ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

The Great Flood by Nicholas Chaperon.

A baptism is always a happy occasion for those involved. What could be more beautiful, more joyful than the reception of a new life into the Church, the claiming of a human being for the Lord Jesus Christ through rebirth into God’s family? This joy is reflected in the symbols of the occasion: The Paschal candle, the little baby in a white baptismal robe, the anointing with oil, the gentle pouring of water over the baby’s forehead with a seashell. Even aunt Maud, snapping away with her tablet, is not an annoyance on this occasion.

It is instructive, then, to look into the teachings of the first Christians to see how they understood baptism. If we do, we will come away surprised, perhaps even a little shocked, for the early Church’s symbols of baptism are powerful, violent images; those of the Flood and the Crossing of the Red Sea. Even Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, sees baptism as a burial! What led our Fathers in the Faith to conceive baptism in such stark and violent terms?

We must remember that to confess Jesus Christ as Lord in that era was to stand under the very present threat of death. For those early Christians, salvation in Jesus Christ was everything, and in their lives, it really did take precedence over everything else. They were not prepared to comprise with the world in the way that many Christians so easily do today. They wanted eternal life with God above all things, and Nothing would deter them from it. For them there really was “no other name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved” – that is, the name of Jesus.

This was the background against which they saw sin. Sin, for them, was a disaster. It separates man from God; its corrupts our very nature, and for them, corruption meant death. They also understood that the problem of evil was something colossal, beyond our human nature, about which we of ourselves can do nothing. Our only hope, they believed, is the grace of God, the power of his mercy, which is infinitely greater than the power of evil. The universal symbol of both life and purity has always been water, and it was in “salvation by water” that they saw their only hope.

Thus it was that when they conceived God’s salvation, his destruction of sin and giving of new life, they did so in terms of water. In the very beginning, before God creates, there is chaos, and in the Old Testament, chaos is water. Water can extinguish fire, they said, but who can stop a flood? But God drives back the water and makes dry land appear, a place for man to live. And when man became so wicked as to be irredeemable, God allowed the water to re-cover the earth, destroying the wickedness of the human race, allowing only Noah and his family to survive in the Ark.

When God leads Israel out of Egypt from slavery to freedom, the Israelites, by passing in safety through the sea, are “saved by water,” while the Egyptians, their persecutors, are destroyed by the same waters. The early Christians saw in both of these cataclysmic events (and the word “cataclysm” means flood) both the destruction of evil and salvation from it. For them, when someone was baptised, the water was a symbol of the very real action of the Holy Spirit coursing through us like a violent flood, destroying sin and bringing us to rebirth as members of God’s family. In the baptism by total immersion practiced in Paul’s day, the candidate descended into the water as though into a tomb, like Jesus after his death, and then rose to new life by coming up out of the water, as did Jesus in his Resurrection.

Next time you attend a baptism, and the touching scene as described at the beginning of this reflection is before your eyes, think about the powerful spiritual event which is the reality of baptism. Recognise that without the power of God to destroy sin, there is no hope for us. See in the baptism the enormous reality of our complete dependence on God who is our only hope, and on Jesus Christ his Son, who won our salvation. And give thanks to God for his precious gift of eternal life through water and the Holy Spirit.

Fr Phillip.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: SIXTEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Most, if not all of us, like to live with the comforting thought that good things happen to good people and bad things, to bad people. In the Israel of Jesus’ time, where there was no strong concept of heaven, that is how people thought. The idea seems reasonable; until we turn it around, that is. As soon as we start saying, “Good things have happened to so-and-so, therefore he must be good,” and vice-versa, the whole idea of good-to-good and bad-to bad falls apart. In the world in which we really live, bad things often happen to good people and good things to bad people. In the later books of the Old Testament this idea is already appearing, for example Job, where a just and good man suffers all kinds of terrible calamities and desperately searches for an answer.

Today’s parable of the wheat and the weeds offers us an answer to this. The landowner will not pull up the weeds in case he also uproots some wheat plants with it. He will wait until the harvest, when the difference has become obvious. In the case of human beings, God will not uproot the wicked man before his time, since until each draws his final breath, there is always the hope he will repent and turn back to God. In the case of humans, this means that if a person dies unrepentant, he has thrown away the lifelong chance for redemption that God has placed before him. Jesus tells us, regarding this dilemma we have, that God “causes his rain to fall on good and bad alike.”

