Love Incarnate … waiting for you

On Saturday 5th September we have another of our regular opportunities for Eucharistic Adoration.  St Alphonsus Liguori tells us “You will gain more by praying 15 minutes before the Blessed Sacrament than all the other spiritual exercises of the day”. Our Lord will be exposed on the altar for three hours, from 3 pm – 6 pm, so you will have plenty of time to spend with Him.

Also during this time there will be two priests available to hear Confessions.  As Confessions are not being heard after Sunday Mass at the moment, this is an invaluable opportunity.  Of this Sacrament, St Francis de Sales says:  “Go to your confessor; open your heart to him; display to him all the recesses of your soul; take the advice that he will give you with the utmost humility and simplicity.  For God, Who has an infinite love for obedience, frequently renders profitable the counsels we take from others, but especially from those who are the guides of our souls”.

Two very good reasons to be at Christ the King on Saturday week!  If you can’t come this time, there will be further afternoons of Adoration and Confession on the first Saturday of October, November and December, also from 3 pm – 6 pm.

by fsspuk

LMS WALSINGHAM VIRTUAL PILGRIMAGE – Friday 28th August to Sunday 30th August

Every year for the last 10 years the Latin Mass Society has held an annual Pilgrimage to Walsingham walking from Ely in Cambridgeshire to Walsingham in Norfolk over three days on August Bank Holiday. This year because of the Covid-19 Pandemic we have decided to continue this tradition but this time it is a virtual pilgrimage from Willesden, London to Walsingham and we want you to get involved.


How will it work?

After the success of our July Digital Conference we will be bringing Pilgrims a daily schedule of Live-streamed Masses, Meditations, Online Rosary and prayer sessions as we travel along our virtual route from Willesden in London to Walsingham over the three days and we need you to join the walk in your own locations. Willesden to Walsingham is 118 miles. We need Pilgrims to pledge to walk a distance during the Pilgrimage which can be anything from half a mile to 100 miles! You can do your own pilgrimage in your back garden, in your street or even the local countryside, wherever you are in the world and whatever feels safe and suits you. With as many pilgrims signed up to the virtual pilgrimage and all praying together we can add up the total of miles walked, along with rosaries said and songs sung as we pray this August to Our Lady of Walsingham.

How can l sign up?
On our website you can register your name and whether you are a group and how many miles you pledge to walk during the Pilgrimage. We would then like to share your experience during the Pilgrimage online and amongst our other pilgrims. If you are unable to join in with our walk then you can pledge to pray for the pilgrims.

To register an interest:-
https://lms.org.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=172&reset=1

Sign up to Youtube for notifications

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsxse5AR6hhY6ATQW34vn8w

by fsspuk

Five Years of the Bedford Latin Mass!

It was on Sunday 16 August 2015 that a congregation of 16 faithful gathered at Christ the King with Fr Daniel Horgan, who was celebrating the first Latin Mass there for many years. From those small beginnings that day, who would have thought that five years on, we would have a congregation of 160 over the current two Sunday Masses and a growing hybrid homeschooling Academy, with some families even moving into the area so that their children can attend the latter.

We have got to know a series of priests, in the early days on a rota system and in just under the last three years, from the FSSP, each priest an individual who through his ministry has opened up to us different aspects of the Faith. We have had the benefit of many challenging homilies and catechism sessions, and the humbling experience of recognising and facing up to our sins in the confessional, and the joy of receiving Absolution. We have knelt before Our Lord at Adoration afternoons, and received Him sacramentally at Mass. We have celebrated baptisms, First Holy Communions and weddings, shared joys, sorrows and many a good chat over a cup of coffee, with the new friends we have made.

For all this, we say wholeheartedly today “Deo Gratias”.

by fsspuk

Feast of the Assumption – Mass Bookings now open!

By kind permission of Fr Patrick Hutton, there will be two Masses celebrated by the FSSP on Saturday 15th August, the Feast of the Assumption. These will take place at 6 pm and 7.30 pm. Bookings are now open and need to be made in the usual way via bedfordlatinmass@gmail.com.

Hope to see you to celebrate this Holyday of Obligation in honour of Our Lady!

by fsspuk

Eucharistic Adoration and Confession 1st August

After our very well attended afternoon of Adoration and Confession on 27th  June, we are pleased to announce that a further similar afternoon will take place at Christ the King, Bedford, on Saturday 1st August from 3 pm – 6 pm.   We very much appreciate the attendance of our FSSP priests from Reading to enable this to happen.  In addition, many people are working hard behind the scenes to ensure that all the necessary conditions are met to ensure the church is safe to enter, and we are most grateful to them.

