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!

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.

Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane - Homily For the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, 22 June 2014

Isn’t it typical of us that we have translated our entire liturgy into English, but despite sustained pressure to rename this feast “ The Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord”, we ordinary Catholics have doggedly maintained its proper title in Latin – Corpus Christi?


For over 800 years it has been our chance to be joyful and even exuberant about that which we see every day in silence and reverence: the Eucharistic Miracle, which we see with our very eyes when the bread beneath its outward appearance becomes the Lord himself - present in the thing, present to us, present for us. For 800 years this has been our occasion for taking the Miracle out, so that the world may see what we see - to show it something so ordinary and common place, yet something that with the eye of faith is what we love the most, are proudest of, and would serve the utmost.

This is our feast of witness, when we tell the truth about ourselves and how we are unashamed to show and call ourselves religious people. And for 800 years it has kept its name.

It is hardly remarkable, because, even in our ex-spiritual society, Corpus and Christi remain very well known words. We know what a corpus of writings, artwork or music is. It is the same as a body of writings, artwork and music. And we certainly know what Christ is. It is the most commonly used expletive for exasperation in the English language. I even heard “Christ” used in this way in the lift at Covent Garden Tube station on the way here. So Corpus Christi, translated through the thought patterns of the world around us, means every petty, ill-tempered frustration coming in one go. But to the Lord in the Host, who is the same as the Lord in the Manger and on His Cross, it is nothing new; it is to be expected and endured. As G K Chesterton once put it, “God abides in a terrible patience, unangered, unworn.”

Nevertheless, Corpus Christi’s title gives us the opportunity to give our fellow members of society a fresh translation. For the Christ of the Eucharist is the anointed One of God, His chosen, His Beloved on Whom His favour rests (anointed is what Christ and christened mean), anointed at His baptism with the Holy Spirit, anointed by Mary the sister of Lazarus whom He had raised from death in preparation for His own Death and Resurrection; anointed by Nicodemus for His burial, anointed in the love of St Peter after His Resurrection and anointed in His Ascension and exaltation to His throne as King. The Body of Christ, the Corpus Christi, is none other than One coming into the world, Who promised to remain with us always, to the end of time, waiting for us to see Him for what He is, waiting for us to realise Who He is, waiting for us to come with Him, to leave all our sin and preoccupations to fall away to one side, to grow in holiness, to long for the Kingdom to come, and to find that we live in it even now. We sing of this gift of Christ in His Body every Christmas:

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given.
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming;
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him, still
The dear Christ enters in. 

We stand in a great long line of those for whom Christ thus waited to receive Him. To Mary Magdalen He was the gardener, until she literally grasped Him as her Teacher. For St Thomas He waited, until his belief could follow his touch and he agree with the others, “We have seen the Lord.” To St Peter, confused by the Lord’s repeated questioning on whether he truly loved Him, Christ waited for the right heart and mind to see the divine purpose and meanwhile was content to ask him, as once He had asked him and Andrew on the shores of Galilee, “Follow me”… “Bear with me, walk in the steps I have trodden, become for others what I have been to you, take up your cross and follow me. Feed my sheep with My own Body; build them up to be My Body the Church. Feed them up to be Me in the world, with it always to the end of time, enduring, abiding in terrible patience, unangered, unworn. Let them be Me, waiting for all the children of My creation to see Me for what I AM, waiting for them to realise Who I AM and why I have come.” As St Augustine told his people who they were, pointing to the Lord in His Eucharistic Oblations – “There you lie on the altar”. It is we who are the Body of Christ, not just for our own fellowship and spirituality, but anointed for sacrifice, and faithfulness, and service to the end.

