government, but consecrating it, body, mind and soul, to the obedience of Christ and his Kingdom.

When Pope Benedict made his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, in the Palace Yard at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, he paid tribute to our Christian constitution, personified in England and Scotland by Christian monarchs, givers of divine law and holy justice, sinners though they be, continuously for fourteen hundred years. Uniquely among other nations, in Britain the Christian Church has both an official standing and is entwined with the active role and symbolic purpose of the reigning monarch, giving the spiritual dimension not just the opportunity but the expectation to influence our civic discourse and public decisions. In his remarkable address to Parliament in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict identified the vital importance of the gift we have in our hands in this country. In our common society, the Church people, the people of other religions, politicians and parliament, the worlds of finance and commerce, and the citizens as a whole can rely on the long crafted awareness that each has a rightful part to play and a duty to play its part. He pointed out that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, faith and reason seen by faith’s light, religion and society can be related to each other, in the knowledge that they cannot do without each other and must remain engaged in a constant dialogue - if we are to make the decisions that answer the deepest questions that human beings face, and if we are to address the malaise in contemporary human living that has broken out in a fevered crisis in public and financial morality that still afflicts us.

In other words, the Church, the Lord’s own people, constantly says to the world’s rulers and hidden wielders of power, “Ecce Homo – Behold the Man.” “Who would you rather be released for you, this Man, or Barabbas?” We the Church are for ever asking the world, “Who is your King?” or, as the psalm puts it, “Who is the King of glory?” Many are the kings and leaders, even church leaders, who have been amazed at their own glory, only to see it slip their grasp because they forgot the reminder of the Franciscan friars who used to precede the Roman Pontiff on processions in the days of pomp, burning flax as they declared, “Sic transit Gloria mundi”; “Thus passes the glory of the world.”

The trouble is that the world has rather been allowed to think of our King as yet another leader whose time was up; thus too the influential public organisation that represents him, his Church. Perhaps it is our own fault for relying too heavily on imagery such as monarchy, because now it does not conjure up the distinct conviction of wide sway, commanding prestige and undeniable moral authority. If we were honest, I suspect even we, when we think of Christ the King and Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, picture a dignified and remote public servant, a constitutional monarch with no powers of their own and always acting on the advice of ministers. If we are even more honest with ourselves, we believe those ministers are us and Christ and His Mother are there, largely speaking, to be persuaded of what we tell them to do, however much we call it prayer.

The fresh-thinking young Australian writer, Matthew Tan has written a remarkable book to explain how we have got into this way of thinking and thus disempowered our own Church on earth. It is called Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, and describes how in the 1960s the Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that humanity had so grown up that it could be set free from the claims of the Church, Christ’s kingdom on earth, to rule it. Those who called for this new approach to the world saw it in terms of maturity and freedom, not compulsion, to choose the path of Christ. They assumed that with this spiritual liberty the human choice for God and the blessedness of the Kingdom, to which the Magnificat is a paean and which the Beatitudes map out, would be irresistible.

In the 50 years since, however, human society has opted not for the Kingdom of God but the market. Now instead of the “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”, all our transactions and relations are determined, not so much by our own selfish preferences, by the demands of the market to capture them. Matthew Tan even says that everything is now relative to it and human society has converted itself into a place, where every idea, value or principle has to pitch for custom and reduced to a matter of ever poorer choices, or what we are prepared to afford for them. He is astonished by how quickly the Christians have bought into this thinking, almost without hope, accepting it as “realism”. So we have the garrulous old Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who bears the distinction of interfering in the affairs of not just one successor but two) calling for the legalisation of euthanasia on the ground of supposed mercy - such a short step from expediency - without any regard in his argument for the absolute binding nature of the revealed truth of God that life is sacred and may not be harmed. I was also surprised to hear Archbishop Justin reported as saying he sometimes doubts the existence of God. Doubtless what he was saying was that he has complete faith in Jesus Christ and it was all taken out of context; but the incident illustrates how we have got ourselves into a position where we have to imagine meeting the thinking of people in the world in terms of packaging a commodity that they will be prepared to buy because it suits their tastes, assumptions and interests on this day if not on that.

