Fr Alexander Sherbrooke is the parish priest of St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square, the heart of London’s West End. His parish encompasses some of London’s most iconic tourist destinations, like the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus, but also has all the problems of an inner-city parish: prostitution (about 250-300 work in the area), homelessness, drug addiction.

This is in an increasingly secular Britain: 4% of the British population practice their faith. Rome has the largest section of this percentage, followed not by Anglicans but by Muslims.

Fr Sherbrooke and his team at St Patrick’s aim to evangelise the culture and they do this in a great variety of ways: Fr Sherbrooke has exposition of Blessed Sacrament 12 hours a day, when people can come in to pray before the Blessed Sacrament.

The parish has two big public processions of the Blessed Sacrament a year: on 8 December in honour of our Blessed Mother; the other in honour of Corpus Christi; a Cenacolo prayer group – offering a two-year course of prayer and formation for those coming out of drug addiction; a School of Evangelisation which gives young people a deeper knowledge of their faith and enabling them, for instance, every two weeks or so to take to streets, show icons of Our Lady, distribute Miraculous Medals, etc.

The parish supports Missions during the year, inviting people into the Church, where Priests are present to offer Confessions and family blessings. There’s the chance to go to the Blessed Sacrament to offer up an intention.

For a country with three centuries of outlawed Catholicism, St Patrick’s has an impressive Catholic history. It has had two great evangelists through its doors – St Columbiere, the confessor of St Margaret Mary Alacoque (the first person to hear of Christ’s desire for devotion to his Sacred Heart) and the American Catholic evangelist Archbishop Fulton Sheen – who is thought to have written his doctoral dissertation in the church’s tower.

It’s great to hear of a Catholic parish doing so much to evangelise – a model for all!

For the week following Trinity Sunday, here is a talk from Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) on John 3:1-16 – where Nicodemus is born again.

Naturally, all three Persons of the Trinity are mentioned in this passage: God the Father – in that much-loved verse, John 3:16: 'For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.'

However, what Miles Toulmin, the speaker, is principally trying to bring out in this talk is that we need to learn to be born of water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For all of Nicodemus' initial confusion – natural, surely – by Chapter 7 he is tentatively speaking up for Jesus, and is mocked for it. By Chapter 19, he is the one who – along with Joseph of Arimathea – has the courage to take Jesus' body to tomb – 'something of eternal significance', since the Christian faith is founded on Jesus' resurrection from the tomb.

HTB is on the Evangelical end of the Church of England, and the speaker, Miles Toulmin, quotes some amazing physical and spiritual healings brought about in members of the HTB congregation by the Holy Spirit.

EWTN is a ministry of a congregation of Poor Clare nuns in Southern Alabama. Their website (www.ewtn.com) is crammed full of good Catholic audio, of which today’s episode of the Journey Home is one. Each week, The Journey Home interviews a convert or a revert to the Catholic faith.

‘He who sings prays twice.’ St Augustine’s words might have been uttered with Jeremy de Satge in mind. After a training in singing at the Trinity College of Music and reception into the Catholic Church, he founded a company that publishes good Church music, both new and old.

He was born into a French family living in England – oddly enough, not Hugenot but one which lost the faith during the nineteenth century. His own first visits to a Catholic Church were made back in France, where he was learning French. From this point he knew he needed to be a Catholic in the Roman Catholic Church.

He also trains the choir of his South London parish – and to some extent the congregation as well. It is generally acknowledged now that Vatican II did not forbid the old Tridentine Mass but instead insisted that the congregation should continue to be able to make its own responses in Latin. Jeremy de Satge’s choir can sing five Plain Chant settings of the Mass, and he ensures that every member of the congregation has a copy of the Mass being sung in front of them, so that they can participate too.

It’s good to hear good Church music, both new and old, being so solidly praised!

(British television viewers can view it on Sky Channel 589 and, for those who do not have Sky, EWTN television and radio is available also on Sky’s Freesat service.)

This is the first of nine lectures from a conference entitled ‘The Splendor of the Church’, held by the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Dr Bergsma speaks on the concept of priesthood and on priests as reflecting Christ’s role as the Bridegroom of the Church in John’s Gospel.

He points out analogies between Christ and the High Priest’s role in the Old Testament, and then identifies Apostolic Succession in John’s Gospel, pointing out the echoes of priestly functions in the Old Testament – and says that Jesus intended his Apostles and their successors to carry them on.

For instance, Jesus’ washing of His disciples’ feet, which refers to Exodus 30:19-21, where Mosaic Law provides for a basin of water to be always present in the tabernacle of the courts so that the priests can wash their feet before performing any liturgical act.

Jesus’ words to Peter: ‘If I do not wash your feet you have no part [or portion] of me’ echoes the fact that the members of the priestly tribe of Levi hold no portion – ‘I the Lord am their portion.’

Again, there is ‘The High Priestly Prayer’ in John 17. This falls into three parts:

vv1-5, where Jesus prays for himself
vv6-19, where he prays for the Apostles
vv20-26, he prays for those ‘Who will believe on me through them’ – the rest of the Church.

John 17 refers to God’s name throughout – v6: ‘I have manifested Your Name to the men whom You gave me out of the world’; v11, ‘And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in Your Name, which You have given Me, so that they may be one, as you and I are one.’ The Day of Atonement was the only day on which the High Priest could pronounce God’s name.

Christ’s commission to the Apostles in John 20 (‘Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, and whose sins you retain are retained) recalls Moses’ words to Aaron in Leviticus 10:10: ‘You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean …’, and the role, elsewhere in Leviticus, of the priests in deciding if a person with a skin disease was clean or unclean, physical illness being seen as reflecting moral impurity.