When Cardinal Manning founded this Church, he meant for it to be a great National Shrine of honour and service to the Lord in His Blessed Sacrament, so that all the indignities done to the Mass, to the priesthood and to the faithful in England could be repaid not with recrimination and resentment, but with the outpouring of love and devotion. He meant it to be at the core of witness to the truth of the Catholic Church’s Catholic belief in her Master and Teacher; and he meant it to stand as the place where all this love and duty poured out would make reparation for the greatest of sins against the Providence of our Sovereign God and loving Father – the acts in the sixteenth century that, despite a millennium and a half of unity according to the mind and prayer of Christ on the night before he died in sacrifice for the world’s salvation, ruptured the Church in two in this land and inflicted division among Christians in the one Body of Christ. Of course, no human deed or failure can take away the unity with Christ and His saints that belongs to the Church which is His spotless Bride. Still, in the world, because of our sin and wilfulness in refusing to obey the will of Christ except on our terms, Christians remain divided at the altar. Last weekend, a small charity founded 100 years ago by Church of England Christians, who saw their Church as separated from the Catholic communion from which it came and to which it truly belonged, and who wanted to work for reconciliation with the successor of St Peter in communion with the Apostolic See of Rome, donated a beautiful monstrance in keeping with the period and design of Corpus Christi Church, in support of its renewed work in the vision of Cardinal Manning. Thanks to the Ecumenical Movement, and the Catholic Church’s energetic efforts towards the fullness of unity in faith and life ever since the Second Vatican Council, that little Anglican charity, known as the Catholic League, had itself opened up and welcomed Catholics as members to pray for unity in the Body of Christ alongside each other. In what may be one of its last acts before it ends its work, it decided to mark its hundred years of patient witness with a gift to this Church of Corpus Christ on Maiden Lane as it recovers its work and purpose as a Shrine of the Presence of the Lord in and for the world in His Most Blessed Sacrament, and as a place of reparation for dishonour to the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, dishonour to the Body of Christ in His Priesthood and dishonour to the Body of Christ in the Unity of his Church. This monstrance will bear the Eucharistic Lord at the heart of the prayers and devotions to be poured out here, whenever the Sacrament is exposed for veneration and lifted over the people and the world in blessing. It is a gift to this parish in the hope of visible Christian Unity, because the Lord prayed that His disciples may be one – so that the world may believe it was the Father who sent Christ to bring it to eternal life. And nothing need divide Christians in their adoration of the Lord, after all.

So in this Feast today, which has been our great celebration for 800 years of all that the our faith means to us, of all that the Mass means to us, all that the Miracle of the Eucharist and the Blessed Sacrament mean to us, whenever we stand out as the parish of Corpus Christi, Christ’s own Body, and whenever we lift up the Blessed Sacrament in the hands of the priest at Mass and in the monstrance with our hearts full of adoration, we will be saying like the disciples and St Mary Magdalen – “we have seen the Lord”. And what we will be showing to the world is the Lord who abides with us, in all his patience, unangered, unworn, waiting “in this world of sin, for meek souls to receive him still.” O Dear Christ, enter in.

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.

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair: at Byzantine Vespers in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2014

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

23 January 2014

Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair

Exodus 19. 3-8

We love to describe ourselves as what the Lord meant us to be for him, as his own people – a Kingdom of priests, a holy nation. But we are less keen on the other side of the covenant we entered, when we said, “Whatever the Lord has said, we will do”.

What did the Lord say? On the night before he died, he said, “Father, as you and I are one, may they all be one, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.” Well, he said it; and we say we will do it.

The trouble is that we have been saying we will do it for hundreds of years. What we have meant is that we will bring about unity when other people come round to our ways, and when we can prevail as they submit. Each of us belongs to a Church body that we think is, in some ways, the right one; each of us thinks our take on the Truth is truer, at least for us and our way of thinking; each one of us thinks our Church body is better organised for the task in hand, or is a more faithful embodiment of the Gospel.  Yes; we must be faithful to the vision we have each been given and the call that each Church body has received. But it is not the end of the story for any of us. The principle and integrity, to which we cleave and which appear to keep us divided now, should be seen only in the light of the unity of the Church from which all derives and to which all returns. Thus the times when a Church exhorted others to give in, and to come round to its position ought to be long gone (though some people still try it on). Apart from anything else, it is futile. For example, we live in an age where people are loyal to the banks, the shops, the TV stations and the clothing brands they know; but they feel quite at liberty to change, and not to be defined by anyone other than what they choose. The more we try to force an identity on people, the more people will suit themselves, especially if it is over against others. People will feel they can take this from here and that from there, making up a Church to their taste, and retuning Gospel message only to the frequency they want to hear. So, forcing an identity on a Church body that is not natural to it would undermine what each of us, in our different Church bodies, is witnessing to as the Truth that we possess: that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, and one Church in the life of the Spirit. We are right, each of us, to say we have the Truth and that we are the true Church – but only if we remember that this will only make complete sense when we are utterly united and can be seen to be at one. In the meantime, to be partisan and competitive about our Church is not to be faithful to the integrity of the faith that we have received and follow in conscience, but to make it just one more competing choice among many.

