Ecce Sacerdos Magnus

In 2003, on Remembrance Sunday, I was the house-for-duty Curate of seven Devon country churches, under a full-time stipendiary Rector - except that he had taken early retirement nine days before on account of health problems caused by those who hated him for his opposition to the sacerdotal ordination of women. But I still had the help of a retired bishop, who lived a few doors away and who, in two years, had become a very dear friend. So, that Sunday, at one end of the United Benefice I said Mass and did the village Act of Remembrance; at the other end, Bishop John Richards did the same. After brunch, he went for a walk with his family; a couple of hours later, after a sudden stroke brought on by his years of selfless service, he was dead.

John Richards was a former Exeter diocesan Archdeacon and a very establishment man who was made one of the first two flying bishops, and in those days after 1993, days heavy with the danger of despair, built up and strengthened a people faithful to the Lord within the apostate body still called the Church of England. The skills which he had used as Archdeacon (and he was a Church Commissioner) to chivvy parishes who were late with their quota were now brought into play to defend the Faithful Remnant against the bullying and cruelty of the liberal establishment.

Going around with John Richards, I soon realised that he had created a new style of episcopal ministry, free from pomposity and prelacy and animated only by the love of God and a perceived calling to strengthen his brethren. PEVs, like ante-Nicene bishops, had no jurisdiction in the modern sense. I think it was the now deceased Bishop (later Mgr) Edwin Barnes who acutely remarked to his clergy 'Fathers, remember that the only jurisdiction we have is what you give us'. I thank God that one part of the patrimony which we carried into the Ordinariates was this vision of pastoral and unprelatical episkope.

John Richards was an Anglican to his fingertips. As we settled down together in the train for the long haul back to Devon after some meeting in London, and I start murmuring some Latin from some Romish volume, he would be fishing out a battered Prayer Book and Bible for O Lord, open thou our lips. But he was far too busy and too big a man to waste his time on anti-Romanism. Whatever he was or did, it was positive and Christ-driven. I think that, had he lived, he would have had no doubts about accompanying his former fellow Exeter Archdeacon Robin Ellis and joining the Ordinariate. But he would have done things in a distinctively Anglican way and in his own inimitatively combative way. He would probably have got down straightaway to enthusiastically devising ways of showing those bloody papists how much better we could do things in the Ordinariate. "Now look here, boy, now we're in the Ordinariate, what we've got to do is  ..."

I can almost hear his voice saying it. He was a dear man.

Cuius animae propitietur Deus.

The LORD be with you [2]

 And every Mass starts publicly with the priest turning to the plebs sancta Dei and greeting them with "Dominus vobiscum": "YHWH [be] with you". And, before the Canon, priest and people establish contact with these same words.

The suitability of this is emphasised by the plain and historical fact that the God who wonderfully created the dignity of the Human Substance yet more wonderfully restored it when Gabriel appeared bearing this greeting, saying exactly these words (in the singular: Ho Kurios meta sou) to a Girl in Nazareth: 'YHWH be with you'. S Luke points out to us that what surprised Mary was, apparently, not the sudden appearance of an Archangel ... as you might have expected ... whatever Gabriel may have looked like ... but what he  said: epi toi logoi dietarakthe ... potapos eie ho aspasmos houtos ....

But, first, a vocative: Khaire kekharitomene, 'Hail Graced One'. We mut include here Luke 1:30: do not fear, for you have found grace, favour (heures gar kharin) with God. Ruth said that she has found grace (heuron kharin) and prayed that she might find grace (heuroimi kharin). Ruth is told 'me phobou', do not fear; the same words that are used to Mary; she describes herself as your 'doule', 'slave'; Mary uses the same word for herself. And the word 'eulogemene' used by Elizabeth ('Blessed') is used in this passage in Ruth. 

S Luke's narrative is shot through and through with vocabulary and turns of phrase from the Septuagintal translation of the Hebrew Bible; the word 'pastiche' almost suggests itself to me.

But the thought I would like to leave with you is this: What a lot you are carrying with you, each time you pray the Hail Mary! And perhaps, mentally, you should capitalise the crucial phrase as "the LORD is with thee". 

When Elizabeth wonders why it is that the 'Meter tou Kuriou mou' should come to her, surely we have here Theotokos?

Ave Maria is (at least) as 'heavy' theologically as the Oratio dominica.

The LORD be with you [1]

When, um, did you last read the Book of Ruth? " ... and his name was Boos". Very 'Lucan' in style, isn't it? ... See Luke 1:26-27. ""And behold, Boos came from Bethlehem; and he said to the reapers 'The Lord be with you'". Clearly, a man of substance. 