Matthew Tan calls time on this: we are not competitors in a market. If the world has taken its freedom from the Kingdom of God and chosen instead the market as the milieu for human society and relations, so be it. But it is a disaster for the world and for humanity: time now to set ourselves up as a completely different way of being human; time now to declare the Church to be an alternative society. Instead of vying in competition, hoping that people will buy our idea in a multitudinous world of options where we are just one of the choices on offer, it is time to say that we alone represent the universe as it is, the created order built on loving relationships, unreserved mutual self-giving, of complete and unreserved sacrifice that alone leads to resurrection and renewal, through the radical power of forgiveness, service and worship. For the created order is not its own end – it is Christ who is its Lord and all else follows from that and falls in place behind it. His existence does not depend on my decision to believe he exists or not, though to hear most people think you would think English people imagine him to be Peter Pan’s tutelary spirit, depending on audience applause for survival.

If we think of Christ and His Mother as kindly European-style monarchs benevolently overseeing everything, hoping it will all turn out nicely in the end, and not getting too much involved, then nothing will change, and there is no point in our being Christian or worshipping in church; that would be just to meet our own emotional needs and calling the spiritual because they looked religious. Instead, we bear in mind centrally what St Paul told us in his letter to the Ephesians, that Christ fills the universe, and he intends us all to come to the full knowledge of faith in him, to reach such a true maturity in him that we reach his own stature.

So I cannot see why we say to people that we have doubts about whether God and his vision of heaven for us really exists. The question that faces us is this: “Do you believe that Christ is Lord of the universe, of everything that there is, or do you not?” If you do, then there are consequences and it truly does mean a transformation of our proclamation of what the Church is, why we have been made to belong to it – to reach our true human maturity – and how it is to be the true pattern for civil society founded on the sacrificial love of Christ, and the very endless living of the Trinity of three persons in one God.

It is in this universe that Our Lady of the Salve Regina stands as the Queen who is in power. She is no constitutional monarch, acting on the advice of ministers, merely benign towards our pleas and prayers, influential upon us and others only in so far as we can press her to be reactive to our interests, thus ever being conformed by us to our world. Instead, the hearer of prayers is effectual, the worker of change in individuals, and whole movements in society’s truest manifestation – the People of God – in a universe of which Christ rules, the Lord who is to be heard and obeyed, and whom our states, our civil societies and our market must likewise in the end come to obey.

This may be a “vale of tears” and “exile” for humanity according to this understanding, but it is not exile from God or his Kingdom; nor is it beyond the reach of his sovereign work. The Salve Regina declares our faith that a Queen has been appointed the advocate of this humanity as it is truly intended to be - an advocate who will turn the attention of all on the Lord of that Kingdom. Pope Benedict told us prophetically that our society is well placed to have the conversation in which faith illuminates our world, so that its kingdoms will be the Kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. If all of us in the Church who are the People of God were to reject the falsely “realistic” barking at us in the market and to exist in and for the “Kingdom not of this world”, the “most gracious advocate” sustains our attention on what people are truly for and why nothing other than Christ is all that is to be said of the entirety of humanity and human living.

Homily for the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral 13 July/30 June 2014

1 Corinthians 4.9-16
Mark 3. 13-19

Glory to Jesus Christ. Glory for ever.



In 2014 with the Julian Calendar, Saturday has been observed as the Feast of SS Peter and Paul. It is an observance common to East and West, marking the time of complete union between the Greek-Byzantine Orthodox and Latin Catholic Churches and looking forward to its restoration, because it celebrates the martyrdom of the two great apostles of the Church at Rome and their repose in the basilicas there that bear their names.


Indeed, it is little realised that St Peter’s Basilica has only recently been known as a Papal Basilica. Until little less than ten years ago, it was known as one of the Patriarchal Basilicas. This does not mean that it was linked to the Pope as Patriarch and Primate of the Western Latin Church and successor of St Peter at Rome, as you might think. Instead, it signifies that, ceremonially, it is assigned to one of the five patriarchs of the Church from before the Great Schism, four of which were once represented at Rome alongside the Pope by a Latin-rite counterpart. The Pope’s own Patriarchal Basilica is his Cathedral – St John Lateran. S. Maria Maggiore is historically assigned to the Patriarchate of Antioch, St Paul’s to the Patriarchate of Alexandria and St Lawrence outside the Walls to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. St Peter’s is the Church in Rome where the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople always has his seat of honour. This is why, since in 1964 the venerable Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the mutual anathemas and the ‘dialogue of love’ between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches could begin, the Ecumenical Patriarch always sends a delegation to St Peter’s every June to keep the feast with the Pope in hopeful anticipation of our union to be restored and to pray for it at the tomb of the Apostle Peter. The favour is returned each November when a delegation from the Apostolic See of Rome visits the Apostolic See of Constantinople likewise to pray with the Ecumenical Patriarch, and to keep with him the feast of St Andrew, whose successor is he is seen to be and whose relics are honoured there.