The famous 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference - the start of the modern ecumenical movement - was a concerted effort to end rivalry between European and North American Churches in world missionary endeavours. It had been realised that Churches’ self-interest was an obstacle to presenting the Gospel. The penny had dropped – the Churches were not one, but many: and people who had begun to listen about Christ would hear no more, because the noisy messages of a Presbyterian Christ, a Lutheran Christ, a Catholic Christ were unbelievable.

When Pope Benedict came to visit us three and a half years ago, he reminded us in the magnificent Anglican Evensong in the Abbey that, however far we have come in love and friendship, however closely we work together on addressing the ills and injustices of the world side by side, however great our solidarity in spirit is, nonetheless our disunity in living together the Church’s and sharing in the risen Christ’s own Body at worship means that, to the world, we fail to give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us.

Yesterday, Pope Francis said much the same thing, but in his usual direct way.  He said,

It is good to recognise the grace with which God blesses us and, moreover, to find in other Christians something which we need, something we can receive as a gift from our brothers and sisters. The Canadian group which has prepared this Prayer Week has not invited the communities to think about what they might give to their Christian neighbours, but rather … to understand what all communities can receive from time to time from the others. This requires something more. It requires humility, reflection and continual conversion. Let us follow this path, praying for Christian unity and an end to this scandal.

106 years ago in 1908, the Anglican rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, Spencer Jones, and a Roman Catholic Franciscan friar in New York, Paul Wattson, after six years of correspondence, became so thoroughly convinced in their own minds of the scandal of disunity that they set up a Church Unity Octave - a whole week of prayer from 18 to 25 January. The Anglican believed that his Church, even though it was a towering presence in English Church and Society as a whole, was nonetheless cut off from the universal Church of which it saw itself as a part. He was penetratingly clear of the need for the Church of England and the Catholic Church to reunite, not to change the Church of England into something it was not, but so that together - and in the harness of the same faith - they could strengthen each other’s proclamation of the Gospel - and be believed. At the same time, the Catholic in New York realised that his Roman Catholic Church, for all that he saw it to be possessed of everything needed for the Church to be fully the Church of Jesus Christ, is nonetheless lacking in something: those who do not belong to it! He saw too that it lacked the many blessings in faith and holiness that had clearly been bestowed on others in abundance. Surely God did not give spiritual treasure to his People, so that only some could benefit to the exclusion of others? He longed for unity and to receive and grow through the same holy gifts. By the same token, he longed for other Christians to see what he loved in the Catholic Church and come to love it as a gift for them to long for too. But he refused to pray against other Churches, or their beliefs. He and his English Anglican friend desired the Church and the Christians who belong to it to be drawn together in one Church.

Twenty five years later, a French priest, the beloved Paul Couturier, was taken up with the same idea. But he saw that Christian Unity, and the sharing of God’s spiritual riches that we have received while we are apart, can never be enjoyed by offloading them onto others unbidden, by imposing them because we think we know better or think we ARE better, teaching other people what we think they need to learn. No; in the divided Church as it is in the world, we can only share in these divine gifts, by asking to receive them, not as little commodities to suit our individual tastes, but as part of what make the whole Church universal. Couturier had this idea that we could take on each other’s gifts of God’s blessings and then outdo each other in growing in them. We could thus vie with each other in advancing in holiness, drawing closer to Christ from where we started out in isolation, until we were united in him and found ourselves united to each other. Thus he thought our parallel lives would converge as we grew in love, and faith and spiritual knowledge.

Nevertheless, here we are, 106 years after Spencer Jones and Paul Wattson first became impatient, still disunited. Here we are, a Kingdom of priests, saying we will do what the Lord says, but not obeying his prayer - addressed as much to us as to his Father – that we be one, so that the world might believe. Here we are finding ever new reasons to back up our separations and to continue to go on in our preferable own way. As Pope Francis says, it is a scandal. And as the world tells us, with its deeply unanswered questioning, we are unconvincing.