Except that if you have a Bible translated in the tradition of Anglican bibles deriving from the Authorised (or 'King James') version, it will read 'Boaz', because that is how the Septuagint, the standard Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, gives his name.

And, additionally, your Anglican-based Bible will read 'The LORD be with you'. 

Does that make any difference? It most certainly does.

In the written Hebrew, the Name of the Hebrew God, or rather, its consonants, is given without any fuss. YHWH (or, if you prefer, HWHY). But the Jews got into the habit of never uttering the Name, because of its extreme holiness. So, when the Biblical text was being read aloud, and the reader got to YHWH, what he actually vocalised ... said ... was 'the Lord'. So 'the Lord' became a regular stand-in for YHWH. And when the Old Testament was translated into other languages, from Greek onwards, the words for 'Lord', in those languages, were substituted for YHWH.

And the Anglican translators had the brilliant idea of printing the word in capital letters: LORD. This is brilliant because it gives valuable information. "The LORD" means that, at this point, the Hebrew text gives the Name YHWH which is too sacred for us to utter without disrespect.

So what Boos said to his reapers was "YHWH be with you".

Apologies to those of you who knew all that.

One of the many excellent reasons why we Clerks in Holy Orders are canonically obliged to say the Divine Office is to ensure that our Mass is situated in a thoroughly Jewish, Hebrew, setting and culture. The God we worship is the Jewish God. No ifs, no buts. As a great pope once said, we are spiritually Semites. Our religion is ... The Genuine Judaism. Hence, all those psalms we recite with all those references to "Thy Name". (Generations of intelligent Anglicans must have wondered how we can glorify His Name when we are not given that Name in most of our texts.)

And, just as, in the Canon of the Mass of the Authentic Roman Rite, we give a daily central mention to "our" Patriarch Abraham, so, in the majestic climaxes of the Divine Office, we mention Abraham in the Gospel Canticles, the Benedictus and the Magnificat at Lauds and Vespers. And we talk incessantly about Sion and going there and worshipping in the Temple of the LORD. Why, we even do it as clergy when we stand at the foot of the Altar, morning after morning after morning, Sacrificing Priests preparing to climb up ad Sancta Sanctorum and to immolate the Lamb. S John Henry reminded us that, day by day, we offer up the Immaculate Lamb. And apparently, in hushed horror at their scandalised tea parties, the clerical wives of Oxford remarked that, every morning, Dr Pusey ("Did you know this, my dear?") slaughtered a lamb in the Cathedral. 

Somebody had got something across!

ALL our SAINTS

The compilers of the C of E's abortive "1928" Prayer Book appear to have taken over, from the Irish Catholic Calendar (the clue is that they borrowed the Collect used in Ireland on November 6) the bright idea of a festival of "Saints, Martyrs, Missionaries, and Doctors of the Church of England" ... which they intelligently placed on November 8 [the old Octave Day of All Saints]. 

"Three centuries ago, and the Catholic Church, that great creation of God's power, stood in this land in pride of place. It had the honours of near a thousand years upon it; it was enthroned in some twenty sees up and down the broad country; it was based in the will of a faithful people; it energized through ten thousand instruments of power and influence; and it was enobled by a host of Saints and Martyrs. The churches, one by one, recounted and rejoiced in the line of glorified intercessors, who were the respective objects of their grateful homage. Canterbury alone numbered perhaps some sixteen, from St Augustine to St Dunstan and St Elphege, from St Anselm and St Thomas down to S Edmund. York had its St Paulinus, St John, St Wilfrid, and St William; London its St Erconwald; Durham, its St Cuthbert; Winton, its St Swithin. Then there were St Aidan of Lindisfarne, and St Hugh of Lincoln, and St Chad of Lichfield, and St Thomas of Hereford, and St Oswald and St Wulfstan of Worcester, and St Osmund of Salisbury, and St Birinus of Dorchester , and St Richard of Chichester. ..."

S John Henry Newman. 

Here is the 1928 English translation of the old Irish Catholic Collect for the day:

"We beseech thee, O Lord, to multiply thy grace upon us who commemorate the saints of our nation; that, as we rejoice to be their fellow-citizens on earth, so we may have fellowship also with them in heaven; through ... "

I regard that as graceful in its elegant simplicity ... 'Old Roman' in its noble brevity. 

