Happy Saint George's Day

Happy Saint George's Day to all of you. Today's grand plans included making a dragon cake for the childen to "slay". Here's the result:

It was generally agreed that our dragon wasn't nearly ferocious enough, that he was probably called "Dongo" or something equally mild and was probably a reject from the fierce dragon school. However he was tasty when speared and eaten - and with a cake dragon, that's what counts.

Christus Resurrexit! Resurrexit Vere!

Święcone - Blessing of Easter Food

Traditionally on Holy Saturday food to be eaten in the Easter feast is brought to the parish to be blessed. A traditional blessing includes prayers over the meat, eggs and bread as well as salt. The tradition has been kept alive by Polish Catholics, and for the past two years our Parish Priest has invited families to bring baskets of food representing their Easter meal to Church on Holy Saturday for the blessing (Święcone in Polish - rather close to my maiden name!). As I'm half-Polish and our children are, therefore, one quarter Polish, we thought this was a good practice to add to our family traditions. The photo is our our basket this year  - bread, eggs from our our chickens, and lamb prepared with sea-salt and rosemary. 


We've abstained from meat during Holy Week - my youngest has woken up every morning for the last three days asking "Can I have sausages NOW?"  so we will appreciate this meal when its time comes.
                 
               ... not long to go until we can celebrate. 
                                          
                                            Not long now to wait for the Resurrection.

Wishing you all a happy and blessed Easter!

Dome of Home: Beacon of Hope

1046 people were counted into the Shrine Church of Saints Peter, Paul and Philomena this morning for a very special Mass (Solemnity of the Annunciation of the BVM) to mark the establishment of the shrine which has been entrusted by His Lordship, Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. The church was packed to the rafters - standing room only. The vast majority of people were local, many unfamiliar with the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite, but reading faces and overhearing conversations afterwards, it was clear that the response was overwhelmingly positive.

There's a lot I'd like to write about the day, which takes the brick-by-brick Hermeneutic of Continuity restoration of tradition to a new level in England. I saw many eyes rimmed with tears after the Mass. An elderly man next to me was almost speechless with joy: he said he'd not seen anything remotely close to a Mass this "powerful and holy" since his youth. He felt that this was the beginning of something new.

I was delighted to meet Canon Meney, the Rector of the Shrine, as well as Monsignor Wach who founded the Institute. Both know our ICKSP contacts and friends in the South of France, so it felt a little like a homecoming. I was pleased to be able to thank Msgr Wach for the work done by the Institute: it is a truly blessed foundation. In return, we were invited to join the ICKSP at their headquarters in Italy for a holiday! I think we'd better start saving or I won't hear the end of it from my eldest son... We also met several religious sisters from the Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus some of whom had come over from Switzerland, others from Italy, especially for the Mass. It's wonderful to see so many young vocations. I'm always struck by how happy young religious are, and these women were no exception. The children - particularly the girls - enjoyed meeting them and they are such wonderful role models. I'm particularly grateful to them for offering to pray for us during our long drive home.

The reception afterwards was extremely busy but we were determined to squeeze every wonderful second out of the day and so we stayed and met old friends and new. I was especially pleased to bump into Charlie Chasuble and meet his lovely family; what with Father Simon Henry there, it was a bit like an impromptu blognic.  

It was a long day: we left our house at 4:30 am and drove for almost 6 hours to get the the Shrine.  It didn't matter what the journey threw at us (roadworks, fog, bad traffic, the van's transmission temporarily packing in on the M6) we were clearly meant to get there. We had no sat-nav with us and almost ended up taking the tunnel to Liverpool, but were saved at the last minute by a friendly tollbooth operator who showed us a sneaky way out. Even then we had no clue where we were - it was 10:15am and the Mass started at 10:30 - "pray kids, pray" I shouted as I drove with more hope than certainty. We rounded a corner and there, above us, only moments away was the "Dome of Home".  We arrived with 10 minutes to spare and   - Deo gratias - a kind steward let us park behind the church, so we were on time!  It took over five hours to get home, which makes 11+ hours driving. Was it worth it? Would we do it again? Absolutely. Next time we'll stay a little longer though...

