The Gang of Four

Lewes' own World Youth Day Pilgrims.

 Jack Trott, William Zammit, Stuart Henderson & Fr Richard Biggerstaff

Getting International

As we prepared for Madrid it was clear things were becoming very international

Luke Daly, Fr Aaron & Steve White

 

We left for Madrid on the Feast of the Assumption, but not before a Procession of Our Lady and Holy Mass

DAYS IN THE DIOCESE OF SALAMANCA

Welcome to Spain. Our parish in the diocese of Salamanca prepared for us a huge paella.

This is Cyril, a young seminarian from Hong Kong

A deacon, soon to be ordained priest, with fellow pilgrims from the archdiocese of Cambrai in France.

John Watts, a seminarian for our diocese with Feli, my host

                                                         There was music and laughter.....

Fr Kevin Dring is the principal celebrant at the Mass of the Assumption 

The days in the diocese form a prelude to World Youth Day. Our Arundel & Brighton group were divided. 'Arundel' went to the countryside and 'Brighton' stayed in the city. We all met up on Sunday, with other dioceses, for a huge Ponfitifcal Mass in the open air at Alba de Torres, where St Teresa of Avila's relics are to be found. We continued our day with the Bishop of Salamanca at his Cathedral for Vespers.

Our Year Six Leavers

Mrs Turner, head teacher, Mrs Lord, class teacher, Mrs Langston and Mrs Shiel, teaching assistants, are all pictured with Fr Richard and the year six school leavers.
A votive mass of the Holy angels was celebrated for them, together with the whole school.
Fr Richard said:
Just because we can't see something, it does not mean that it is not real..... The angels are unseen, but they are surrounding us and aiding us  in our worship of Almighty God. You young people may well have been called angels during your time at St Pancras School! Today you look back and you look forward. The angels neither look back or forward, they stand in the eternal presence of God and that is their eternal value. At St Pancras School, in all your education, you have learnt your own worth and value. Every day you have been told that you are loved by God. You are like the angels then, who know this and worship God in the love of the God who loves them.  

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.

FR RICHARD ON THE MOVE

Bishop Kieran has asked Fr Richard to be the new parish priest of Horsham.

Fr Richard will leave Lewes on 12 September to take up the appointment and return to Lewes in early October for a farewell.

Fr Jonathan Martin, chancellor of the diocese of Arundel & Brighton, is to be the new parish priest of Lewes.

Fr Richard will be joined in Horsham by a new assistant priest, Fr Aaron Spinelli.

St Pancras, pray for our priests and for our parishes

St John, beloved disciple of the Lord, pray for our priests and for our parishes

Reverence

Our First Holy Communion children, and indeed our whole parish, are encouraged to make a sign of reverence before receiving Holy Communion. Hannah is pictured genuflecting before the Lord. Today two of the children, Luke and Joseph, received Holy Communion at the monthly extraordinary form Mass at 12.30pm. They knelt alongside their grandfather.