Unfortunately, when the Ordinariate Missal emerged, what it gave us was:

"Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God: that we may in all things be comforted by the intercession of holy Mary, Mother of God, of all the holy Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, and Virgins, and all the Saints of England (Wales); and that like as we do call to mind their godliness of life; so we may be effectually defended by their help; through ... "

Plodding? Verbose? 

Vain Repetitions?

 Sacrosanctum Concilium wisely advises the avoidance of "repetitiones inutiles". This, of course, implies that some repetitions are not 'useless'. 

But a prejudice against any and all repetitions is not a new thing among liturgists.

I have in mind today the old arrangements with regard to the Sundays in October. In the days of S John Henry Newman, in many dioceses including those of England, the first, second, third and fourth Sundays in this month commemorated, in turn, the Holy Rosary [and Lepanto!]; the Motherhood; the Purity; and the Patronage of our Lady. But, so a Dom Grospellier argued, certain modern festivals, wherein are celebrated this or that mystery of the life of our Saviour or the Blessed Virgin, are but useless repetitions of what is contained in the office of the season. "Thus, for example, the double Mystery of the Virginity and of the Maternity of Mary is expressed in a manner most beautifully poetical, and full of the symbolism dear to the Christian epoch when it was written, in the office of the octave [day] of Christmas, that is to say of the festival which we now call the Circumcision of our Lord. In the feasts for the Sundays in October, conceded to many dioceses, we find similar repetitions."

I spent quite a few decades teaching, both the younger and the older generations. And the most important piece of advice I could give to anybody setting out to teach members of either category is this: Don't assume that when you've said something once, you've done the job. You haven't ... however brilliantly you explained it! People learn at different speeds. And, above all, they remember different parts of what you say. If you aren't prepared to repeat yourself ... and to do so quite often ... you aren't much of a teacher. Don't expect your A-level results to sparkle!

The didactic element in the Church's Liturgy is subject to the same law. The widespread ignorance of the Church's teaching in our own time is, in my view, partly the result of a failure to grasp this principle.

 

Fifteen Altars, Fifteen Pictures?

Saint John Henry, with the English Martyrs presumably in mind, refers to those "whose pictures are above our altars or soon shall be, the surest proof that the Lord's arm has not waxen short, nor his mercy failed--they ... are looking down from their thrones on high ... ". 

In our days, we have a genre facing near-extinction: the Sacred Picture above, behind, an altar.

I did a post not long ago, being snide about the way 'Art' tends to end up being ripped out of its sacral context, at the mercy of the grim and generally bog-ignorant 'art history' industry. Today, I am complaining rather more about the way the supply of such art has pretty well dried up anyway. Not entirely: there is the splendid new canvas behind one of the altars in the Ordinariate basilica of S Agatha's, in the Portsmouth area of Venice not far from the Bacino. And those most admirable people, the Brompton Oratorians, have created a stylish chapel of S John Henry, with a fine copy of the Arundel/Millais Newman. (Plenty of space in that chapel, incidentally, for the faithful to fill up with crutches and silver ex voto expressions of gratitude for answers to prayer, as we all  bother Providence for dottore subito.)

And, indeed, in a recent number of the Brompton Parish Magazine, the Provost writes that when the Roman Oratory Church was being rebuilt, S Philip Neri insisted "that every chapel should contain an image of Our Lady over the altar. His personal favourite was Federico Barocci's rendering of the embrace between the Blessed Virgin and Elizabeth, for the altar of the Visitation, before which he was to be seen in ecstasy. And so, when the Roman Oratory fathers constructed a shrine after his death to contain his mortal remains, they made sure that the beautiful painting of our saint by Guido Reni over the altar depicted him on his knees, in Mass vestments, in front of a vision of the Madonna and Child."

Pictures over altars were still quite normal in the good old days of good old Papa Pecci, aka Leo XIII, who wrote a Rosary Encyclical each year. He seems to have been genuinely thrilled that the Diocese of Lourdes-Tarbes had built a Rosary Basilica, with fifteen altars honouring the Fifteen Mysteries. He commissioned a buddy, the Cardinal Archbishop of Rheims, to go and and consecrate it, giving him faculties to wear his pallium extra provinciam. [REDHERRINGWARNING: the Apostolic Letter describing this reads "praesenti autem anno a quo suum saeculum vicesimum ducit exordium" ... readers will rember how, in our time, millions of the innumerate all round the world were convinced that the New Millennium began with the year 2000. Pope Leo, apparently, could count, because he was writing in 1901.]

Please ...