You may recall that, at the end of the period of the Crusades to drive out the Islamic invaders of the Holy Land which had been part of the Christian Roman Empire, the shameful and ultimately disastrous Fourth Crusade turned on its fellow Christians instead and Latin Christians sacked and looted the city of Constantinople, all but undermining the lasting viability of the Byzantine Empire. This is a wound that is still sore for the Greek Orthodox and which the Roman Catholic West still underestimates, because it is far from healed in the memory and it accounts for a great deal of the suspicion and animosity that significant sections of the Orthodox world continue to bear towards the Latin Church which it feels has never made good the hurt. Nevertheless, when the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire at Morea in the Peloponnese collapsed under the Ottoman onslaught in 1461, it was to Italy that the Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos took with him the relic of the head of St Andrew to exile. He entrusted it to Pope Pius II, who enshrined it in one of the four central piers of St Peter’s. Here it remained until 1964 when Pope Paul VI, in a great work of Catholic reparation for the injuries to Catholic-Orthodox relations in the history we share together, restored it to the Church of St Andrew in Patras that it had left five centuries earlier.


So having honoured St Peter and St Paul on Saturday, with Sunday coincides the feast immediately following, a second gathering, or Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles. We have heard the names listed in the Gospel of those entrusted with the authority to proclaim the message of Christ and to cast out the powers and spirits who stand in the way of the Kingdom. Among them is included, of course, St Andrew, the first apostle to be called by the Lord from the shores of Galilee as he was mending his fisherman’s nets. Here too is Peter and all the others, including Judas who let Jesus down and was succeeded by St Matthias. Not mentioned is St Paul, although in today’s Kontakion of the Apostles he is ranked next to St Peter, the rock of Christ’s faith, and alongside the Council of the Twelve. It is always St Paul, though, who puts things most vividly. He sees an apostle as a spectacle, something that God exhibits. You might think that he means something admirable or splendid to look at; but as always he sees things as they are. What may at first look powerful, influential and even wonderful and inspiring, he knows from the inside is set up to be torn down and humiliated, or, as he puts it, “rubbished”. But he is not complaining. He is just telling us what the glory of heaven must look like when it comes into the world: beauty which human beings in their sin and enthralment with death cannot bear to behold: beauty which they must mar, obliterate.


St Paul has in mind, perhaps, that moment in St John’s Gospel when Christ is brought out by Pilate whose soldiers have flogged Him, crowned Him with thorns and dressed Him in an imperial robe of purple. When Pilate seeks to release Jesus, he brings Him out to the Gabbatha Pavement. It is unclear whether the text reads next that Pilate sits on the Seat of Judgement, or sits Jesus upon it. Surely it is the latter, because St John means to show that Jesus is the King not of this world, that Pilate realises this, and is presenting the King of Heaven to the people. “Behold your King,” he cries out. So there He sits, a spectacle, exhibited, just like St Paul imagined it years later when he wrote to the Christians in Corinth. There He sits, rejected by the people, soon to be deposed as their King.


The irony is not lost on St Paul, who will also be recalling, perhaps, Jesus’s words to the disciples not long before: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” For it is the very rejection, the obvious public disgrace that is how the apostles’ message of Christ is expressed and how His meaning is conveyed. Be imitators of this disgrace, says St Paul, in words we do not easily wish to hear.


Only this week, we have seen the terrible films from Mosul of the crazed Jihadists, perverters of Islam, desecrating not only the graves of their own fellow-Muslim forebears in faith, but also destroying the tombs of the Prophet Jonah and the Patriarch Seth, honoured by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. Once again, something beautiful about humanity has been made a spectacle and, to quote St Paul again, “made into the rubbish of the world”. It breaks our hearts to think we will never see these places, sacred presences in our world of the Kingdom of the Eternal in our midst, again.


But the Kingdom is not of this world; and what we are seeing of the fanatical destruction of holiness that has stood undishonoured in ancient churches and shrines for hundreds and thousands of years is part of the pattern we were told to expect. The destruction through human wilfulness of the unity of Christ’s Church and the obscuring of the one Body of Christ in the world, such as happened at the Great Schism; the sack of Constantinople and the destruction at rival Christian hands of the Christian civilisation and society of the old Near East; the long years of side-lined exile for the remains of St Andrew; the blasphemies to altars, churches, icons, sacred ministers, religious and lay people in Syria and Iraq, including their abduction, rape and murder; the impious sacrilege of the resting place of the holy prophets – all are part of the same pattern that belongs to what it is to be apostles and those who follow them as their “imitators”.


