Vigil for Nascent Life, 27th November 2010

Prayer Vigil For Unborn Life
5.45pm-6.15pm Saturday evening, 1st Sunday of Advent, 27th Nov 2010

There will be a half-hour of prayer immediately after the evening Mass.
Our Bishop has encouraged us to respond to the Holy Father’s “unprecedented request” for Catholics throughout the world to join him in observing a “Vigil for All Nascent Human Life”. The purpose of this prayer vigil is “is to ‘thank the Lord for his total self-giving to the world and for his Incarnation which gave every human life its real worth and dignity,’ and to ‘invoke the Lord’s protection over every human being called into existence’.”

Opening Hymn while the Blessed Sacrament is incensed
Soul of my Saviour sanctify my breast,
Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest,
Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide,
wash me with waters gushing from thy side.

Strength and protection may thy passion be,
O blessèd Jesus, hear and answer me;
deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me,
so shall I never, never part from thee.

Guard and defend me from the foe malign,
in death's dread moments make me only thine;
call me and bid me come to thee on high
where I may praise thee with thy saints for ay.



Prayer (said by priest)


Rosary


LITANY FOR LIFE
Please join in the responses in bold print
Lord, have mercy - Response: Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy - Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy - Lord, have mercy
Christ hear us - Christ, graciously hear us

God the Father, Creator of the world, Response: Have mercy on us
God the Son, through whom all things were made,
God the Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life,
Lord Jesus, the Beginning and the End,
Lord Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life,
Lord Jesus, Eternal Word of Life,
Lord Jesus, living in the womb of the Virgin Mary,
Lord Jesus, Lover of the poor and weak,

For the gift of new life, Response: We thank you, Lord
For those who cherish and support life,
For all those in healthcare,
For mothers who welcome new life,
For those who support new mothers,
For fathers who accept their responsibilities,
For those who help provide alternatives to abortion,
For those who promote adoption,

For parents fearful of their responsibilities, Response: Aid them, Lord
For mothers with unplanned pregnancies,
For weak and sick unborn children,
For doctors caring for life in the womb,
For unborn children under threat,

For every sin against life, Response: Forgive us, Lord
For experimentation on human embryos,
For profiteering in human experimentation,
For the sin of abortion,
For mothers and fathers pressured to have abortions,
For all doctors & nurses who perform abortions,
For the silence of Your people,
For our own complicity in failing to defend life,

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
Response: spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
graciously hear us, O Lord
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us.

Let us pray,
Almighty and ever-living God, You have created all things through Your Son Jesus Christ. He hallowed life in the womb by His incarnation in the womb of the Virgin Mary. May all who acknowledge You promote the sacredness of life and always serve You faithfully, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.


(Litany adapted and shortened from the “Litany in Response to Abortion” by Fr Frank Pavone, http://www.priestsforlife.org/prayers/litanyinresponsetoabortion.html accessed 20/11/2010)

Prayer (said by priest)


Hymn:
Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui;
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui;
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

Genitori genitoque
Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque,
Sit et benedictio;
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio.Amen.


Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament.
Reverently bow your heads while the congregation is blessed by Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.


Divine Praises (repeat each line after the priest)


While the Blessed Sacrament is reposed into the tabernacle we will sing the following refrain three times:
O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine



Final hymn to Our Lady:
As I kneel before you, As I bow my head in prayer,
Take this day, make it yours and fill me with your love.

Refrain:
Ave Maria, Gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Benedicta tu.

All I have I give you, Every dream and wish are yours,
Mother of Christ, Mother of mine, present them to my Lord.

As I kneel before you, And I see your smiling face,
Ev'ry thought, ev'ry word, Is lost in your embrace.

Pastoral letter from Bishop

There was no sermon this week because there was a pastoral letter from the Bishop. This will be available at the Diocesan website:

http://www.plymouth-diocese.org.uk/

Remembrance Sunday, 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Shaftesbury

Lk 21:5-19
Today in Britain we keep Remembrance Sunday when we think of those who have died in the wars: we thank God for their labours and sacrifice, and pray to God for them.

This year I would like to spend a moment recalling a virtue that we associate with soldiers, a virtue that is typically defined with respect to soldiers, namely, fortitude, and its related act: endurance.
The Latin word for fortitude, which gives us the ancient meaning that saints and philosophers assigned to it, combines both strength and courage.
The ancient philosopher Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas both write at great length about fortitude and they describe it as THE soldierly virtue, the virtue that faces fear (Summa Theologica II-II q123 a3) and faces death (a5). In particular, St Thomas considers what is the DEFINING act of fortitude, and says that it is endurance, because it is endurance that enables a man to stand firm in the face of fear and death (a6).
And, in this, the soldier models something that all of us need to live.