 I have recently been suffering rather from my malady, and intermittently falling over. 

Please pray for me; and be generous if I am rather backward in enabling comments, or responding to emails.

Thank you.

John Hunwicke

November 5, Feast of the Holy Relics

What a wholesome liturgical instinct this glorious festival represents. In the medieval English rites, it tried out various dates; May 22 or the Monday after the Ascension at Exeter; the Sunday after the Translation of S Thomas (July 7) at Hereford and Sarum - although Sarum notes that 'nuper' it occupied the Octave Day of our Lady's Nativity, with an appropriate Collect "Grant we beseech thee Almighty God, that the merits may protect us of the holy Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary and of thy Saints whose relics are kept in this church ...". The traditional Benedictine rite keeps this festival on May 13, presumably a learned allusion to the Dedication of the Pantheon in Rome, upon this day, as the Church of Sancta Maria ad Martyres. Before the reforms of S Pius X, this festival was to be found among the Masses For Some Places on October 26, or on the Last Sunday of October.

After S Pius X, the Feast of the Relics settled, most appropriately, onto a day within the Octave of All Saints, November 5, where it was observed by papal indult in certain places (often as a Greater Double). The colour to be used is red. This is consistent with the fact that the Office is the Common of Many Martyrs, despite the fact that not all the Saints whose relics we this day venerate were martyred. Perhaps we may relate this usage to the primitive notion that the Martyrs are the prototypical saints; that the unmartyred sancti et sanctae in a sense just piggy-back along upon the martyrs.

The dear old Sacred Congregation of Rites sometimes felt tempted to turn to Byzantine sources to get a richer mixture than one always finds in formal Western texts (Sessio xxv of Trent is sound enough on the relics but a trifle sober). So the proper lections at Mattins for this feast are taken from that always-reliable Doctor of the Church S John of Damascus (Fr Eric Mascall once observed the propensity of Roman liturgists to resort to Eastern sources whenever they felt moved to say something 'extreme'). "For since Life itself and the Author of Life was numbered among the dead, we do not call those who finished their last day in the hope of Resurrection and of faith in Him 'Dead'. For how can a dead body utter miracles? Through relics the devils are cast out, diseases sent fleeing, the sick healed, the blind see ..." etc. etc.. The Collect is a fine composition which likewise sees the miracles performed through the relics of Saints as pledges of the Resurrection: Increase in us O Lord our faith in the Resurrection, who in the relics of thy Saints dost perform marvellous works: and make us partakers of the immortal glory of which our veneration of their ashes [cineres] is a pledge.

In the Leofric Missal, copied probably from texts brought to England in S Augustine's rucksack, there is a Votive for use in a Church or Oratory where relics are held. Its Collect lists all those categories of Saints of whom we might possess relics ... including our Lady and the Angelic Powers! A couple of its texts use the word patrocinium apparently to mean "our hoard of relics", and one phrase reminds God that we have gone to the trouble to collect them (colligere curavimus)!

This celebration disappeared from Church life in the post-Conciliar period, for presumably the same reasons that at the same time caused the Jesuits, who then occupied the Church of S Aloysius in this City, to have a massive bonfire of all the relics and reliquaries in their splendid Relics Chapel (the late Fr Bertram's elegant booklet about those events reminds one uncannily of the similar things which happened throughout England in the late 1540s ... mercifully, the gracious spirit of S Philip Neri has now restored lost glories by filling the Alyoggers Relics Chapel with a grand new collection).

This feast is, in my view, rich in themes for evangelical preaching and teaching, and ripe for wider revival. It teaches the goodness of material things against a false 'spiritualism'; it preaches the ultimately indissoluble link between Body and Soul against the sub-Christian notion that only the soul really matters; it proclaims the transforming eschatological glory which will clothe this perishable with what is imperishable, and this mortal with what is immortal, in a moment (en atomoi), in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

Nasty Newman?

The late Henry Chadwick, the towering Anglican intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century (an extinct species), believed that John Henry Newman was the most superb writer of Satire and of Irony in the English language. True! I commend to those who have never read it Newman's semi-autobiographical novel Loss and Gain. He exposes to our laughter the absurdities of popular Evangelicalism; of sonorous, pompous, and dignified Oxford dons who were ... well, actually just plain ridiculous (and far from well-read). 

