Tuesday, 28 February 2017
ASH WEDNESDAY MASS TIMES - 1ST MARCH, 2017
Ash Wednesday Mass times are as follows:
St Joseph's, Bloemfontein:
6.30am
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bloemfontein:
9am (Archbishop celebrates)
5.30pm
Sunday, 26 February 2017
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: EIGHTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR 2017
The
world loves to speak of love. We all know the old cliché “It’s love that makes
the world go round”. But by “love,” the modern world really means “sex” and all
the short-lived, superficial passions that accompany it. This certainly does
not mean that sex is bad, or superficial, or undesirable. To the contrary, it
is part of the order in this world created by God, and of everything that he
created, “God saw that it was good…and indeed, it was very good.” But the modern
world has divorced sex from the God who created it, and in doing so has
separated it from the elevated and profound purpose which God destined
as its end. In cutting mankind off from God who is love and the source of all
our love, modern secular society has come to equate sex with love.
You
do not have to look very far to see this. Switch on your TV in the evening, or
glance briefly at the magazine covers in the local supermarket. You could also
try the Divorce Court rolls in the
newspapers. The high rate of divorce on the grounds of infidelity proves
that a large proportion of human beings still believes in mutual fidelity, but
that lifelong mutual fidelity isn’t working. Why? Because we are no longer able
to rely upon the enduring Love of God, we have been forced to make do with that
feeble emotion we humans call love. Christians need to ponder the limitless
mystery of God’s love, for it is the very reason why we were created, why we
continue to exist, and why there is still hope for us all, and a reason for us
to soldier on despite the negativity we see around us every day.
If you ever wondered what was wrong
with the world, think of that figure on the cross, selfless, dying to set us
free, giving us a love that rescues us from our ugliness and hatefulness – yes,
even the young, beautiful and rich – and makes us beautiful and lovable.
Think of that image; and then look at the world around you. God never meant us
to live like this – struggling to survive on our own shallow passions. He
always willed us to live in his love, and he wills us to do so still.
Do you think there is even a choice as
to what sort of love, human or divine, the world needs? what sort of love is
our only hope? For it is the one hope to which we might cling, the only certainty
which will never fail. Let us choose that hope today. Let us
welcome into our lives the everlasting hope and salvation offered only by the
Love of God. In a word, let us submit our lives, our hope our all, to
the God of Love.
Fr Phillip
Friday, 17 February 2017
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: PROF. JOHAN ROUSSOUW ADDRESSES THE NEWMAN ASSOCIATION
The Bloemfontein Newman Association held its opening meeting on Tuesday, 14th January, 2017. Our first speaker for the year was Prof. Johan Roussouw of the University of the Free State, a member of the Orthodox Church, who delivered a moving lecture on Orthodox Spirituality. This is one of Prof. Roussouw's many areas of expertise. He clarified a number of areas of misunderstanding that are held about the Orthodox Church, and proceeded to explain its deep and rich traditions of prayer and meditation, as well as the central importance of its Liturgy in that tradition. The almost forty people who attended were deeply impressed by what they heard, and many questions were asked at the end, all superbly fielded and answered. Fr George, the Orthodox priest in Bloemfontein, was happily present on this occasion.
The Newman Association meets again on 14th March, when Dennis Molyneaux, attorney-at-law, will be speaking on the death penalty. Those wishing to attend are welcome. Please call Mrs Paddy Huygen, the Cathedral Secretary, at 051-447-2827 in order to have your name added to March's guest list.
Below are a few photographs of last Tuesday's Newman Association meeting.
The Newman Association meets again on 14th March, when Dennis Molyneaux, attorney-at-law, will be speaking on the death penalty. Those wishing to attend are welcome. Please call Mrs Paddy Huygen, the Cathedral Secretary, at 051-447-2827 in order to have your name added to March's guest list.
Below are a few photographs of last Tuesday's Newman Association meeting.
Dinner draws to an end, and the guests move through to the lecture venue. |
From left to right: Prof. Roussouw, Fr Johnson,
Fr George (Orthodox Church) and Mary Paine.
|
Prof Roussouw addresses the Newman Association. |
Some of the people who attended the Newman Association on 14th February. A cell-phone camera is, frustratingly, never quite wide-angled enough to take in the entire scene! |
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: SEVENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017
Last Sunday our attention was focussed
on the Jewish Law in the Old Testament reading. Law in itself, we learned, is
not enough to keep us close to God. We need something outside the Law to make
it work. That is why the New Law which the prophets foretold, the Law of Jesus
Christ, is “written on our hearts” (Jeremiah 31,31). In the Old Testament this extra
something is called the Law of Holiness: “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am
holy.”
