Today’s Scripture Readings are about “counting the cost” of following Christ, in terms of commitment and personal sacrifice:

Great crowds accompanied Jesus on His way, and He turned and spoke to them… ‘Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple’.

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, comes among us in person. In 1982 Pope John Paul II paid a Pastoral Visit to this island. Pope Benedict pays the first ever Papal STATE visit. He comes as Successor of St Peter, and will have a message for both the State and for the Church in our land. His words will be significant. Like Jesus, in whose Name he speaks, he will challenge us to live the Gospel, to stand up for and proclaim the truths of the Catholic Faith. Are we ready to be challenged?

During a January 2008 General Audience, the Holy Father explored what St Augustine of Hippo meant when he said, God is “more intimately present to me than my inmost being” (De vera religione):

Saint Augustine taught that by belonging to the Church, we are so closely united to Christ that we ‘become’ Christ, the head whose members we are. As our head, Christ prays in us, yet he also prays for us as our priest, and we pray to him as our God. If we ask what particular message Saint Augustine has for the men and women of today, it is perhaps his emphasis on our need for truth. Listen to the way he describes his own search for God’s truth: ‘You were within me and I sought you outside, in the beautiful things that you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. You called me, you cried out and broke open my deafness. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you.’ Let us pray that we too may discover the joy of knowing God’s truth.

Thursday 16th to Saturday 19th September 2010

Pope Benedict’s presence in Britain this September is a unique opportunity for Catholics to evangelise and explain our Faith.

The Catholic Truth Society (CTS) has specially published a new range of books, booklets and leaflets for children and adults, explaining the papacy, introducing the Catholic Faith, and telling of Cardinal Newman (whom the Pope will Beatify during his visit).

You can pick up a FREE red brochure listing a wide range of literature, and there are displays in the Bookshop and at the back of Church which will explain and vary over the next few weeks.

Prepare for the coming visit with good Catholic books so that you have answers for questions you’ll be asked, so that you can help family, friends and colleagues to get involved, so that you can be excited, informed and renewed in Faith when the Successor of St Peter comes among us.

It’s not enough to just watch him on TV (as if he were anywhere in the world) when the Pope will be right here in our midst. We want to welcome him! We want to be where he is! We want to be inspired by his life and his words!

Remember to keep an eye on the official Papal Visit website, www.thepapalvisit.org, to be up to date with what is happening.

We can speak to God because God has spoken to us – because He has come to us as a Word and because, in His inmost life in the TRINITY, He is a relationship.

The prayer of Jesus reveals that the heart of the TRINITY is a familial, filial relationship of love. God in His inner essence is a dialogue of love, and our prayer, both corporately in the liturgy and privately, is a participation in this filial and familial dialogue.

The family prayer that Jesus taught his followers, the Our Father, illuminates this point. Even when the believer prays the Our Father privately, he or she prays as a member of the family of God. It is never my Father. The prayer of Jesus is always personal and simultaneously the prayer of one who knows himself to be part of a family. Prayer is always praying with someone in the communion of the Church, in the Body of Christ, the family of God.

As our prayer is never alone, neither is it something we can do on our own initiative. Prayer and worship are our response to the God who has first spoken to us. God’s Word to us is a gift, the gift of Himself; it is the opportunity to participate in His familial dialogue of love. This has two implications. First, it implies that our worship is never the work of the Church, never our own invention. Worship is a response to an initiative coming from above, to a call and an act of love which is mystery.

We can respond to God’s words and deeds in prayer and worship because He calls us into the dialogue that He is. As Pope Benedict says, “God Himself is the content of Christian prayer”. In our prayer we ask for no less than the gift of God’s self. We have the audacity to ask for that gift because He has given Himself to us, in a most definitive way, on the Cross.

The prayer of the Church, the liturgy, becomes, then, a participation in Christ’s work of self-giving. Liturgy is the opus Dei, the work of God – God’s action in us and with us.

Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, by Scott Hann (DLT 2009). All quotations are the the Holy Father’s writings.

5th Sunday of the Year

We are all equal in the sight of God. Although he may have given us different vocations to fulfill in the world, at a deeper level we are simply his children, sinful, but loved by him and forgiven through the death of his Son. This fact is what gives us all our fundamental dignity – as St Paul says: ʻIf anyone wants to boast, let him boast in the Lordʼ.

Despite our equal dignity, it does not follow that all human opinions are equally valid. A child who says that 2 + 2 = 5 needs to be corrected: so do adults who adhere to White Supremacy or the doctrines of the Taliban. In such cases, correcting error is not an affront to dignity of those people, but actually enhances it: by offering them the truth we put them in touch with reality and give them the chance to live their lives in a better and fuller way – as Jesus says in the Gospel, it is the truth which sets us free.

Some truths about the human condition are so basic that they have come to be known as the ʻNatural Lawʼ. Many facts about sexuality, parenthood and the family come into this category. To take a topical example, most people instinctively believe that the married love of a husband and wife provides the best possible context in which to raise a child – this is the way God intended things to be and it is the best way. Believing this is not based on prejudice or bigotry, nor does it mean we hate single parents, orphans, homosexuals or other people whose lives follow a different pattern. But we do believe there are certain facts which cannot be denied, and we claim the right to speak about these facts and teach them to our children.

The Governmentʼs ʻEquality Billʼ currently being debated in Parliament seeks to prevent us speaking about or teaching the Natural Law in its fullness – hence Pope Benedictʼs comments during the week, that such legislation ʻimposes unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefsʼ. Fashionable or unfashionable, we have a duty to pass on that which God has shown us to be true. For, as Pope Benedict remarked to the English Bishops:

ʻFidelity to the Gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others – on the contrary it serves their freedom by offering them the truthʼ.

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has inaugurated a special ‘Year for Priests‘, which will run from 19th Jun 2009 until 19th Jun 2010. He has chosen this year particularly because it is the 150th anniversary of the death of St John Vianney, ‘the Cure d’Ars’, a famously holy parish priest in France during the 19th Century, who the Pope declares “a true example of a pastor at the service of Christ’s flock“.

The Year for Priests will be a time for priests themselves to strive for greater holiness of life, and for the whole Church to pray for the priests who serve her. Appropriately, the year begins on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. The image of the Sacred Heart is a visible reminder of the love of Christ. So too, priests are called to make visible the love of God, through their concern for his people. “I will give you shepherds after my own heart“, promises the Lord (Jeremiah 3: 15). Especially through their administration of the sacraments, but also through the example of their lives, priests are called to make the love of Christ the Good Shepherd a reality in the world of today.

Priesthood then, is a high and challenging vocation. Yet priests are only human, and due to the demands made of them, can often be exposed to temptations of many kinds, or fall short of the high aspirations they should have. For this reason it is essential that all of us pray for priests regularly. In our parish we have prepared a yellow sheet, simply entitled ‘Prayers for Priests’, which is available at the back of Church now, or downloadable here. In union with the other parishes of our Deanery we particularly encourage you to use these prayers on the First Friday of each month (dedicated to the Sacred Heart) and when present at Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament (which takes place in our church, every Thursday and the first Saturday of each month).

Jesus, High Priest, faithful and merciful, have mercy on us

Today’s feast of Pentecost is in a special way the Feast of the Holy Spirit. On this day we remember how the Spirit descended on Mary and the other disciples, 50 days after the Resurrection. In that moment the Church was born.

The Hebrew word for ‘Spirit’ – ruah – can also mean ‘breath’. Breath, in turn, signifies life. When God created Adam, he breathed life into him, according to the Book of Genesis. If we have no breath in us, we die.