However beauteous is our Divine Liturgy - the very inspiration of heaven in earth - it has to be impossible to us to lose sight of what it truly represents. It is a parade of a spectacle to the world, just as St Paul said. When we clergy come out of the Holy Doors, it is a mistake to look on the surface and see gold and shining and glory. We and the mysteries of Book and Sacrament that we bear are being exhibited like the apostles, fools for Christ, weak men; and we are blessing and bringing good, with lasting forbearance and unfailing forgiveness, only because that is all that is left, once the world - and all of us included - have cast what looks beautiful away, leaving only what it thinks is rubbish, the dregs. It was the same with Christ, enthroned with His crown of thorns, then lifted up, then thrown down, cast aside. Yet out of this rejection and fall from grace came Resurrection. Thus “Death is plundered” (Troparion of Sunday, Tone 4). Thus, and only thus, does the risen “Christ our God … grant mercy to the world”. St Paul said, “Be imitators of me”. If we try to re-enact his apostolic grandeur through earthly splendour we will never achieve it. The true grandeur of our Liturgy, God’s work upon us, is that - for those who have eyes to see - it takes the road to the Resurrection by no other way than the Gabbatha Pavement, the rise up that hill of Calvary and then down again to the tomb, not far from the rubbish heap. Thus “death has been plundered, and Christ our God … grants to the world great mercy.”


Glory to Jesus Christ. Glory for ever.

Britain's Christian Society

When the Prime Minister repeated his view in April 2014 that Britain is a Christian country, it was hard to forget two things – what he said to Pope Benedict on his departure from England at East Midlands airport in 2010 and his argument against the Archbishop of Westminster over the effects of welfare reforms in February.


To Pope Benedict, Mr Cameron recalled Newman’s lesson from the decline of ancient Rome, about a state that had lost its “sentiment of sacredness” and its need for a “common bond of unity” based on more than the unanimity of self-interest (Lectures on the History of the Turks in their Relation to Europe, Lecture 7, Barbarism and Civilisation). Reflecting the Pope’s observation at Westminster Hall that British constitutional values concerning power, democracy and liberty have much in common with Catholic Social Teaching, he latched onto the Pope’s “challenge” for humanity to embrace its true purpose with “the new culture of social responsibility we want to build in Britain”, of which “faith is part of the fabric”. Such responsibility is more than working for the common good. It estimates Britain in theological terms, going beyond faith as personal profession, to faith - specifically the Christian faith - as defining British civilisation and a national life together conceived on Christian lines. Thus, whatever our hard-won tradition of tolerance and personal religious liberty, nonetheless Britain is a corporately Christian state.

 

On Cardinal Nichols (as he now is) he observed, “Many of the great political questions of our time are also moral questions – we should not be surprised, and nor should we be dismissive, when members of the clergy make their views known.  But neither should political leaders be afraid to respond…  The Archbishop of Westminster … offered a critique of this Government’s welfare reforms. I respect his view but I also disagree with it deeply.”

It is hard to reconcile the two comments. First he admires a society that is unified in purpose, bears a sacred character, and thus resonates with Catholic Social Teaching. Next, when a Catholic Social Teacher “challenges” (Mr Cameron’s word!) the direction that British society’s purpose is taking - because in its effects it is unpicking the fabric of the common good of which is part - it is extraordinary that he personally goes to the lengths of arguing against the Church’s moral critique of these effects, point by point, in The Daily Telegraph (18 February). It is important to recognise that the Cardinal was not casting doubt on the decency or good faith of political reformers, let alone involving himself with the practicalities which are the concern of party politics. But in any state, especially a professedly Christian state, Christian teaching about how the Kingdom of God is served in this world has to be heeded, not just noted “with respect”. For, far from being “simply untrue”, as the Prime Minister complained, everything Cardinal Nichols had stated about people’s safety net being withdrawn came from the direct experience of priests, parishes, charitable organisations and other dioceses and Churches across Britain. Thus he was merely doing what a certain type of British politician says the Church should confine itself to – defining what is right and where people are going wrong, and thus saving people’s souls. He had acknowledged that politicians were trying to repair public finances, as well as to break dependency, stimulate more employment and improve more prosperous livelihoods in a sustainable way, with the necessary support for those at greatest risk. But he also pointed out, whatever the good intentions, that systems and the politics behind them are not neutral or occupy a different compartment of the universe from the “spiritualities” – they boil down to personal effects on individual households; and when this causes hardship, especially noticeably wider hardship, there is a moral question to be answered. Thus the Cardinal was not just expressing his “views” with which the Prime Minister felt free to disagree “deeply”; he was speaking truth unto power. Power found this “challenge” uncomfortable, weighed it respectfully, set aside what it had earlier said to Pope Benedict, and rejected the Cardinal’s application of Catholic social teaching.