It is hoped that while Confessions cannot be heard after Sunday Mass, these afternoons will take place monthly, possibly on the 1st Saturday of the month, but please watch this space for future dates.

by fsspuk

TWO Masses on Sunday!

We are pleased to announce that the FSSP will be saying two Sunday Masses at Christ the King from Sunday 5 July at 8.30 am and 1 pm.
Due to the need for social distancing, the seating capacity will be much lower than usual. You will need to book for these Masses by e-mailing bedfordlatinmass@gmail.com, stating which Mass you would prefer to attend, and will need to give your contact details for Test and Trace in line with Government guidelines.

Fr Patrick Hutton says in this week’s newsletter: Without booking, if there are no seats left free on the day, sadly you would have to be turned away.

Act promptly and spread the word to ensure that you can be present at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the first time since 15 March!

by fsspuk

Adoration on the 27th!

Great news!  Father O’Donohue will be coming to Christ the King on Saturday 27th June to offer Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament from 2 pm – 6 pm. This is our first opportunity for adoration since the middle of March and we hope that many people will take the opportunity of spending time with Our Lord.

Naturally we need to observe all the necessary conditions regarding hygiene and social distancing.  If anyone can volunteer to be a steward for part of this time, this help would be gratefully received.  Please contact Rita Carroll on margueritacarroll@gmail.com or telephone her on  07984 867837.  You will need a short session of training; if you see this article before 1 pm on Saturday 20th June and can get to Christ the King for a training session at that time, please do so.  Otherwise separate arrangements can be made.

This is a major step towards public Masses being celebrated again – Deo Gratias! – and many thanks to Fr O’Donohue for coming over to be with us.

by fsspuk

St Mary’s Shrine Bulletin Sunday 7 June 2020

Churches to re-open for private prayer on Monday 15th June:

Because ‘stewards’ will have to be present to ensure safety, there will have to be specific opening times. We will soon release them.

We need volunteers as stewards. They must be members of our community, with no health condition (and preferably under 70 years of age).

Read full guidance instructions here.

Mass intentions:

[More Masses are offered daily using the intentions booked on your behalf. Ask Fr Whisenant for further information if needded.]

Updating Mass times

While during lockdown LiveMass allows us to reach out to many souls far away from Warrington, the following enquiry is meant for those actually present in the pews under normal circumstances.

It will have been over three months without our congregation in the pews when Holy Masses resume, please God next month. Now is a good time to assess the needs and expectations of those among you who normally attend our Holy Masses.

While we kept the pre-existing 12:10pm weekday Mass since we took over St Mary’s in November 2015, we must recognise that this midday slot failed to attract those working in the town centre, who could have attended during their lunch break. On the other hand, nearly all of those who attend regularly could come at a more convenient time. Changing long-established Mass times must only occur if real improvement is expected. Thus, please email us your preferred Mass times, if applicable:

Monday-Saturday: 8am, or 9am, or 10am, or 11am.

Sundays: 8am and 11am; or (current schedule) 11am and 6pm.

Would you attend Sunday Vespers & Benediction at 5pm if continued after lockdown?

Any other suggestions regarding our regular activities?

Read the latest issue of our quarterly magazine Dowry here https://fssp.co.uk/category/dowry/ .

If you live in the UK and Ireland, you can have the printed version sent to you through subscribing here: https://fssp.co.uk/manageprofile/index.php

Thank you for your support to St Mary’s Shrine during this lockdonw and after. You can send your donation here, mentioning ‘Warrington’ is relevant: https://fssp.co.uk/donate/

Priory Campaign:

Dear friends, supporters and benefactors, thank you wholeheartedly for your continued interest for our Priory Campaign. While we already own Units Two & Three (bought last October for £480k, i.e. £240k each), we need to raise the remaining £125,000.00 (out of £240k) before 16^th October 2020 to complete the purchase of Unit One, currently leased to us.

As you are aware, our aspiration is to buy the remaining part of Priory Court (Unit 1) as part of the Campaign, but should we not have sufficient funds to convert and reconfigure the whole Priory Court building to better suit the needs of St Mary’s Shrine, then Unit One will be handed back to its owner in October 2020 and Campaign funds would then be used for the purposes of conversion and reconfiguration of the parts of Priory Court that we do own (namely, Units 2 and 3).

Each unit is 2,561 Sq ft on three floors. We will thus own 5,122 Sq ft, plus 18 parking spaces.

Please get in touch with us if you would like further clarification or wish to discuss a donation that you have made. Kindly email any inquiries to malleray@fssp.org.

God bless you.