The journey to God is
centred upon this: the Quest for Holiness. It is the most important quest of our
life. To be holy, to be without sin, like Jesus, is what makes us fit to live
with God for all eternity. We cannot do this by ourselves; it has to be done by
God, through the death and Resurrection of his Son, the Lord Jesus. When we
turn to God and ask him to forgive our sins, he answers through the power of
the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts.
But we cannot become holy by worshipping
God on our own; there is no such thing as a private Christianity. God calls us
to be part of his community, the Church. Of course we must pray and read the
scriptures privately. But we also pray with our families. And we worship God
with the whole Church community on the Lord’s Day, and receive, from the
hands of his ministers, his Body and Blood, which the priest has made present upon
his altar. We confess our sins and receive God’s forgiveness through the
absolution of his priest. We take part in the life of the Church, and through
our generosity assist and engage in its many ministries and outreaches.
To become holy, we must also bear
witness to Jesus Christ our Saviour to the unbelieving world around us. We can
do this by word and good action. But we can also do harm to Jesus’ mission by bad
example and behaviour. We can harm both ourselves and the Church’s mission by
denying our faith in Jesus Christ when we most need to affirm it before
other humans.
Loving and serving Jesus is our path to
holiness. He is the Law of the Lord which makes us holy. “For there is no other
name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved,” as Peter himself puts it
(Acts 2). It is through loving and worshipping Him, through serving Him in his
Church, through bearing witness to him in the world, especially amongst those
who are in most need of our help, that we are made fit to live eternally with
God. The path to God lies open before us. Let us set out upon it without delay.
Fr Phillip.
Saturday, 11 February 2017
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: SIXTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017
We
have all, in one way or another, had something to do with the law. Especially
in civil law, where the penalties are money or property, matters generally boil
down to a simple issue; what is the minimum I can get away with? Whether it be
maintenance in a marriage case or compensation for damages, the defendant will
try to argue down the amount due, using all the evidence at his or her
disposal. Watch one episode of Judge Judy
and this will become abundantly clear.
Law is aimed at regulating just
relationships between people. It is a necessary part of a well-ordered,
functioning society. But it has two serious shortcomings; it sets the terms for
the minimum required, and it does nothing to promote reconciliation
and love; rather, it tends to accentuate differences and even increase
bitterness. Law requires something outside itself to achieve true healing
between those involved in its process.
When God gave Israel its Law, he
intended it to be a means of regulating relationship between Israel and
Himself. With it came a very special requirement that was to govern all the
Law’s other commandments; the Law of Holiness. “Be holy, for I, the Lord your
God, am holy.” But ultimately, a Law written on tablets of stone seemed to
produce hearts of stone (Ezekiel 36). Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah (31,31) foresaw
a new law written in the very heart of man. This law was an living,
personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which fulfils and exceeds all other
laws. It is the perfect fulfilment of the Great Commandment: “Love the Lord, your
God, with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your might…and
your neighbour as yourself.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus takes the
provisions of the old Law and overtrumps them one by one. What were written
Laws to be followed to the letter, as was the case in the religion of his day,
he transforms into attitudes and the condition of the heart. The observance of
the Law by the teachers of his day was minimal. Of them he says to his
disciples, that if their observance of God’s Law is no deeper, “you will never
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” He restores the demand to “love the Lord
your God with all your heart.” With ALL your heart. Jesus has
given his all for us; he wants us, if we really want him for all eternity, to
give our all to him.
ARE we giving
our all to him? Or are we doing what we hope is the basic minimum to get into
heaven? With Jesus, it is all or nothing. Let us rededicate ourselves to him
today, and give him the All which he asks of us.
Fr Phillip.
Sunday, 5 February 2017
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION - ERECTION OF SECURITY FENCES
This week, security fences were erected around the area abutting the Cathedral. Apart from the security of the house itself, one of the many other functions they will serve is to curb the Wanderlust of certain dogs!