The soldier endures despite discomfort and difficulty before the battlefield, the soldier endures despite fear and uncertainty in the midst of a battle, and the soldier endures despite the attack of the enemy.
For us as Christians, Scripture explicitly describes Christians as "soldiers of Jesus Christ”(2 Tim 2:3) and describes us as such in the context of saying that we must "endure suffering".

In today's gospel we heard the Lord Jesus also speak about endurance and about suffering: he spoke in particular about the sufferings that would accompany the end of the world: nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, there will be earthquakes and plagues and famines and fearful signs from heaven. Worse still, for Christians, there will be persecution.
And what must the Christian do in the midst of all this? What is it that will gain the Christian eternal life? Jesus says, “Your ENDURANCE will win you your lives"(Lk 21:19).

The endurance I have just described is perhaps most obvious in the face of the dramatic sufferings Jesus indicated. However, there are many other forms of endurance that characterise Christian living: to love others often requires simple endurance in the form of patience with other people; to love others in obedience to Christ's command requires a further form of endurance in that it requires endurance in the form of maintaining our hope in the promised reward for loving others; and loving others include endurance in the form of patience with the difficulties of life so that we don't allow our illnesses and difficulties, our personal crosses, to make a so disagreeable that we fail to love. To be a Christian is to endure.

So, to come back to where I began, as we think today of the many soldiers who died in the wars, let us think too of the way in which soldierly fortitude, and its principal act of endurance, models the endurance that we each need to be manifesting in our daily Christian lives.

Mass Intentions

From the newsletter this week:

The month of November is a time when people particularly remember to have Masses offered for the dead, especially for family and friends. There are brown ‘Mass Offering’ envelopes in the porch for this purpose: please write your intention on the outside of the envelope, enclose your Mass stipend donation, and place the envelope in the collection plate or in the presbytery letterbox.

The practice of offering Masses for the dead is the Christian fulfilment of the Jewish practice of having sacrifices offered in the Temple for the dead “so that they might be released from their sins”(2 Macc 12:45). The Early Church celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the sacrifice that superseded the Old Testament Temple sacrifices and it was for this reason that the writings of the Early Church Fathers record how the Mass was offered for the dead. For example, Tertullian writes in the 2nd Century about a widow who had Mass offered for her deceased husband: "Indeed she prays for his soul, and requests refreshment for him meanwhile, and fellowship with him in the first resurrection; and she offers her sacrifice on the anniversaries of his falling asleep". Similarly, many of the Fathers echo the sentiment expressed by St Gregory the Great, "Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them." While St. John Chrysostom encourages us by saying, "If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them."[1]

But what does it mean to have a Mass offered ‘for’ something or someone? In answering this question it is important to differentiate between the general and particular intentions in the Mass: Every Mass is offered with the general intention that is articulated in every Eucharistic Prayer: for the glory of God and for the needs of the Church and the world as a whole. In addition, each individual member of the congregation brings his or her own particular intentions in his or her prayers that are united to that Mass. There is a third type of intention brought to the Mass, however, and it is this intention that is referred to when people speak of a ‘Mass Intention’, namely, the specific intention for which the priest celebrant offers the Mass: The priest’s intention specifies the “special fruit”[2] for which that particular Mass is being offered. It is in this sense that someone asks a priest to offer Mass ‘for’ something or someone.

Mass Stipends
Linked with the above is the ancient practice of Mass Stipends: a financial offering to accompany the offering of your prayer, a specific donation to accompany the specific request. While the amount donated for a Mass is at the discretion of the individual there is a standard rate set in each diocese and for many years our Bishop has set this at £10. In this parish the donation goes to the parish funds (in contrast, most other places continue the ancient practice of the Mass offering going to support the priest).

Other Intentions
The Mass is the greatest prayer we have since it is the sacrifice of Christ Himself. It is therefore important to remember that we can have Mass offered for many intentions: for the living as well as for the dead, for family difficulties, for sickness, as well as in thanksgiving for graces received etc.


Announcing the intention?
In some parishes the intention of each Mass is published in the weekly newsletter or on the notice board. Sometimes a priest may announce the intention. It is worth noting, however, that the offering of the Mass for that intention does not depend on it being publically voiced but on it being specified in the priest’s personal prayers. Similarly, if a priest announces that “I am offering this Mass for [such and such an] intention” he does not thereby require the rest of the congregation to pray for that intention or to make their own lay-offering of the Mass to be for that intention.


