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The Birthday of Our Lady

This coming Friday (8^th September) we celebrate the Birthday of Our Lady. Her entrance into the world was one of the greatest events ever to take place in human history, because by it, our salvation was about to be ushered in. I doubt anyone even suspected that the child born of St Joachim and St Anne would be the greatest and most highly honoured of all God’s creatures by being the Mother of our God and Redeemer.

It is from tradition and particularly from the Apocryphal Gospel of James, that we know the names of Our Lady’s parents. St Joachim and St Anne were childless until the birth of Our Lady, but they lived godly lives and were always fervent in prayer. After twenty years of fruitless marriage, and despite all their efforts and prayers, they were still without a child. According to tradition, Joachim decided to go into the desert for forty days, and made a retreat and did a lot of fasting and penance while St Anne stayed at home and did the same thing. An angel appeared to Joachim and told him that God had heard their prayers, and that he and his wife would conceive. So now very happy, Joachim set off to return home, and on the way met his wife in the Gate of Jerusalem. Before he could say anything, she told him she had had a vision and that they were going to have a child.

The Jews had been waiting for centuries for the coming of the promised Messiah, but no one would have thought this little baby girl born to Joachim and Anne was to be the fulfilment of that promise. St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) teaches that Mary’s soul was the most beautiful God had ever created. She was immaculately conceived, without Original Sin and hence she was full of grace from the moment of her conception. Even in St Anne’s womb her sanctity was higher than all the angels and saints.

People sometimes say that since Mary had so many graces and was immaculately conceived and sinless, that we can learn very little from her. But this is not so. Yes, she is above all the angels and saints, but we must remember that in Baptism, our souls were cleansed from Original Sin and we were given sanctifying grace. And this gives us the foundation we need to grow in holiness. Yes, she was conceived “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), but it was still by her free will that she chose to continue in that grace, and each moment of her life she chose to cooperate with that grace, and to continue free from sin. 

God had a plan for Mary and He also has a plan for each and every one of us. But it’s also up to us whether we want to cooperate with His plan and do His Will. We can choose to follow Him like Mary, but we can also choose to go our own way, and if we do that it is more than likely to lead to our destruction.

So let us rejoice at her birth, and also emulate her example and follow her ways. And may God who made Mary perfect and good in His image, also make us good and perfect, which is what we all should aspire to be – like Mary in how we devote ourselves to her Divine Son.

Fr Paul Gillham, IC

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The Gift of the Papacy

This Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 16:13-20) gives us the famous account of Our Lord conferring the Keys of the Kingdom on Peter and changing his name from Simon to Peter, the rock upon which He would build His Church. There is a stain glass window depicting this event on the right-hand side of the church above Fr David’s confessional. Peter had professed his faith in the divinity of JESUS who then said to him, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build My Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in Heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in Heaven” (Matthew 16: 18-19). Christ will always be the Head of the Church, but after the Ascension Peter was to be the visible Head of the Church on earth. Peter, or Cephas in Aramaic, means ‘rock’ and so Our Lord is making Peter the foundation or the rock of the Church, and this is why Our Lord changed his name from Simon to Peter. He will keep the Church together and make it endure. This power of the keys (authority) is passed on to all his successors, the Popes.

The First Vatican Council in 1870 infallibly defined that:

• St Peter was appointed by Christ to be the visible Head of the Church;
• He received from Christ supreme authority to teach and govern the whole Church;
• Peter has a perpetual line of successors in the Primacy;
• His successors are the Roman Pontiffs or the Popes.

The Primacy of the Pope means he has real power and God-given authority to rule the Church, and we believe that under very strict conditions he is infallible (cannot make a mistake), when he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. It does not mean the Pope can do no wrong or that he can never be mistaken, even in a religious matter. It is important we all understand that the Pope is a human being and is always subject to human frailty and the possibility of error as are the rest of us. Hence St Paul’s rebuke to St Peter, the first Pope at Antioch, when Peter insisted the Gentiles follow the Jewish dietary laws, thus threatening the entire mission of the Church to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:11-14). The last time a Pope infallibly defined a dogma was in 1950, when Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption. And even when the Pope does infallibly define a dogma, he can do no more than confirm and make clearer what has always been believed and handed down. Hence the First Vatican Council said, “For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that they might disclose a new doctrine by His revelation, but rather that, with His assistance, they might reverently guard and faithfully explain that revelation or depositNewsletter 27 August 2023 web LL of faith that was handed down through the Apostles.” So the Pope cannot, for example, say there are four Persons in the Godhead, or that marriage can be between two men or two women, because God has revealed Himself as a Trinity of Persons, and that marriage is between one man and one woman ordered to procreation. The novelties we often hear being proposed by some churchmen today concerning faith and morals can be found nowhere in the Deposit of Faith handed down through the Apostles, and therefore are not of the faith and must be rejected. As Pope Benedict XVI said in May 2005, “The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith.”

