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A Collective Conversion
I made the photograph above in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, the oldest part of the Abbey, completed around 1255. Here, the monks would gather and read the Rule of St Benedict. It is also the place where the King’s Great Council first met in 1257, this later becoming what we now know as the British Parliament. It’s strange being in a place where the same faith I profess was being practised more than seven hundred and fifty years ago. It is the same faith, yet it is a different expression of that faith today. The essentials are unchanged, of course, but our understanding of the faith, what it…
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Barred and Bolted
When Christ founded the Church, it was abundantly clear that it was open to all – everyone was not simply welcome, but actively invited to respond to the Good News which He proclaimed throughout His life, to enter that Kingdom which He told us was close at hand. Everyone, without exception, was asked to “follow Me” – and this included those whom the religious leaders and people of that time least expected to be invited. Christ became a bridge to all people, regardless of their situation. Today, things seem somewhat different. The faith has become not so much a bridge as a wall. That open invitation of the Lord has…
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Refuge In Her Heart
Although devoted to Our Lady of Fatima, for a great many years I could not really understand the call to “pray for peace” which seemed to form a core part of the message presented at Fatima in 1917. Certainly, I could understand the relevance of this call at the time Our Blessed Lady appeared there, when the First World War was taking place; and again, when another war – “a worse one”, as Our Lady described it – would break out two decades later. I could even understand the message had a place in the 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war was at least greatly possible. But then, “Russia”…