Today, the Spirit, the Breath of God, gives life to the Church. In doing so, the Spirit continues the work of Jesus, whom we call the ‘Word of God’. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#689)  puts it like this:

When the Father sends his Word, he always sends his Breath

The work of Jesus culminates in the sending of the Holy Spirit, but in turn the Spirit deepens our faith in Jesus and helps us to live as he commands. No one can be filled with the gifts of the Spirit without believing in Jesus, but in th esame way no one can be truly Christian without the assistance of the Spirit. Both work together in order to lead us in love to God our Father, and to the joys of his heavenly kingdom, foreshadowed even now in the life of the Church.

Pope Benedict, in his Pentecost homily from 2005, declared that the true meaning of Pentecost was this:

In people, notwithstanding all of their limitations, there is now something absolutely new: the breath of God. The life of God lives in us. The breath of his love, of his truth and of his goodness … The Gospel invites us to this: to live always within the breath of Jesus Christ, receiving life from him, so that he may inspire in us authentic life, the life that no death may ever take away.

As we celebrate the end of the Easter Season today, we pray that all of us, as individual Christians and as the Church, we may live fully this new life which Christ and his Spirit bring.

Following on from last week…

Pope Benedict’s defence of the Catholic belief that condoms are an inadequate response to the AIDS epidemic has found support in some unexpected quarters. Edward C Green, Director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Centre of Population and Development Studies (a prestigious secular institution) told reporters:

the best evidence we have supports the Pope’s comments

adding

there is a consistent association shown by our best studies … between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV – infection rates.

Green’s comments were made in an interview with the (secular) American journal National Review Online.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center of Philadelphia, USA, also carries the following story on its website:

An exhaustive review of the impact of condom promotion on actual HIV transmission in the developing world concluded that condoms have not been responsible for turning around any of the severe African epidemics. This rigorous study was originally commissioned by UNAIDS [the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS], and concluded by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco. Instead of welcoming the findings, and adapting HIV prevention strategies accordingly, UNAIDS first tried to alter the findings, and ultimately refused to publish them. The findings were so threatening to UNAIDS that the researchers were finally forced to publish them on their own in another, peer-reviewed journal.

Read more at www.ncbcenter.org.

Beginning a tour of Africa, Pope Benedict XVI restated the Catholic belief that distributing condoms will not solve the scourge of HIV/AIDS. For this he was predictably vilified in the western media. The Pope’s comments were “close to premeditated murder“, according to one German MP, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Hysterical reactions such as these should encourage us to look at the issue more rationally.

No-one pretends that the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa is anything other than a tragedy – least of all the Catholic Church. Worldwide, 1 in 4 AIDS patients is treated in a Catholic clinic: 27% of the centres that treat HIV/AIDS sufferers are Catholic based.

So why does the Church argue for a solution beyond a deluge of condoms? Firstly, because no country in the world has solved its HIV/AIDS problems that way. A famous example is Thailand. In 1987 there were 112 cases of HIV/AIDS in that country. The Thai Health Ministry responded with a ’100% condom use’ policy. By 2003 there were 899,000 cases of HIV/AIDS, which had resulted in 125,000 deaths. The policy had failed. By contrast, Uganda – with a large Catholic population – implemented an AIDS prevention policy focusing primarily on faithfulness in marriage. Whereas 30% of its population were infected in the 1990s, this figure is down to around 8% today.

Encouraging marital fidelity (as opposed to condom use) is important for other reasons. HIV/AIDS spreads principally through the exploitation of the vulnerable (usually women) and this situation must be challenged, not tolerated. As the Pope said this week, HIV/AIDS will ultimately by overcome by ‘the humanisation of sexuality … a spiritual and human renewal bringing about a new way of behaving towards one another’. This means encouraging fidelity and chastity – God’s law. But western liberals see their own values challenged by this approach and prefer to pour scorn upon a Pope who has made the journey to Africa – at the age of 83 – because he cares for the people of that continent and wants to help them. Catholics should be proud to support him.