The Papacy is a great gift to the Church. As Catholics we know that when the Church has given a solemn and definitive answer to a question the teaching can never change, and the goal posts cannot be moved in the future, no matter how hard some may try to!| Development of doctrine is different to changing it. This is what Our Lord intended and why He founded His Church on Peter the rock. The pope is the test of the true Church. As St Ambrose said in the fourth century, “Where Peter is, there is the Church.”

Fr Paul Gillham, IC

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St Pius X, Warrior for the Faith

Tomorrow (Monday), we celebrate the feast of the great Pope and saint, Pius X, who reigned from 1903 until 1914. St Padre Pio said of him that he was the holiest and noblest Pope after St Peter. Quite an accolade! Even the look in his eyes was enough to convert people, and towards the end of his papacy he worked many miracles. What a gift the Church had in him.

He was born to a poor family in the Italian village of Riese near Venice in 1835 and was baptised Giuseppe (Joseph) Sarto. He was given a dispensation to be ordained priest at the very young age of 23. He was successively curate, parish priest, Bishop of Mantua and Patriarch of Venice. He was well known for helping the poor and was strong on Catholic Social Action. And then much against his wishes, he was elected Pope on 4th August 1903, and took the name of Pius, and his papal motto was “To restore all things in Christ”.

As Pope he would often sneak out to visit the sick in local hospitals. He improved priestly formation, and promoted sacred music, particularly Gregorian Chant. In 1910, he issued his famous decree which lowered the age for First Holy Communion for children. He is probably best known for the heroic steps he took to combat the heresy which he called “modernism” which is to try and change the Faith into something different, destroy what has been handed down to us, and then redesign it to suit the mood of the times. He called it the “synthesis of all heresies” which means we have all the heresies and errors of Christian history lumped together into one. Among the chief errors of the modernists are that the Church cannot determine the genuine sense of the Scriptures and neither is God really the author of them. The Gospels do not prove the divinity of JESUS, and He never intended to found a Church. The dogmas held by the Church are not revealed truths but mere opinions, and therefore they can change in the future. (Many today are seeking to change the moral teaching of the Church). Christ did not always know He was the Messiah, and the Sacraments originated in the Apostles from some ideas Christ expressed, and not from Christ Himself. And since the dogmas of the Church cannot be reconciled with science, in order to have progress, dogma must be abandoned. These errors and many others were condemned by St Pius X, and I give the main ones here so as you may identify them as errors should you hear them voiced, as they are gaining in frequency.

So we see that St Pius X was a Catholic through and through, and he could see over a hundred years ago that an anti-Catholic way of thinking was entering the Church. So he obliged all teachers and clerics before ordination to take an oath against modernism in the hope of suppressing it. It had the desired effect for several decades, but now it has reared its ugly head once again. St Pius X warned that the heresy of modernism contaminating the minds and hearts of the faithful would extinguish the light of faith in them. So it has to be fought against because these ideas are poisonous. Therefore we have to know and study our faith and remain faithful to what the Church has always taught. As I’ve said before, beware of novelties! The Church is going through a Passion at the moment as did her Divine Founder. But Good Friday is always followed by Easter Sunday. Christ and His Church will be victorious in the end. Our Lady of Fatima promised over a hundred years ago, “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph”, meaning that the Church and the Faith will be exalted and glorified as never before in her history. So never despair.

It is said that St Pius X died of a broken heart at the outbreak of the First World War. How heartbreaking it is to see that we are now experiencing conflict within the very heart of the Church, and that the light of faith is under attack, particularly in Europe. But however hard they try, the gates of Hell will not prevail (Matthew 16:18). Let us invoke St Pius X, and St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church after whom St Pius X was named, that we become models of uncompromising faith.

Fr Paul Gillham, IC

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The Assumption of Our Lady

On Tuesday we celebrate the glorious Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven and it is a Holyday of Obligation. As far back as the Church can remember we have celebrated the fact that Mary, at the end of her earthly life, was taken up body and soul into Heaven – not just her soul, but her body also. This dogma was solemnly defined as an article of faith in the Papal Decree “Munificentissimus Deus” (The Most Bountiful God) by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So within the lifetime of many of you reading this, a dogma which has been believed from the beginning of the Church and has been celebrated with great joy and solemnity throughout the centuries, was finally proclaimed ‘de fide’ (of the Faith), and must therefore be believed by all Catholics.