Footnotes:
[1]Fr William Saunders, “What does it mean to have a Mass ‘offered’ for someone?”,
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0812.html accessed 2/11/2010
[2]Pope Pius VI, Auctorem Fidei (1786), cited in Aidan Nichols, The Holy Eucharist (Dublin: Veritas, 1991), p.100.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 18:9-14; Ecclesiaticus (Sirach) 35:12-19
Many people in Shaftesbury think that they are among those people who are to be considered as “personages”. Shaftesbury is full of people who attended the finest schools, the great universities, many have fine houses and secure pensions, and perhaps you might add that you are popular among your friends.
But God could not care less about any of these things. There is not one of these things that mean that you stand more or less in God's sight.
Thus it is that we heard in our first reading about how "The Lord... is no respecter of personages... [it is] the humble man's prayer [that] pierces the clouds”(Sirach 35:12ff).

I have been thinking these past few days especially, as I’ve pondered this Bible text, how I might view myself in the same way. I might think about how I stand before the world and before God: I have a degree, from a respectable university, a degree in a respectable subject, as a priest I have studied in Rome, even now I am a professor in the seminary, surely I am a “personage”. And yet, God couldn't care less about any of these things. There is not one of these things that mean that I stand more or less in God's sight.
God surely laughs at our pretence of being some kind of "equal" to Him.

Now, it might seem that this is not fair. Surely, you might say, my achievements should mean something to God. “Surely”, you might say, “God must think more of me than that person over there because I am” whatever-you-might-think-yourself-to-be.
Well, and this is perhaps the key point:
our achievements do have a value, and our achievements do change how we stand before God, but how our achievements affect our standing before God depends not so much on the external matter of the achievement but the inner humble spirit with which we did that thing –or not.

The importance of humility can perhaps be most clearly seen when we recognise the destructive effect of its opposite, namely, pride. As I think St Augustine said: It is the distinctive quality of pride that it can enter into ANY outwardly good action and turn it into something evil.
ANY task or chore can be done in pride for our own achievement, or, it can be done as an act of service to God using the talents He has given me as He wishes me to use them.

To turn to the example in today’s gospel, let us consider the good deeds of that Pharisee. There was nothing wrong with his deeds at the outward level. As he said himself: he fasted twice a week, he paid his tithes. However, his good deeds were destroyed by the pride that animated them: his deeds were something that he did not refer to as serving God or as serving his fellow man, rather, his deeds were something that he used to rank himself, as he himself put it, above “the rest of mankind” and especially above “this tax collector here”(Lk 18:11).

A humble person is capable of doing outwardly great things –the same outwardly great things that a proud man does. The difference is that the proud man attributes all of his greatness and all of his success to himself, and he achieves things for himself and for his own greatness, whereas, in contrast, the humble man attributes all of his gifts and talents to the Lord who bestows those gifts and talents, and a humble man achieves great things not for himself but in service to others.
Hence, as we heard in our first reading: it is such a “man who with his whole heart serves God” and it is such a man who "will be accepted"(Sir 35:16). "The Lord... is no respecter of personages”(Sirach 35:12ff).

28th Sunday Ordinary Time, Year C, Harvest Festival, Shaftesbury

Lk 17:11-19
Today we keep our harvest festival. The primary thing that this involves is giving thanks to God for the fruits of the harvest, and in this giving thanks to God for all the good things He gives us.
Today's gospel gives us one of the classic texts where we see thanksgiving in action: 10 lepers were healed. One leper came back to give thanks.
I want to say a word about the connection between faith, thanksgiving, and salvation, and to start by looking at the words that Jesus said to the healed leper who had returned to give thanks.

Jesus said to that leper, "Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you"(Lk 17:19). Now, I think this is interesting, because it indicates something of what "salvation" means.
All 10 of the lepers were healed, all 10 were "saved" in their body.
But it was only the one who had enough “faith” to return and give thanks, it was only that leper who Jesus said was "saved":

"Salvation" is not just about the body. Often, especially when we are sick, we can reduce our problems and reduce our concept of salvation to just being about matters of the body, just being about material issues, whether it is health, money, and so forth.
However, Jesus's words point out to us that salvation is more than just about material things. Ultimate salvation, in heaven, will have the perfection and satisfaction of both our bodily and spiritual needs. But, while we journey though this world it is important to remember that it is the spiritual soul that is the higher part of us, and if we are saved in our body but not in our soul then we are not really saved at all.
And this is something we experience even at the psychological level: my body can be healthy, my house and my wealth might be secure, but I can still lack that peace of soul that is the more precious commodity.

The words of Jesus to that leper not only praised him for what he had but also point out to us how it is that we might have that salvation: by having faith.
If we believe in God, if we believe in what Jesus Christ has told us in the words of Scripture and through the teaching of His Church, IF we believe then we see the realities that this passing world fails to see and we rejoice in the realities that this passing world fails to rejoice in. And if our faith enables us to see these things then it enables us to give thanks to God for them.