Despite the lockdown, we haven’t been idle:

Like the entire country, our Priory Campaign has suffered from the Covid-19 lockdown. Work, social activities and fundraising were de facto suspended. But we were able to transfer all the music archives on new shelves into Unit One where our new Music Room is now located. This allowed us to move our liturgical items into the original church Sacristy, until then used as Music Room. With frequent solemn high Masses, Lauds, Vespers and Compline prayed daily, and many altar servers, the need for a dedicated sacristy was becoming critical. Playing musical chairs – no pun intended – our lay servers moved into the former Sacristy, originally the Servers’ Vesting Room. This in turn freed up the side Confessional they were using to hang their cassocks and cottas, now available again as a Confessional when the church re-opens. The last stage will be to move the free-standing confessional out of the Memorial Chapel where confessions have been heard for five years, and to have the chapel used for smaller groups, devotions etc. In addition, our only Meeting Room so far was in the Presbytery. Moving it out into Unit 1 allowed us to turn that room into a much needed sitting-room for our resident clergy and occasional guests (until then we only had the dining-room and kitchen as common rooms at the Presbytery). Last but not least, assessment has taken place to move all our administration into Unit Three. We need to create offices for the four priests, since so far all but one have only their bedroom for work. Our Secretariat, Archives and storage will also move there.

None of this would have been possible without the purchase of Units Two and Three last October. If God grants us to complete the purchase of Unit One, it will allow us to plan more activities beyond the immediate needs of Warrington, with your support.

Special intercessoress: the Servant of God Elizabeth Prout (1820-1864) founded the female branch of the Passionists with Bl. Dominic Barberi. Her congregation served deserving families in the North West. The Sisters of the Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ arrived in Warrington on 3 January 1899. Their convent, 80 Buttermarket Street, was beside St Mary’s Benedictine Priory.  They came to teach, to visit sick and needy parishioners, to instruct converts and to help the poor. The Sisters taught in St Mary’s girls’ and infants’ schools from 9 January 1899 to 1967. Her congregation now ask to be informed of any favour granted specifically through her intercession. This could lead to her beatification. With the 200^th anniversary of her birth occurring this September, less than a month before the fundraising deadline for our Campaign, I now request you confidently to make daily if you can the following prayer: “Servant of God Elizabeth Prout, to further your work of Catholic education and assistance to Catholic families in our country so much in need of it, please obtain from God’s Providence the successful completion of the Priory Campaign in Warrington, on the very location where your Sisters served for decades.”

by Fr AM

Easter in lockdown – a Sermon

A monk of my acquaintance once drily remarked, as he looked across at the banks of gloomy faces in the choir stalls opposite, that he sometimes doubted the Resurrection had really happened.

The point is well made. It can be easier in a way, for us Catholics, to identify with Lent and Passiontide than with Easter. Even if we haven’t kept our Lenten resolutions as well as we would have liked, we still relate more readily to the themes of penance and punishment, sacrifice, suffering, and death, than we do to joy and peace and new life.

And there is good reason for this. Suffering and anguish is ever present in our world – no one is spared it, to one degree or another, just as all will certainly undergo the sentence of death. But joy, when it comes, tends to be more fleeting, rapidly overshadowed by some difficulty. There is a risk that Easter, for us, becomes little more than a natural consolation, a merely temporary respite from gloom, when we are allowed to break the fast, put out flowers, and eat chocolate – with little sense of something life-transforming.

Perhaps this seems all the more the case now of all times, when the present pandemic continues to overwhelm just about the whole globe; and does not appear to be ceasing for the commemoration of Our Lord’s Resurrection. Indeed, we are denied even the consolation of celebrating Easter by attending the sacred rites.

And yet Our Lord has truly risen – and we must, we must, allow this glorious truth somehow to penetrate our lives.

There can be little doubt that the coronavirus pandemic is a divine chastisement. This really ought to be an uncontroversial statement, but it seems there is no shortage of people, even senior churchmen, to deny it. No doubt this ultimately springs from a loss of the sense of the supernatural, the recognition that God is the cause of all things whatsoever; but perhaps in part it is motivated by a false understanding of God’s love and mercy (“a loving God would never do that…”). And perhaps even more there is the anxiety that if we say God is punishing for sin, then we must ask, ‘which sin?’; and then it amounts to saying that those who die from the virus are the most guilty of that sin, that they apparently ‘deserved it’.

But that’s not really the case. Firstly, to us Catholics, it should come as no surprise if chastisement is visited upon a whole people collectively, or if the innocent are asked to suffer on behalf of the guilty. After all, both these aspects are precisely the themes of Holy Week. Your clergy have been reciting, in the Divine Office, the prophecies of Jeremiah, warning of the wrath upon Israel, the exile into Babylon, and the destruction of the temple – culminating in his haunting lamentations that are sung in the Office of Tenebrae during the Triduum. And then on Good Friday, we looked at Our Saviour upon the cross, He who was without sin accepting the terrible price for the redemption of sinners.