The "Dome of Home" becomes, in Canon Meney's words a "beacon of hope"

The Reverend Canon William Hudson (left in black) translates the welcome address from Monsignor Wach (in blue)

The Most Reverend Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewbury vests at the beginning of Mass 

Spot the blogging priest.

Reverend Canon William Hudson, Pro-Provincial for England reads part of the Apostolic Blessing

Our favourite Bishop!

Men of the moment: His Lordship, Bishop Davies, Msgr Wash and Canon Meney 

 

Bishop Davies cuts the cake!

 

See Father Simon Henry's blog for a detailed description of the Mass and subsequent festivities as well as some wonderful photographs that capture some of the spirit of the day.

Bigger than the Beatles. Cooler too.

We're all getting rather excited here about the grand opening of the Shrine Church of Ss Peter and Paul and St Philomena, New Brighton, Wirral which has been entrusted to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest an order both dedicated and devoted to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite; an order dedicated to defending Catholic orthodoxy and priestly spirituality. We love the ICRSP who run our parish in France, and our contact with them has been a great blessing to our family.

We'll be leaving SE England in the small grey hours of Saturday morning, to arrive at the Shrine Church on time for Mass which will be celebrated by Monsignor Gilles Wach, the French founder of the Institute, and the homily will be preached by our favourite Bishop, Rt Rev. Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury. 

How much better can it get? 

Well, try this on for size: the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI has offered a Papal Blessing with an attached Plenary Indulgence (usual conditions apply) for all the faithful who attend the grand opening.

Well, what ARE you waiting for? Details below

...and while you're sorting out your travel arrangements, why not say a decade (or five) of the Rosary for Bishop Mark Davies, a courageous and visionary shepherd, without whom none of this would be possible... 

...and when you've done that, say another decade (or five) for the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. who, (as I wrote last year) 

"have a steady stream of vocations for the priesthood and of women to the religious life. Their parishes are so demographically healthy that anyone much over 40 will be at the top end of the age bell-curve. They run excellent schools, academically and doctrinally rigorous, educating children in the Faith. They run orthodox Catholic summer camps for boys and girls, and traditional Catholic scout groups. In short, they are a massive success story". 

God bless the ICRSP: may they repeat their international successes here in Mary's Dowry.

3 books - a Kindle Schmindle

I love books. In my (much) younger days as an irritating, impetuous little know-it-all I was once found on the Left Bank of the Seine proclaiming loudly "I'd rather see people killed than books thrown away!" in response to seeing a Parisian outdoor bookseller discarding his unwanted stock at the end of a working day. I hardly need point out that this is a sentiment I cannot relate to now. However a couple of decades ago, a first-class literature degree under my scrawny bohemian belt, I was horrified by the idea that books could be discarded so casually (ironically, as a self-defined non-Catholic at the time who had just spent four years in an astonishingly relativist academic milieu, the discarding of tiny humans didn't even enter my consciousness). As soon as the bookseller had departed, I raced to the bin and liberated the violated tomes (a real mish-mash of genres and periods) and placed them lovingly along the wall of the seine with a large handwritten sign proclaiming (in French) "FREE BOOKS - HELP YOURSELF".

My poor partner-in-crime (now long-suffering husband) and I watched from a bench in the distance (with a bottle of wine, natch) as passersby stopped, read the sign and browsed the books - sometimes continuing their journey with empty hands, but more commonly snatching a copy with a furtive look around and departing clutching a new (to them) paperback friend and with a spring in their step. Eventually all the orphaned volumes, barring one abstruse work by a French surrealist, found new homes, and we were able to wander off to a cafe for more wine and some decent food, satisfied in a job well done.

Samuel Pepys:  what would he have made of the Kindle?