But, this said, many of us often feel how we lack faith, how our faith is not as strong as we would like it to be.
We can pray the prayer we heard in last week’s Gospel: “Lord, Increase our faith”(Lk 17:5).
I would like, however, to point out something else that we can do to increase our faith, something that is important for us to do even if we think our faith is strong: we can give thanks.
If I want to deepen my awareness of God, deepen my faith in Him, deepen the amount I see His workings and gifts all around me, then an important way to deepen my faith is to thank Him for the gifts that the little faith I already have enables me to recognise.
When I go to bed at night I can pause to thank Him for the good things I have enjoyed during the day;
when I wake in the morning I can thank Him for the gift of the new day and for what will lie ahead;
and, the more I remember to thank Him at the start and end of the day the easier it will be to remember to thank Him during the day,
and, the more I thank Him then more that habit will enable me to clear my sight so that I will see better with the eyes of faith,
and, possessing ever deeper faith I will possess a deeper share in salvation,
so that one day Christ might say to me as He said to that leper, "Your faith has saved you"(Lk 17:19).

Centenary, Mass of Anniversary of Dedication of a Church, Shaftesbury

2 Chron 5:6-11.13-6:2; 1 Cor 3:9-11.16-17; Lk 19:1-10
We are here today to celebrate the solemn dedication of the church 100 years ago, and it great to have so many here today. I want to start by referring to a historical memory that someone told me.

In the buildup to this centenary a number of people have been offering their memories of our parish history, and I was very struck by a recollection from someone whose family has lived here for many generations, someone who told me how his parents told him part of what it meant to be a Catholic here before the church was built, even before the FMI priests came here:
to be a Catholic here in Shaftesbury meant walking the 6 miles that it took to get to Mass in Marnhull –and they had to go to Marnhull because there was no Mass in Shaftesbury. And I think that memory alone helps illustrate what the building of this church was about:
the building of this church was about people who knew their Catholic Faith well enough, and valued what their Catholic Faith told them, to know that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was something worth making the effort for, and, worth constructing a building that would be set apart for the Mass.

But there is something else that a Church is, something that it is BECAUSE the Mass is offered here, and that something was echoed in two of the Scripture readings we just heard:
a Catholic church is the dwelling place of God –a place where we meet Him.
In our 1st reading (2 Chron 5) we heard of how the Temple of the Old Testament was built and how the glory of the Lord filled the Temple, the glory of a presence that was brought through the actions of the priests.
This happens even more fully in the dispensation of the New Testament:
In keeping with the command of the Lord Jesus that we “do this in memory of me”, when the priest repeats the words of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, "This is my body... this is the chalice my blood", the promise of Christ comes true and He dwells among us: The bread and wine change and become His very self: His Body and Blood, His Soul and His Divinity.
And so, because the Mass is offered here, God dwells here in His tabernacle, as He dwells in the tabernacle of every Catholic church across the world.

This is something that we as Catholics value highly, and something that Catholics frequent suffer to acquire. Across the world today, and down through the years, Catholics have made many sacrifices to be with God in the Eucharist:
Today, in many parts of Africa or South America people walk long hours to get to Sunday Mass;
In our own country, in centuries gone past, during the Penal years when it was illegal to be a Catholic in this country, people made great risks to get to hidden Masses and to shelter priests who would then offer them Mass;
In centuries before that, when the Catholic Faith was first being established in this land, when King Alfred the Great was driving out the pagan Vikings and building the abbey here in Shaftesbury, to achieve that people made sacrifices by donating for the building and upkeep of the abbey;
Even before that, in the very beginnings of Christianity, we know from the first historical records of the universal Church that the first Christians set aside houses from the very beginning to be dedicated for the worship of God;
And, as we are commemorating today, when this church was built a hundred years ago, people sacrificed time, money, and work, that there might be a sacred place for the Mass, that there might be dwelling place of God among them.

But, my final point and concluding focus is to point out that God dwells among men, and we build churches that He might dwell in them, SO THAT He might then also dwell in our hearts.
As we heard in that 2nd reading, “You are God’s building”, you are His dwelling place.
The people who journeyed to get to Mass in Marnhull, the people who built this church, they did so in the hope that God would also dwell in them, with the resolution to make Him welcome in Holy Communion.

All of this leaves a legacy for us, and a call for us to put that legacy to good use: the example of our forefathers in the Faith should prompt us to seek to value the Mass more, to love Jesus in the Mass more. Last week, when Pope Benedict was here, he spoke repeatedly of the need to rediscover the place of God in society and in our lives. As we recall today what has been bequeathed to us in this sacred building, let us seek to value and love what they loved: to love the good God who dwells among us in the Eucharist.