This weekend, Bishop Michael Campbell is due to celebrate the sacrament of confirmation with our teenagers.  We are most grateful to him for stepping in, after the departure of Bishop Nicholas Hudson for his new diocese of Plymouth.  Bishop Campbell, you will remember, was our celebrant on Saint James’s Day last year, he is the former Bishop of Lancaster, and like Pope Leo, he is an Augustinian, hence his choice of residence with the Augustinian community in Hammersmith, where he was living before he became Bishop of Lancaster.  Our eighteen young people are to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, traditionally seven gifts, which, as Father Richard Conrad OP has said, “are to do with the Holy Spirit Himself prompting us, leading us, taking us by the hand, giving us the instinct to do what must be done, in the divine way in which it must be done.”

 

The weekend is a significant one for our families and our younger members, because the First Holy Communion, for 39 children, took place on Saturday 9 May.  We thank God that so many of our young people are taking these significant steps forward in their sacramental life and practice.  We pray that they may continue to receive many graces from their Christian life.

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Next Sunday is World Communications Day for which Pope Leo has issued a message, entitled “Preserving Human Voices and Faces”.  It can be found in full at the following link: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html.  The Holy Father offers a thought-provoking reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence, and he urges us to give priority to truly human means of communication.  He argues that an alliance with the promoters of artificial intelligence is possible, as long as it is based on the three pillars of responsibility, co-operation and education.  On World Communications Day, there will be a second collection in support of the communications work of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

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As some of our parishioners will be aware, the parish priest has just returned from Lourdes, from a pilgrimage organized by the Order of Malta.  It was wonderful to see how the sick are treated as VIP’s, and given prominent places in the celebrations of Mass at the Grotto and in the various basilicas, as well as the processions.  We are particularly grateful to the Companions of the Order of Malta, many of whom were present on the pilgrimage, for the work they do to provide evening meals for the homeless here at Spanish Place on Mondays and Thursdays, not to mention the work that our own SVP does on Tuesday and Friday evenings.  

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May is the month of Our Lady, hence the daily recitation of the rosary in the Lady Chapel after the weekday evening Mass.  This coming Wednesday, we recall Our Lady of Fatima, as it was on 13 May 1917 that she appeared to three young children in the Cova da Iria, near Fatima in Portugal, asking them to pray the rosary daily for peace in the world and for an end to the First World War.  The crowned statue of Our Lady at the small Lady altar in our church close to the statue of Saint James is an image of Our Lady of Fatima.

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Wednesday evening, however, is the Vigil of Ascension, a great feast of Our Lord which takes precedence over other feasts.  It is a Holyday of Obligation, meaning that all Catholics are obliged to attend Mass on that day, as if it were a Sunday.  To facilitate this, there will be an additional early Mass at 7.15am on Thursday 14 May, as well as the usual 12.30pm and 6pm Masses and a celebration using the 1962 Missal at 11am.  The choir will sing at the 6pm Mass on Thursday.  The Vigil Mass on 13 May fulfils the obligation.

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Pope Benedict has written rather beautifully about the mystery of the Ascension (the second glorious mystery of the rosary) in the Epilogue of Part II of his Jesus of Nazareth Trilogy, the Holy Week volume.  Speaking about the account in Saint Luke’s Gospel, he says this:  “Jesus departs in the act of blessing.  He goes while blessing, and he remains in that gesture of blessing.  His hands remain stretched out over this world.  The blessing hands of Christ are like a roof that protects us.  But at the same time, they are a gesture of opening up, tearing the world open so that heaven may enter in, may become ‘present’ within it.”

 

In some parts of the world, the Ascension is celebrated on the seventh Sunday of Easter, which means effectively that there is no “additional” obligation, because the obligation to attend Mass applies to every Sunday anyway.  This happens mainly in Catholic countries where the government does not grant a public holiday on the feast, because it would be unthinkable in those countries for a “Day of Obligation” to fall on a working day.  In Italy, for example, Ascension is celebrated on the Sunday, although rather confusingly in the Vatican it is celebrated on the Thursday.  (In the Vatican, it is a non-working day).  The bishops in this country did move Ascension from the Thursday to the following Sunday from 2007 to 2017, but the move proved unpopular with the faithful.  Having listened to the faithful, the bishops duly restored the observance on Thursday of the sixth week of Easter.  

Et ascendit in caelum, sedet ad dexteram Patris.