It is not what we have, but what we do with it, that determines our eternal future; with or without God. There are thus two very important, God-given tasks for us as we live our daily lives; to see to it that we remain close to God, and to pray and work for the salvation of those who are far off from him.

Fr Phillip.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: OUR POSTULANTS - JULY 2017

Here is the first official photograph of our four postulants. The Cathedral parish has already encountered them all serving at the 9am Mass and involved in various activities such as altar server training and LifeTeen. They are engaged in a variety of studies, including Classics (Latin) and Education at UFS and Computer Technology at CUT.

The four postulants of the Bloemfontein Community-in-formation: from left to right
Louis Fourie, Amelio Smith, Thabo Moloi and James Mellin.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: NEWMAN ASSOCIATION - JULY 2017

The Newman Association met on 11th July. Fr Phillip presented an introduction to Gustav Mahler which included excerpts from the First Symphony, the song-cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) and musical examples played at the keyboard. For many members it was a first exposure to this great composer. The lecture was preceded by dinner as usual, this month consisting of a pot of Italian minestra for the cold season.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: FIFTEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Most, if not all of us, like to live with the comforting thought that good things happen to good people and bad things, to bad people. In the Israel of Jesus’ time, where there was no strong concept of heaven, that is how people thought. The idea seems reasonable; until we turn it around, that is. As soon as we start saying, “Good things have happened to so-and-so, therefore he must be good,” and vice-versa, the whole idea of good-to-good and bad-to bad falls apart. In the world in which we really live, bad things often happen to good people and good things to bad people. In the later books of the Old Testament this idea is already appearing, for example Job, where a just and good man suffers all kinds of terrible calamities and desperately searches for an answer.

Today’s parable of the wheat and the weeds offers us an answer to this. The landowner will not pull up the weeds in case he also uproots some wheat plants with it. He will wait until the harvest, when the difference has become obvious. In the case of human beings, God will not uproot the wicked man before his time, since until each draws his final breath, there is always the hope he will repent and turn back to God. In the case of humans, this means that if a person dies unrepentant, he has thrown away the lifelong chance for redemption that God has placed before him. Jesus tells us, regarding this dilemma we have, that God “causes his rain to fall on good and bad alike.”

It is not what we have, but what we do with it, that determines our eternal future; with or without God. There are thus two very important, God-given tasks for us as we live our daily lives; to see to it that we remain close to God, and to pray and work for the salvation of those who are far off from him.

Fr Phillip.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: CATHOLIC BLOEMFONTEIN BY NIGHT - 2017

A few photographs of the Cathedral and Oratory by night.

The Cathedral tower with its great Fatima rosary.

The view down the Cathedral drive and up the length of Aliwal Street.

The Cathedral gardens.

The Oratory from the main entrance.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: FOURTEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Paul's letters would have looked very much like this manuscript. It is an early surviving example of the Letter to the Ephesians written on papyrus.

The few verses we heard today outline the vital role of the Holy Spirit in our salvation. When one reads Paul’s writings, one is always aware of the extreme closeness of the three persons of the Holy Trinity at work in our salvation; so much so, that it sometimes seems to be a little confusing. In today’s few verses, for example, the Holy Spirit is referred to as acting in his own person, as the “Spirit of Christ” and as the Spirit of “he who raised Jesus from the dead; that is, the Father.

But whatever the capacity in which the Spirit is acting, his role is essential to our salvation, for without him, as Paul tells us, we do not have Jesus, and without Jesus there is no hope of salvation. But we need, first, to take a step back from this teaching in order to understand how Paul views human beings; without this view, we will not understand what he is saying in our scripture.

In Paul’s day, and for long before, the Greek philosophers were very concerned, in their ethics, of discovering the golden mean of goodness. They were not blessed, as we are, with the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and had to work hard to think out for themselves the yardstick of what it means to be good. Not possessed of the idea of divine grace, they all in some way, and to a greater or lesser extent, believed that it was within the power of human beings to perfect themselves.

To become good meant to become natural, and there was a word for it in Greek: psychikos, which referred to the human soul or mind. Psychikos could in fact be translated as “natural man,” and this remained the hope of many, even at the time of Jesus and beyond. In fact, many people today still hope that this is the case.