Why mention this at all? Well, my pal, fellow parishioner, senior blogger and venerable cat-charmer Mac of Mulier Fortis fame has kindly tagged me in her Kindle-o-rama meme to name three books I'd recommend that she buy to read on her shiny new kindle (actually, it's a bit less shiny now than it was when she first tagged me - it's taken a fortnight to wrest my laptop from the possession of my children and get back to my blog, but that's another story...) Anyway - here I hit a moral dilemma: I love paper books. I love the way that they smell, and age and the fact that you can read them in the bath, in the rain and get them half buried in sand on the beach. I like the fact that you can chuck them into the fire if you really really disapprove (have only done this once and it was good fun). My children are reading paperback novels that I read 35 years ago that were tatty and old when they were passed down to me by friends of the family. You can't do that with a kindle.

On the other hand, my eyes are getting dodgier as I get older, and the notion of larger type starts to sound attractive. Not to mention having an entire library in my handbag. Books are an expensive habit, not so much in their acquisition as much as in the storage space that they take up. We're currently trying to figure out how to convert an outbuilding into a library. Yes, that many books.

The Pepys Library at my old Alma mater: if only my books were so well organised!

Mac on the other hand, is sensible enough to equip herself with a Kindle, and be able to carry the equivalent of the boxes and boxes filling my loft, cupboards and garage (labelled "boring books", "rodent diseases/dissection", "m/physical poets" and so forth) in something that can slip into a pocket. So I'm going to run with the fact that she already has one, rather than debate the rights and wrongs of electronic reading devices, and recommend a little light reading. I know that the meme was really a Desert Island Discs sort of "three essential books" but I change my mind so often that I thought it better to recommend some pacy relief to the worthy and weighty tomes that would be truly indispensable.. Not quite chicklit, but I've been into the sort-of-girly apocalypso genre of late, and so my recommendations are:

[1] Fatherless/Motherless/Childless by Brian J Gail
 Ok so this is a bit of a cheat. Three books in one. But it's worth sticking with Fatherless to get to Motherless which allows you to get to Childless. Sound Catholic novels just shouldn't be this much fun. Oh - and if you buy Motherless then you get Childless free in the Kindle edition: the "preview" is actually the whole novel. A kindle-reading friend pointed this out to me - she reckons that Brain J Gail just wants to get the book "out there" and as widely read as possible. I can see why.

[2] Eclipse of the Sun by Michael D O'Brien.
The catch with this one is that it's two books - really you should read the much shorter Plague Journal to get full benefit form Eclipse. Plague Journal might even be a better book, but the end of Eclipse make the journey worthwhile. Strictly speaking these two are the end of a trilogy (that is itself part of a series of seven books) but I'm not as ardent about Strangers and Sojourners as I am about the others. Almost anything by Michael D O'Brien could have been on this list - particularly Father Elijah (probably his best known) and The Island of the World (his most elegantly written work). There's something about the characters and images in "Plague Journal" and "Eclipse of the Sun that ring true. Warning: not good bedtime reading for the paranoid.

[3] Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson
Scarily prescient Catholic science-fiction novel written over 100 years ago but eerily contemporary. Unputdownable. And it's FREE on Kindle.

I'm going to tag five other bloggers for fairly random reasons: OTSOTA because he's already a Kindle lover and prolific reader and a real cleverclogs in a good way, Mundabor because his blog makes me punch the air and say "Yessssssss!" and because I'm curious to see what he'll recommend, Jean of KiwiTrad and Anna's Song blogs because she lives in New Zealand which gives her a different perspective,  Bara Brith because she's a font of musical knowledge and all-round good egg and Joseph K of my "brother blog" Defend us in Battle who wages spiritual warfare from the frozen wilds of Alaska.

Closed: anything to do with the Kindle?

I've just said a Hail Mary for the reader...

...who found my blog using the search terms "green + ink + secularist"

Whoever you are you made my day!