So did the Prime Minister also dismiss the “sentiment of sacredness” and the “common bond of unity” arising from it? When Mr Cameron says “Christian”, he means a rather individualised version of “Protestant”. In a Protestant society, the individual believer is his or her own interpreter of the Bible, needing no mediation from the Church for access to God, faith or salvation. The Church conducts worship based on the Bible and its clergy’s preaching is authoritative because the theology tradition claims it says nothing more, nothing less than is explicit in the text.  In such a society, this may be fine as long as the State likewise sees itself as subject to the Scriptures (and can thus use the Church to keep the people there too). But when the nature of the text of the Bible itself is open to question -  its formation, its origins, its literary genres, its historical and social contexts, its standing as  literal, analogical or allegorical truth – who is the interpreter then? What authority privileges the “view” of the Church – in other words, her teaching - when all the world is free to decide from out of the same Scriptures their own religious teaching and moral choice, rather than those of the Body as a whole?

Thus Britain, a confessionally Christian state, has abandoned the defence of marriage and family stability by facilitating divorce; it has undermined the corporate observance of Sunday and the principal Christian holy days (notably Good Friday and Ascension Day) in favour of the pressures of the market; it has engineered the exclusion of historic Catholic institutions that helped to found the nation’s childcare services from any further role in adoption and fostering; it is tacitly softening the application of the laws that strictly limit abortion and forbid euthanasia; it is barring the professional freedom of Catholics and other Christian doctors and nurses working in general practice and reproductive healthcare if they are conscientiously opposed to the termination of the lives of unborn children, or refuse to refer applicants to those who are not. There are numerous further examples.

Yet this is not because any of our succession of church-going Prime Ministers is not Christian. It is because they do not see that, beyond a moral or spiritual critique, the Church has bearing on society, and how individuals live their lives in good conscience and under the law, any more than anyone else. The individual is free to decide, the Archbishop of Westminster is entitled to his views and a Christian Prime Minister “deeply disagrees” with him. No one wants a theocracy, social rule by religious leaders. Nor do we want this or that political leader’s subjective impression of Christianity, its generalised values and supposed historic influences, rather than what it teaches and demands. Instead we need a society that is able to integrate, rather than balance off against each other, our political and our spiritual identity, one that is, as Mr Cameron himself said to Pope Benedict, a “fabric” where faith is not a patch stitched on but in the weave.

For this to happen, England needs the Christians of this country to be united, not at odds. A society with political, social, historical, moral and spiritual integrity deserves a Church that brings Christ’s voice to bear upon it because she is His Body exemplifying His wholeness in humanity; a society without wholeness even more deserves the Church that brings integrity to its political, social, historical, moral and spiritual identity for it truly to be humanity. Only the Catholic Church can provide this; not because its universal extent in time and place can be all-encompassing, but because its social teaching is the teaching of Christ about human beings and how they are designed by God in the image of Christ to make up one humanity in Him. This is not a view, or one critique among many. It is how things are from the perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven and how they ought to be conformed in the kingdoms of this world. In a Christian society, it is not merely to be taken into account by the rulers, but internalised and put into practice.

The alternative is a society defenceless against monstrosity. One hundred years ago, Britain and Ireland went to war in defence of “little Catholic Belgium”. Four years ago, the centuries-old “folk Catholicism” of Belgium and its uneasy modus vivendi with political liberalism were irrevocably shattered, when Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Brugge admitted the sustained abuse of two nephews. Nuns were heckled in the streets, priests advised not to appear in public, the Archbishop of Brussels-Malines repeatedly assaulted with custard pies, and the retired Cardinal Danneels questioned by police. In March 2014 King Filip of the Belgians, whose uncle King Baudouin had abdicated rather than approve the legalisation of abortion, signed into law the euthanasia of children.