The second part of the lecture discusses the Church as Bride of Christ in John’s Gospel. Mary anoints Jesus with a costly jar of pure nard. Jesus says: ‘It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.’ This ties in with the only reference to nard in the Old Testament: in the Song of Songs, where it is one of the perfumes for Solomon’s bride.

Song of Songs Chapter 3 has a beautiful song about the bride yearning for the bridegroom and looking for him. Mary Magdalen’s search for Christ’s body reflects this in great detail.

Dr Bergsma’s final point is that the priest’s role – in persona ‘Christi’, modelling Christ to the people – is in fact closer to Christ’s role of Bridegroom than that of married men!

MP3 length: 51 mins 51secs
Download: http://siministries.org/Podcast/TheConversionofJosephPearce

Joseph Pearce – Conversion testimony – ‘A sound bigot cannot be too careful of his reading’

In his account of his journey from far right and Protestant extremism to Catholicism and Literature Professor at Ave Maria University, Joseph Pearce adapts CS Lewis’ words in Surprised by Joy: ‘A sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. Pearce expands that comment to include a racist, Protestant bigot, ‘and all the things that I was’. Lewis was referring to Chesterton – who had the same profound influence on Pearce.

He describes his childhood heroes of 60s and 70s Dagenham as ‘Nazi hippies’ – thugs who beat up coloured people while high on LSD.

Role models like these led his joining the National Front – which I was surprised to see described by Wikipedia as still a separate organisation, having assumed that it had evolved into the BNP years ago.

Pearce served two terms of imprisonment in the following years for publishing ‘material likely to incite racial hatred’ as editor of NF’s Bulldog magazine – having been appointed to the post at the age of 16. He remained defiant during his first sentence, and on release went immediately back to the magazine.

During his second prison term, he was slowly coming to Catholicism through his love of reading – the vehicle being G K Chesterton’s Distributist ideas as an alternative to global capitalism and Marxism, which are described in GKC’s article ‘Reflections on a Rotten Apple’.

Pearce came to like Chesterton himself, and so was especially receptive to the latter’s defence of Catholicism. Someone sent him a Rosary during his second prison sentence in 1985 and, although Pearce had yet to learn the Credo, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be, he was consumed by a desire to pray. He was finally received into the Church on St Joseph’s Day 1989 after ‘ a lot of inner healing.’

Although I would have liked to hear about his early life before the age of 14, this is an inspiring story of how God’s grace can triumph over a most unlikely defences.

Is work important? Why should God get involved in it? Why should we get God involved? Are some jobs more holy than others?

These are some of the issues Ken Costa (Chairman of Lazard International) and Nicky Gumbel (Vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton Church) discuss in this series of podcasts, taking a different work-related topic in each podcast.

This first podcast looks at ‘Work matters’. In the New Testament ‘there is no division between our faith and our work’. God made us to enjoy our work, and although there will be spiritual battles out there, our work is inherently of value to God – and not just because, through work, we can reach other people.

Ken explores some of the theology of work: the ultimate model of the Trinity as a team (God loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Spirit reflecting the love between the two of them, and the three as one).

This throws light on the way we think of work: we talk of business ‘partnership’, ‘Joint Ventures’, the nature of a company as a joint stockholders coming together for a common purpose, having the liabilities of a partnership and sharing their assets.

Christ identifies with us in the world of work, and sets an example for us to work – both in the secular world as a carpenter, and overall as ‘doing the Father’s work’. He said in John Chapter 5: ‘My Father is still working, and I am also working.’

That work came to ultimate fruition on the Cross, where he disarmed the spiritual powers of greed, economic power, advancement, excessive motivation, that stand between us and God. Christ worked to a purpose, as we are intended to – so much so that at the end of His Passion he said of his work, ‘It is finished!’

Particularly relevant also in these times of employment churn!

Individual Podcast:
http://siministries.org/Podcast/SongsofLoveandForgivenessastudyofHosea

Download other Podcasts individually:
http://siministries.org/Podcast/PodcastList

Subscribe to St Irenaeus’ podcast in iTunes:
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St Irenaeus Ministries takes its name from a second century missionary bishop and vigorous defender of Catholic orthodoxy known as the ‘Father of Catholic Theology”.

This ministry produces a weekly podcast – currently 184 of them – which primarily look at books in both Testaments of the Bible, but also at themes within the Christian life, like interpreting the Scriptures, and ‘Christian Apocalyptic – the Modern Age’.

This first podcast is a Lenten meditation on the Book of Hosea, the 28th book of the Old Testament. He is the first of what are known as the Minor Prophets – not minor as in unimportant, but as in a figure of whom we know little. Hosea is the only prophet from the north whose written work is included in the Bible. (Both Elijah and Elisha came from the north, but did not themselves record their prophecies.)

The Book of Hosea describes Hosea as receiving the calling of God to marry an a woman who is engaged in prostitution, to love her and call her back to him. Hosea identifies three shortcomings in the unfaithful wife: of hiding or not developing her knowledge of God; lack of love; and lack of commitment. The book’s theme is one of repentance, forgiveness and returning to God, and, as such, can be read as an allegorical story of Israel’s (and the unfaithfulness of members of Christ’s Church) and also (as most scholars now believe) as a literal account of Hosea and his wife.

As often with Catholic Bible studies, we begin and close with the Sign of the Cross and a prayer, which puts the study in its proper context, of allowing God to use it to develop our spiritual formation, not just as an academic exercise.