Yet to lose heart after all these years of prayer together is to forget what we have seen. The Lord reminds is of “how I carried you away on eagles’ wings and brought you to me”. We have come so far.

We understand that we do not need all to be the same, in order to be Christian. The Pope, like his predecessors, reminds us that other Christians teach us the things we still need. We can attend each other’s worship and combine our efforts to meet the needs of the world. We draw on each others’ traditions and are constantly enriched as we do so. This service tonight is in its way a small miracle. The Ukrainian Church this week is facing a deep crisis in the country that is its homeland; nonetheless it desires to play its part as an integral part of the Christian Church here in England. It brings with it the tradition of ancient Christian Byzantium, in its fusion of monastic psalms and hymns, with the drama of the light, the incense and the icons that are at the heart of Eastern Christian devotion to our Lord, as somehow we pass into the courts of heaven as we worship in the Church below. (Hymns were not only invented in recent English history - tonight’s come from the first millennium!) And after Vespers there will be more recent Christmas and Epiphany carols from Ukraine. Thus English-language Christianity, the liturgy of the Christian Roman emperors and the music of Ukrainians all come together, as do we, joined by beauty in worship and hope.

In this giving and receiving, it is as though there is something in our Christianity - when it is truly the faith of Christ - that is restless for as long as it is not the faith that can be shared with and embraced by all who love and follow Jesus our Lord. We have been learning for years, almost without noticing, to go beyond ourselves, so as to find how to be more truly the Church that is Universal, with the whole faith, in the whole Christ, for the whole of humanity. We have all looked at our Churches and asked ourselves, “Can we imagine what more can be added, what new space can be opened up in our Church, so that it can also be the home that others can recognise as their own?” All of our Churches have acted on this questioning in the past, and it has made us what we are today. For instance, the Catholic Church has learned not to be a monolithic institution but a communion of Churches, movements, and new ideas that can embrace people in the way that God has called them to hear his gospel.  We have our parishes, priest, bishops, dioceses and religious orders, but we also have our new lay-led renewal and evangelical mission movements, offering and exploring new ways of being the Church for England’s people.

The Catholic Church does not wish simply to be a Roman Catholic denomination, but to be more and more like the universal Church, honouring and embracing the Church of others on their own terms but in complete communion of united life and faith. I like to hope that the Ordinariate, for instance, will one day come to be seen as a way for the Catholic Church to embrace a religious tradition from which it was once estranged and live out in a prophetic way that Anglicans and Catholics can live as one in communion, united not absorbed, not amalgamated and assimilated, but in the lively, diverse, abundant communion of all the People of God in the one Body of Christ His Son. There is great ecumenical potential to be tapped and it should bring us close in respect, understanding and conscientious faith.

Likewise the Salvation Army, which every Christian in this land loves and rejoices in, represents a movement that was organised to meet the needs of the poor and destitute, and to bring them to the love of Christ on his Cross, in a way that no other Church could at the time. It still meets those that not all of us can. We have all gained so much from the gift of confidence in each other and trust from God that means we can do this work alongside each other, with mutual encouragement and mutual reliance. The Church of England, too, with its cultural-spiritual heritage, its liturgical and musical tradition, as well as its pastoral mission visible and active into every corner of the country, is a resource for the whole Church that is never static. For instance, it has sought to be imaginative in fresh expressions of Christianity that can meet the religious awareness of contemporary people but still take root in the wider Church. Even the Grosvenor Chapel began as a “fresh expression,” addressing unmet needs, and to this day creating distinctive Christian community. From all this, in a bewildering world of beliefs to choose, both sacred and secular, we learn that none of us can make it separately. We rely on each other, not only for aid and support, but for learning more about how Christ’s is the pattern we live as His Body, the pattern for the whole of humanity that stands in His image.

Thus the prayers of 106 weeks of prayer have been richly answered. The miracle of unity, when it is achieved will be God’s. We can take down our sinful man-made barriers and persist on the journey whose destination was determined at the outset. We should not fail to see how the Lord has taught us to turn to each other in our need to learn, and moreover planted that seed of imagination of how it could be - what it would be like - if we in our currently separate Churches could live as one, solid Church, a rock that the world could rely on and believe when they see it.