PASTOR IUVENTUS

A starbust of love in the elevated Host
After the intensive halfterm trip to Rome I must confess I really struggled last week. The endless rain and grey skies didn’t help. I just felt at every turn that I could cheerfully sleep for about a week and wake up when the days begin to lengthen.
As it was, I was spiritually revitalised by the wonderful few days in the Eternal City and the kind of reassuring depth and solidity of the Faith that is always renewed by a visit to that city of martyrs and saints. Celebrating the feast of the Chair of St Peter last week, I was once again so grateful for the experience of spending so much time in Rome. I re-read the Holy Father’s wonderful meditation for the feast in which he manages to evoke from a description of the Bernini Altar of the Chair in St Peter’s a deep analysis of the nature of the Church. He looks at the famous window above it, depicting the Holy Spirit and develops the window as an image of the Church. “It signifies,” he says, “through the dove of the Holy Spirit, that God is the actual source of all light. But it tells us also something else: the Church herself is in essence, so to speak, a window, a place of contact between the other-wordly mystery of God and our world, the place where the world is permeable to the radiance of his light. The Church is not there for herself; she is not an end, but a point of departure beyond herself and us.” This week brings at long last some sign of spring, with two lovely, bright days. With the imperceptible tilt of the earth nearer the sun come suddenly a few mornings in the year when the sunlight streaming through the high windows of our church shines fully upon the uplifted Host and chalice at the consecration, such is the juxtaposition of planet and star and time. The sudden light is a little reminder of the starburst of love that is contained within that elevation, and of the mysterious orbit of grace in which we are held even though sometimes its workings seem imperceptible. And the season of Lent invites us to try to resist that gravity of selfishness which tilts away from him back towards Jesus, who longs to warm us with his love. More prosaically, March 1 brings the news from the local authority of the school places allocation. Each year there are disappointments, this year sore ones for good, devoutly practising Catholic families, some of whom have not been offered a place at any so-called “faith” school at all, let alone one of their choice. I have spent the morning talking to aggrieved parents, and while I share their sense of frustration am inclined to lay a good proportion of the blame at the doors or those who insisted on abolishing interviews on the grounds of “fairness” – namely, the Government cheered on by the Catholic Education Service. The net result of this for the excellent (and therefore heavily oversubscribed) local Catholic secondary schools has been to make admissions far more arbitrary and slanted towards those who score well on paper and the middle-classes who are adept at filling forms and learning how best to play the system at the cost of the genuinely practising. There remains a touching, but unfortunately essentially naïve, confidence in what Father can do to influence admis sions decisions. The reality is that Catholic schools have had most of their discretion removed from them.
More positively, I welcomed a guest this week. Fr Francis Xavier is a young priest from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. He will stay in the parish for 20 months while he learns English. In fact, he seems to have a good basic grasp of it already, and over lunch on our first day he tells me a little about his life as a curate in the countryside outside Ho Chi Minh City. When I tell him that my Holy Communion round takes up one morning a week he reminisces about how his took three days of the week as he would cycle to far-flung villages to the many people in his huge parish. His normally smiling face darkens as he speaks about the difficulties the authorities try to put in the way of the Church, even though the Church is very numerous and powerful. It took many months for him to be granted the necessary paperwork to come to England. Their government, he says, is hugely suspicious of the West, matched only by a huge suspicion of China and its influence. He will be a great blessing to us, I feel. And as I have lived through the whole long refurbishment of the house, it is wonderful to feel that this is starting to bear fruit with the arrival of another priest, even if it is for a limited duration. So he concelebrated the morning Mass with me and has gone off with his rucksack up the road to his language college. He has professed himself willing to do anything he can to help out, and he boasts a host of other talents; he is a musician and a keen gardener, apparently, who was delighted to see the vase of tulips in his room, as he said they did not have them in Vietnam.
We went into school, where I introduced him to some of the classes. It says a lot for the regime under which we are living that I had to gently tell him that, strictly speaking, he should not take pictures of the children to send to his family. It felt very embarrassing, for I was quite clear that it was his innocence which was being compromised by such an instruction. But such is the world we live in – or, rather, such have we made it.