A remarkable recent book, Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, by Matthew John Paul Tan, explains what has been going on in advanced Western societies, by asking why, when there is so much need for Christians to unite in addressing the ills of society, and there are so many opportunities for the concerted social action in service of suffering humanity that Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism called for, Christian unity has not come to pass and the Church remains in a state of rupture. Tan locates the problem in the decision of the Church in the modern world to recognise the freedom of the world and its social, economic and political structures from the Church, allowing them to migrate beyond the realm of the Kingdom of God. The Church may seek to set the tone, but civil society and the state have autonomy in their own, separate sphere. Free from the boundaries of the reign of Christ, the state and civil society identify their own ultimate objective, which now becomes earth-and-time-bound, in preference to the end of all things - the good, and the coming of the Kingdom, such as we see in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer.

Tan sees the Church in shock and denial at the flight of its child and what it has chosen for its path to happiness. For instead of the Kingdom, the state and civil society have chosen for their own the objectives of the unfettered market. This means unconstrained personal liberty, even to the interpersonal “violence” that means one person may prevail over the rest. In this context, says Tan, it is hardly surprising that the Churches have not been able to draw together in serving the realisation of the unity of humanity in Christ, because the new “state/society/market matrix” actively prevents them from doing so. The Christian Churches have been constrained to be part of a market of choice and competition – not just with each other but with every other ware on offer. Thus the Universal Catholic Church can hope at best, if it is to engage with the world to which it has given spiritual liberty, to serve as its chaplain. It is a far cry from Newman’s state with both a common bond of unity and a sentiment of sacredness, or even Mr Cameron’s socially responsible state, with faith woven through its “fabric”. But it is what we have come to.

Tan’s remedy is to say that the Church’s diakonia – its service of the Kingdom in and for the world - whether ecclesial or ecumenical - would be impossible now, unless it is united with its leitourgia. This is not just its “liturgy” as the work of the people to worship God, but the work of God for and upon the worshipping people.  By this he means that it is time for the Church to reassert itself as the alternative humanity, the “still more excellent Way”, restoring as its end the objective that points us towards God and his Kingdom. Thus humanity can recover a proper view of the human person, and of its relations with the other, that is not modelled on the untrammelled needs of the market and unfettered personal liberalism, but on the endless self-giving and mutually receiving of the persons of the Trinity, as the pattern for the people of God and the best, the only true, pattern for the whole of humanity.

With regard to our leitourgia – how we are the humanity focussed upon God and His Kingdom – Tan believes that the way we celebrate Mass and the direction we offer it actually conforms us to the “state-society-market matrix” that frustrates us so. In other words, we aim at ourselves and our own progress and development, rather than Christ and His Kingdom. This is why we are of no use to the world and why we cannot collaborate ecumenically in a lasting way that can be consolidated, in order to transform the ills of the world by looking to the transcending intervention of the Kingdom of God in our own hands as its People.

This is also why the People of God fails to exhibit itself as the Body of Christ; for, as chaplain to the “state-society-market matrix”, we are forced to pursue its objectives and not those of the Kingdom. The “matrix” will seek the Kingdom, not because the Church as its chaplain exhorts it to, but because that happens to suit its ends for the moment. People of God we may call ourselves, but we are merely “people” like anyone else, competing in the market place of ideas and offers and objectives. Hence, we need to declare our own freedom from this “matrix”, in order to reassert the sovereignty of God and the lack of society’s autonomy to direct itself as though it lies beyond the Kingdom of God and the hearing of the teaching of Christ and His Church. As Martin Luther said, “Let God be God” – not what political leaders, however well-meaning and personally devout, need Him to be and to mean from this day to that.

In 2013, a commemorative stone was set into the floor of the West Door of Westminster Cathedral, commemorating the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. Its Latin says that he “celebrated the Mass … showing what advantage faith may be to society.” Advantage? Is that all that is left for us to offer? Is faith not the “sentiment of sacredness” of a state’s very fabric, sealing that “common bond of unity” that forms society out of more than the mere coming together of otherwise divergent and sectional interests?

We are a country of wondrous diversity in which all have a stake and all possess rights and mutual obligations. Our traditions of freedom of speech, of personal and corporate religious liberty, of tolerance, equality and the rule of law have been won at the price of blood that live on in our collective memory as both defining our present identity and a warning from history. But our society is not Christian because Christianity transmits values we can all mostly sign up to, or because Christ reigns in all or some of our hearts, feebly or strongly, high in archbishops and ministers of the Crown, or low in us normal people around the altars and pulpits of our churches. It is Christian because the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ. This does not depend on a ministerial evaluation, or because the Church can make a convincing argument. Christ reigns in and over society, whatever we think. That is just the way humanity and the universe have been made. To this the Church holds it.