Work on the main fence nears completion. The Cathedral is in the background. |
Lilian, the Cathedral housekeeper, and Isabella the Jack Russell look on with varying degrees of interest. |
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION - FIFTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR 2017
Some years ago now
there was a well-known British actor, who seemed to have everything: fame,
looks, popularity, publicity, wealth, friends and charm. Yet to everyone’s
shock, he one day, quite unexpectedly, committed suicide. His reason? As he put
it in his suicide note: “I was so bored.” What does it mean, to be so bored
that life is not worth living? To have the world at one’s feet, and to find it
bland and tasteless? This curious and rather sad story has a link with the Sermon
on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel. “You are the salt of the earth.” That is part
of the essence of Jesus’ message. Yet what a wealth of meaning and profundity
is contained in this apparently simple phrase.
Consider first
what salt means in our lives. Anyone who has been put on a low-salt diet will understand
precisely the implications of this question. Salt, literally, brings flavour
and thus variety to food. Now consider what would happen if salt were suddenly
to lose its flavour. What use would it be to us? Its one great purpose is in bringing
out the flavour of food; if it could no longer do that, it would be less than
useless to us, in the words of Jesus, “fit only to be thrown out and trampled
underfoot.” The disciple of Jesus has the same function in the world as salt
has in food; to bring out the fullness of its meaning. The world was created by
God, and human beings can only really learn to understand, to love, to care for
the world, if we become aware of the meaning and purpose with which God has
invested it. When we grasp God’s plan for his creation, it ceases to be a bland
or indifferent place, and comes alive with colour, meaning and excitement. In
the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of
God.”
This is at the
heart of Jesus’ message, “You are the salt of the earth.” It is God’s plan to
reveal the purpose and destiny of his creation through the person of Jesus
Christ. And in founding his Church and calling us to be members, Jesus is
calling us to be members of his very own
Body. In other words, we are to
be his presence in the world, through
which he reveals God’s presence to mankind. God wants us to be the means by which all men to see the glory, his glory, which shines out through
creation, leading us beyond that which we see to the Creator himself.
Do you see
yourself as one through whom the “grandeur of God” is revealed to the world? If
we are to be the “salt of the earth,” we must fulfil our God-given task of communicating
the “grandeur of God” to those around us. In following the path that God has
chosen for us, then, let it be our
purpose to become a people who bring light, life and meaning to the world, a people
through whom it blazes forth as “charged with the grandeur of God”? May God bless
each one of us, and may he truly make us, in word and deed, the “salt of the
earth,” so that all men, in the words of the Psalmist, might “taste and see
that the Lord is good.” Amen.
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION - ARCHDIOCESAN INDUCTION OF CATECHISTS, 5TH FEBRUARY, 2017
Today, during the 9am Mass celebrated by Archbishop Jabulani Nxumalo, newly trained Catechists for the Archiocese were inducted. Here are two photographs of the occasion.
ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION - FOURTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR 2017
In the prophet Habakkuk, God's answer to a cry against
injustice is "The just man will live by his faithfulness." In our experience, questions about justice
invariably begin with someone asking why someone else is being unjust.
But when God is questioned about matters of social justice, his reply
has always to do with faith – our faith.
Faith means living in utter dependence upon God, who
has called us and shown himself to us. It is in such faith that the just man
lives. This is a difficult point for many modern Christians. In days gone by,
when we were less able to take care of our material needs, much more the
victims of weather, disease and wars, we were more aware of our dependence upon
God. Since then, modern technology has changed our lives. As we have learned to
look after a lot of matters we formerly thought beyond our control, we have started
to think differently. We have become less willing to allow God a role in our
lives, because more and more we have begun to think we can do it all ourselves.
Today, some people even think that they can do without God, and explain
everything through science.
For someone of Habakkuk's day, who was much closer to God
than modern human beings, it was very easy to understand that the sin of the
human heart was responsible for the injustice that befalls the world. Before
our time, justice was understood as a quality of a human being, not a situation
in society. It is when a man is made just by faith that his sin cleansed from
him. When he abandons to the mercy of the living God, he lives according to the
will of God. The great social advances in England during the Nineteenth Century
were made by Christians who lived like this, who expended themselves in service
of the suffering of society. Such people were the only ones who really and
disinterestedly fought for the poor and oppressed. The power of God at work in
them changed the lives of millions dramatically for the better.
It is in the state of the human heart, not in the structures
of society, that sin and evil lie. Because justice is directed towards God, it
is the state of our heart that determines true justice, for true justice resides
within the human heart. Habakkuk learned it from the very lips of God.
If the world is to be made just, we must become just men and women. For
it is only when the righteousness of God is alive in our hearts, that we will
be able to change the world as so many great Christians have done.
Fr Phillip.
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