Fr Frederich Kernbach

A new priest for the diocese of Paderborn.

I was privileged to preach at his first High Mass in the extraordinary form at St Mary Magdalene, Brighton today.

From left to right: Me, Fr Blake pp, Fr Spinelli (who will join me in Horsham), Fr Frederich, Fr Sean Finnegan (author of the new history of St John's Seminary Wonersh).

Can you bear to read the homily....

It is a great privilege for me to come all the way from Lewes to preach at this first High Mass celebrated by Fr Frederich, our new priest. Of course Father has travelled further, from Paderborn, from Germany. You are our first German today. We welcome you amongst us and thank you for giving your life to the service of Almighty God and Holy Church as a priest.

The interrogator, prosecutor and eventual successor as chancellor of England of St Thomas More, one Thomas Cromwell, has an association with Lewes. It was Cromwell who came personally to dissolve the great priory of St Pancras at Lewes in 1535, the same year as the deaths of our martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher

Whilst we associate the two Thomases in the telling of English history -More and Cromwell - for the Catholic mind they are not the usual association. More and Fisher our great Catholic English martyrs for us! They are depicted in the new (1939) St Pancras Lewes side by side in stained glass.

Imagine my own surprise when travelling to New York and viewing and eclectic collection of pictures organised in the 1920s by a man called Frick I saw More & Cromwell side by side! Holbein, our second German and the great portrait artist, was the connection. These pictures, the one of More so familiar in Catholic devotion, looking every inch the saint; Cromwell (perhaps this is just prejudice) looking rather sinister. Holbein’s sketches of a similar portrait of Fisher survive, but alas not the portrait itself.

Holbein travelled to England in 1526 in search of work and he had got it, first through More and subsequently, returning in the 1530s and with the tide turning through Cromwell and Anne Boleyn herself.

The art of the portrait reminds us of the importance of the way the priest is seen: his joy and his manners, his attire (naturally) but also his ease and reverence with the holy, his care for himself so that he might easily be disposed to care for others... 

How the fortunes of More and Fisher changed so quickly. Prominent and sought after.... Theological as well as governmental collaborators of the King, their prominence and company was sidelined, until on charge of treason these loyal servants of God first and only then King, died a traitor’s death. The consistency of words and ideas, the integrity of their lives made them both attractive and then all too quickly repugnant to the new established order.

In 1521 Fisher was called upon to devote this consistency and integrity in thoughts which were to become his historic sermon in St Paul’s against our third German, Martin Luther. Almost certainly with More two years earlier, our martyrs had supported the witness of the King himself in Henry’s treatise Assertio septem sacramentorum.  And as defender of the faith Henry was supported again by Fisher and More who upheld Henry’s cause against Luther's counterattack in the work Contra Henricum regem Angliae, of 1522.

The battle with the heretic reminds us of the importance of the way the priest teaches. His consistency and his integrity. His heroism to make a stand and remind others of the stand they had taken, his focus on the eternal truths rather than the trendy response....

Fr Frederich, many of us here do not know you, but simply because of what you now are in the mystery of the sacrament of holy order, we know what you are about. After your long and thorough formation and probably (by this stage) too many homilies like this, you have received much advice, many words. But you know most of all that what will help you to be a good priest is your daily devotion to the King of the martyrs, Jesus Christ himself, in whose priesthood you now share as His priest. Live so that He might be seen in you, teach so that His words might become your own.