As to which sin God is chastising us for – well, there will always be the temptation to name our ‘favourite’, whichever of the innumerable manifold vices and perversions of fallen human nature pique our interest. There is more than enough to choose from in the secular society: abortion, euthanasia, same-sex “marriage”, gender ideology, human trafficking… the list goes on and on. Or there is the spread of false religions or militant atheistic ideologies. And then within the Church we can make another catalogue: clerical sexual abuse, rampant heresy, disobedience, and schism, disregard of Sundays and holy days, liturgical abuses, widespread impurity, indifference and faithlessness, sacrilegious Communions, badly made confessions (if made at all), and so on. It seems foolish to try and identify just one that is the cause of all our ills. But all of these things eventually boil down to one – the rejection of and failure to worship the One True God. And for this, our collective punishment is long overdue.

And in reality, all of these faults put together pale into insignificance next to but a single act of sacrilege or idolatry. We do not tend to feel it is so – but God’s view is not our view. God tends to punish precisely by abandoning the people to what they have craved. So in a world that elevates individualism over communal responsibility, perhaps it is fitting that there should be enforced ‘social distancing’; and if,  as I suggest, everything is ultimately about our failure to give God right worship, then we should not be surprised if we Catholics have to bear our brunt of the chastisement in our very particular way – the cessation of public Masses (and even, in some places – horribile dictu – of all the sacraments).

In fact, in a sense, this is the worst of the curses. To say this may seem to be incredibly cold and indifferent given the very real pain, suffering, and loss that many are going through at this time because of the virus, not to mention the horrific economic fallout. I do not mean in any way to diminish this. But we should recognise that man’s purpose and fulfilment lies precisely in the worship of God. We are more than the body only, and there is more than this life only.

This is felt all the more keenly precisely by those who are the most devout, who we would think least ‘deserve’ it, since they want to offer God fitting worship and are struck by its loss the most acutely. But it was ever thus. The prophets warned Jerusalem of what was coming and wept for it, while the hierarchy repeated complacent, empty mantras: “peace, peace, but there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14; cf Ez. 13:10), or “we have the temple” – then even this consolation was taken away from them (Jer. 7:4).

Israel had gone after false gods; and then the True God withdrew from them.

Probably this Easter many will feel much like Psalm 136: “by the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Sion…how shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?”

And yet, the Babylonian exile was not forever. Israel was restored – at least in part – and the temple was rebuilt. And all this was for a sign of the death and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord. Ecce, omnia nova facio (Rev. 21:5). Death is not the final word; Christ has claimed victory, and it is decisive.

Thus there can be joy, even in the midst of distress and bewilderment. It is not a transient sentiment, but a deep conviction that stems from faith of the love that God has for us, a love proved dramatically on Calvary. This joy does not simply happen on its own: it can and must be cultivated, through acts of faith and above all charity.

This present moment too shall pass. But will our lessons have been learned? Divine chastisement is never a matter of an angry God fulfilling a lust for vengeance. It is a correction; and as a correction, it is a loving act of mercy, a means by which God draws us back to Him. For our part, we should not be longing for things to ‘return to normal’, but rather seeing where we need a true conversion of heart.

Is this not the message of St Paul? “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin may be destroyed, to the end that we may serve sin no longer” (Rom. 6:5-6); and: “Therefore if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth. For you are dead: and your life is hid with Christ in God.  When Christ shall appear, who is your life, then you also shall appear with him in glory” (Col.3:1-3).

May we never again take the Holy Mass for granted! May we come to treasure anew the beautiful gift of the Sacraments. Let us prepare well to make good, humble confessions, and approach the Holy Eucharist with awe. Let us resolve above all to pray always, with thanks in our hearts, and to take every opportunity to give to Almighty God the adoration that is owed to Him.

And if we do this, the mystery of Easter will have truly penetrated our lives, and the joy of the Risen Christ will be in us – and no one can take this away.

May God bless you, and Our Lady keep you.

by Fr SP

Prayer to our Guardian Angel when we cannot go to Mass

Dear Guardian Angel, go for me to the church, there kneel down at Mass for me. 

At the Offertory, take me to God, and offer Him my service; what I am, what I have, offer as my gift.

At the Consecration, with your seraphic strength, adore my Saviour truly present, praying for those who have loved me, and for those who have offended me, and for those now deceased, that the Blood of Jesus may purify them all. 

During Holy Communion, bring to me the Body and Blood of Jesus, uniting Him with me in spirit, so that my heart may become His dwelling place.  Plead with Him that through this sacrifice, all people throughout the world be saved.

When the Mass ends, bring home to me and to every home the Lord’s blessing.  Amen.

by fsspuk