The event of Mary’s Assumption is not described in the Bible, but there are accounts of others who were taken up into Heaven; the most famous being Elijah who went up in a whirlwind, and you can read about that in the Second book of Kings (2:11). However, there is an important passage from Scripture which the Church gives us as the First Reading of the Feast: “A great sign appeared in Heaven, a woman adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant and in labour, crying out aloud in the pangs of childbirth…” (Apocalypse 12:1-2). Now the woman described is unquestionably Mary, because it is a beautiful woman who gives birth to a child who can be none other than JESUS, and they are both in Heaven, and it is clear from the inspired text they both have bodies. 

When Pope Pius XII defined the dogma, he didn’t indicate whether Mary had died as we don’t know for certain one way or the other. What is important is the fact she was taken up to Heaven body and soul. And in fact there is some difference between the Eastern and Western Churches as to how exactly it happened. The Eastern Churches actually refer to this feast as the “Dormition of Our Lady”. Dormition is a word for ‘sleep’ and refers to her death, whereas the Western Church tends to portray her as being taken alive at once body and soul into Heaven, although there is a tradition in the West too that she first died, was carried to her tomb by the Apostles, and then three days later was taken up to Heaven. It is also significant that whereas we have the tombs and relics of every Apostle and the bones of many early saints, there is nowhere on earth that claims to have the body of Mary.

But how does this affect us and what does it mean for us? It means that what happened to Mary in a very profound and also preliminary way will also happen to us. As Mary was assumed body and soul into Heaven, so we will be in Heaven one day, both body and soul. But for now, when we die, our soul, after any necessary purification in Purgatory goes to Heaven, whereas the body remains in the tomb. But on the last day we will be raised up, and the body will join again with the soul. With God all things are possible. As Scripture says, “He will change our lowly body to be like His glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Mary is our hope, and she will surely help us achieve this end.

Fr Paul Gillham, IC

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The Transfiguration – what to make of it?

This Sunday 6^th August is the Feast of The Transfiguration of the Lord but when you think about it, it can sound a bit ‘magical’, ‘fairytale-ish’ even. We are told that Jesus goes up onto a mountain and His clothes become dazzlingly white. Prophets appear and talk to Him. And then it is all over and Jesus tells His friends to say nothing. But why?

We should hold on to the absurdity of the incident. For there is simply no reason for all this to have happened. In particular, there is no reason to put it into a Gospel – the evangelist, Matthew, makes no capital out of it. It doesn’t help his message. It’s simply just there!

And this is the strength of the Transfiguration as an historical incident. There is no reason for anyone to have invented it. It is not central to the Christian case. It is not used to win arguments. There is only one reason to put it into the Gospel, and that is because it happened. It is one of those cases of the writer putting things down without knowing why they are important but just because they happened, and their very puzzlement is what makes the story so convincing.

Why, then, did it happen? Surely so that we could see and understand that Jesus is at once the one with the message and the one foretold by the prophets of God and that He is one with God, and lives for all eternity in a blaze of dazzling and unapproachable light. What Peter had blurted out, in his usual impetuous way, that Jesus was the Christ of God, is here on the mountain confirmed in unimaginable clarity.

And so too, in the Transfiguration, Jesus is empowered to continue His journey and mission to save all who will trust in Him, knowing that regardless of what lies ahead, His Father remains with Him, guiding His steps and making His mission bear fruit for all humanity.

In the end, as we reflect on the mystery of the Transfiguration, we are reminded that the death of Jesus was not an accident of fate or some expression of Divine wrath, but an act of love, freely accepted and offered for the sake of those who are “least” in the Kingdom of Heaven—for you and for me and all who would call Him Lord.

Let’s heed the words of Wisdom then, spoken to us from on high: Suddenly the voice of the Father resounds proclaiming Jesus to be His most beloved Son, saying ‘listen to him.’ These words are important! Our Father said this to these Apostles and says it to us as well: ‘listen to Jesus, because He is my beloved Son.’

This week let us keep these words in our minds and in our hearts: ‘listen to Jesus! God the Father says it to everyone: to me, to you, to everyone, all people! Here is the aid for our journey of life. ‘Listen to Jesus!’ Listen to Him as you read your Bibles. Listen to Him during the Mass. Listen to Him in your special moments in prayer.  Don’t forget, HE LOVES YOU!

Fr David Jones OLW

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