Paul would have none of this. Although he says, at the beginning of Romans, that pagans can come to know goodness to a degree through observing God’s creation, the rest of his letter makes it clear that he does not regard this as adequate. For him, there are two kinds of human being; those who live according to the flesh, and those who live according to the Spirit.

Paul makes expresses this at the very beginning of today’s reading: “You are not of the flesh, but of the spirit.” Fleshly people, sarkikoi in Greek, are people enslaved by their appetites and desires, which lead them ultimately into a downward spiral of self-indulgence and sin. On the other hand, spiritual people, pneumatikoi in Greek, are people who are subject to the promptings of God, who leads them upwards on a path of self-forgetfulness and holiness.

For Paul, we cannot be spiritual people without the grace of Jesus Christ. How do we receive this? Because the Holy Spirit actually lives within us. He is the “Spirit of Christ” who makes Jesus present to us as a source of life and holiness, who makes it possible for us to attain holiness, not because of anything that we can do of ourselves, so much as because God’s presence within us through his spirit, is what transforms us from within.

But Paul makes a further link; for him, fleshliness is indissolubly linked with death, spiritual-ness with life. It is through the human body that we can participate in sin, and be dragged down into death. It is through the spirit that we can be made holy, and be drawn up into life. The ultimate link is the death of Jesus Christ.

Paul sees Jesus’ death in terms of his resurrection. Jesus had to die, because he had to be raised bodily to new life. Without the fact of bodily resurrection, there can be no hope for us. It is a theme that Paul comes back to over and over, most notably in the 15^th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians. But there can be few places in which Paul expressed it as pungently as he does in verse 11 of today’s Second Reading: “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies…” Just to make sure we do not miss the point, Paul repeats himself at the end: “…through the indwelling of his Spirit in you.”

There we have it. Sin, in which we participate through our bodies, has made us dead to God. In order for us to be redeemed, body and soul, Jesus had to be raised from the dead in his human body. The Resurrection makes it possible for us to be raised “in the body” from sin and death to holiness and everlasting life. It was “in the Spirit” who gives life that God raised Jesus from the dead. It is through the same Spirit, living within us, that God will one day raise us to everlasting life. For this to happen, we must co-operate with the Spirit, so that our spirits selves raise our bodies up to life, rather than our bodies dragging our spirits down to death.

Paul saw this renewal as extending, not just to human beings, but to the whole of creation, wounded by sin but now to be made new through the same Holy Spirit, a teaching which fulfils a prophecy made in the Psalms. And as we recognise this, so should we recognise that the teaching of Paul on the Spirit is not at all unfamiliar to us; it is to be found in that prayer known and prayed by every Catholic: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you will renew the face of the earth.”

That Spirit has filled the hearts of many through the centuries. It filled the heart of St Philip Neri in the catacombs, and through its fire the very Church was transformed from its mighty heart in Rome. That same Spirit can transform our hearts today, raising us to new life in Jesus Christ through the power of his Resurrection. We, like the saints of old, need to pray constantly for the gift of the Spirit of God in our lives.

“Lord, when shall we begin to do good? Send the fire of your Holy Spirit into our hearts, that we might burn with love for you, and serve you with gladness, in a spirit of joy. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Fr Phillip

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA 2017

This year's celebrations of our Lady of Fatima, being the centenary of the apparitions, were carried out in great style by the Portuguese community of the Cathedral, though this is a feast in which the entire community participates. There were the familiar prayer events of Mass and rosary processions. The tent with its array of food and dancing was, as always, on the hockey field. This year saw some extra features, some of which are presented in the photographs below.

The sanctuary decorated for the feast.

The Fatima statue being carried in procession.

A rosary made up of helium-filled balloons, released at the end of the celebrations.

The giant rosary that hangs from the Cathedral tower. Made up of blue and white LED lights, it can be seen halfway across Bloemfontein at night. It will remain in place until October.

Fr Phillip concelebrates Mass in Portuguese with Fr Geraldo, the visiting priest for the celebrations, on Sunday 13th May.

The Portuguese youth of the parish perform traditional dances at the festivities in the tent.

Fr Johnson joins the Knights of Da Gama for the concluding ceremony on Sunday.

Fr Geraldo blesses the bearers of the Fatima statue before the procession.

Special centenary handkerchiefs are distributed to the community for the farewell ceremony.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: NEWMAN ASSOCIATION, MAY AND JUNE 2017

Both topics for the May and June evenings of the Newman association were unusual and interesting. In May, Dr Jasieu Lewtak, a Polish scientist living and working in Bloemfontein, spoke on "Men and Christianity." In June, Dr Don Paine, head of Biology at Eunice Girls' School, gave a lecture on "Youth at the Crossroads" in which he addressed the problems faced by parents and children in dealing with a difficult and complex modern world. Dr Paine addressed, in particular, the issues of Christianity in a secular state school, and the attraction of various religious groups for the pupils.

Fr Johnson introduces Dr Paine to the Newman Association.

The front corner of the audience listens intently to Dr Paine.

Members of the Association help themselves to a steaming pot of lamb curry.

Dinner is always a sociable and lively part of the evening - in true Philippine style.

Dr Lewtak addresses the Newman Association.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: PHOTO GALLERY FOR THE SECOND QUARTER OF 2017

Here is a selection of photos of events during the months of April, May And June 2017.

A recent visit to Oudtshoorn Oratory by two of the novices of the Bloemfontein Oratory. Left, Amelio Smith and  centre, Thabang Moloi. To their right is Archbishop John Wells, the Apostolic Nuncio to South Africa.

St Philip Neri Day on 26th May, after Mass celebrated in the Oratory chapel: from left to right Thabang Moloi (novice), Fr, Xolisa, Fr Stephen, Fr Johnson, Fr Cyriacus, Amelio Smith (novice) and Hugh Miller.

Cathedral extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist after the Mass at which they renewed their commitments. Fr Stephen is with them.

Adult Confirmation 2017: The newly confirmed together with Archbishop Nxumalo after Mass.

Fr Johnson greets parishioners after Mass on Sunday 13th May.

The closing ceremonies of the Centenary celebration of our Lady of Fatima, 2017.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: 13TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Paul's later letters were written while he was in prison in Rome: they are known as the "Captivity letters."
Here the artist imagines Paul in prison, writing his letter to the Church at Ephesus.

Today’s Second Reading, from the letter to the Galatians, gives us Paul’s great teaching on freedom. It is summed up in that letter in the words, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Paul makes an interesting contrast. He does not oppose freedom with slavery, or imprisonment, or oppression, or captivity; he contrasts it with self-indulgence. And by self-indulgence he does not mean what we usually mean; gluttony, lust or any of the other modern types of materialism we hear about with such regularity. For Paul, self-indulgence means two things; lack of love for neighbour, and failure to be guided by the Spirit of God.

For Paul, we cannot love one another, nor can we live at peace with one other, without the freedom from self-centredness, from self-indulgence, which only God’s Spirit can bring about in us. He uses the most common example of this in our lives; our extreme willingness to find fault with others, to snap at people for the faults they have that annoy us. We recognise how intolerant we can be of others’ weaknesses, and especially of their criticisms. But we are outraged when someone dares to tell us we are wrong about something, especially when that person has faults of his own. And how often do we lash out in kind; we counter someone else’s criticisms of us by criticizing them, hoping to neutralise their words by revealing to them that, since they are no better than we are, they have no business criticizing us. In this way, marriages, families, cities and countries are torn apart or reduced to tattered shreds.

This is what Paul refers to as self-indulgence. It is one of the worst characteristics of human beings. It is one about which we moralize, one which we try to rectify by human means, through endless counseling, group discussions and platitudes.

But there is no real human solution to it. We have no human ways to correct each others’ sins; in fact, we are not going to correct people’s sins at all. Each one of us can help only ourselves, in this regard, with the help of God. But, like God, and with his help, we can learn to live with the sins and weaknesses of others, and to find ways of encouraging them to turn to God, who will change their weaknesses into strength. We need not to indulge our resentfulness and anger towards others, but to be sources of healing to them. This we will only ever be if we are mindful that we ourselves are sinners, that we need to be enfolded in the liberating power of God’s Spirit. Only when we are possessed of the freedom of God’s Spirit will we be truly free, free especially from the self-indulgence of a mean human spirit.

This is one of the prime characteristics of the saints. They lived for God, not themselves, and in the same freedom of the Spirit, and through it, were able to love their neighbour as themselves, no matter what their neighbour’s weaknesses and faults. May we, following the exhortation of Paul in the letter to the Galatians today, find the source of our strength in God, that we too might enjoy that same freedom in his Spirit, and love our neighbour as ourselves.

Fr Phillip.