So were the new religious movements thrown up by the ferment of the 1840s. With exquisite cruelty he analyses the hypocrisies of the comfortable domestic affluence, combined with a dilettante affection for the superficial trappings of Catholicism, enjoyed by a certain type of Establishment, monied, gothic-romanticist young Anglican. Clearly, all this touched a raw nerve, and the Novel was the only way in which Saint John Henry could express the strength of his feelings. And not much more gentle was his ironic mockery of those daft enough to believe that the Birmingham Oratory contained oubliettes in which heiresses were tortured to death for their inheritances.

Newman, frankly, took no prisoners. And his mode of attack is, essentially, to laugh at his adversaries. This, surely, is the most ruthless possible way of putting somebody down. If a person criticises you in a flat, humdrum, pathetic, terribly earnest style, s/he doesn't get to you. You cheerfully write him/her off as a poor, sad, silly old thing. But if s/he laughs ... or sniggers ... at you ... !! 

You see, the victims of this sort of attack  quite simply ... to quote the martial figure of Corporal Jones of Dad's Army ... don't like it up 'em. The grander you are, the more surrounded you are by people who defer to you and treat you with respect and deference, the less you like the satirist. The more you are a bully, an obsessive oppressive, or a control-freak, the more indignant the satirist makes you feel. Ho anaginoskon noeito.

And, in many ways, our own age is made for the satirist. Never was there a time when the the Great, the Wise, and the Good, were less able to control a narrative ... the narrative ... any of the narratives. The Internet has done for them and for all their shabby little techniques for establishing dominance. 

 If, being Intellectuals, you would like an intellectual ... indeed, a theological ... account and justification of Satire and Laughter, I offer you the collection Essays in Satire by another brilliant Anglican, a generation later than Newman, who also brought his satirical gifts into the Catholic Church: Mgr Ronald Knox. In his Introduction, he entertained the speculation that "our sense of the ridiculous is not, in its original application, a child's toy at all, but a weapon, deadly in its efficacy, entrusted to us for exposing the shams and hypocrisies of the world. The tyrant may arm himself in triple mail, may surround himself with bodyguards, may sow his kingdom with a hedge of spikes, so that free speech is crushed and criticism muzzled. Nay, worse, he may so debauch the consciences of his subjects with false history and with sophistical argument that they come to believe him the thing he gives himself out for, a creature half-divine, a heaven-sent deliverer. 

"One thing there is that he still fears; one anxiety still bids him turn this way and that to scan the faces of his slaves. He is afraid of laughter. The satirist stands there, like the little child in the procession when the Emperor walked through the capital in his famous new clothes; his is the tiny voice that interprets the consciousness of a thousand onlookers: 'But, Mother, he has no clothes on at all!'"

Distractions and Ramblings

As I said Mass yesterday for All the Souls, a distraction struck me at the Offertory.

I was just about to bless the cruet labelled Aqua when Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-1974, distracted my mind. Here is a story which those of you who lack the advantages of Anglican Previous may not already have heard.

At Requiems, one does not bless, sign with the Cross, the cruet containing water.  But on one occasion, Ramsey momentarily forgot this, and began to make the sign of the Cross. But then he remembered, and, half way through the blessing, changed it into a kind of rubbing-out gesture, deleting, as were, the half-given blessing.

Ramsey would, Fr Aidan Nichols has pointed out, have been one of the great Archbishops of Canterbury, but for the fact that, during the Humanae Vitae controversies, he took the wrong side. Perhaps, you might say, he was 'around' at the wrong time ...

It is so important to be on-stream at the right time. Perhaps that is part of what is meant by the Et ne nos inducas eis peirasmon at the end of the Our Father. A shame PF was unaware of this when he blasphemously purported to change the Prayer.

Dear me, what a tragedy it is that PF has (apparently) never had at hand somebody to explain the Christian Faith to him!

Footnote: when bilingual service books for Papal rites are printed, the Italian column gives the Bergoglian corruption of the Our Father; but the Latin column gives a translation of the version as mistakenly delivered by the Man from Nazareth.

Pelagianism and Prayer for the Departed

Some time ago we took buses to Shipton-under-Wychwood (don't we have entrancing place-names in England?) and did a walk in the valley of the Evenlode (and beautiful river names?). In Shipton church is a palimpsest brass.

The 'front' bears an inscription about a woman who died in 1548. Interestingly, it bears no hint of expectation that it might be appropriate to pray for the repose of her soul. This calls for explanation: out in the Oxfordshire backwoods in 1549 the people rose in rebellion against the Prayer Book. So you don't expect to find there evidence of a Protestantism which by then had made little progress beyond some very small areas in the East of England. But the inscription cheerfully assured us that her virtues and her virtuous deeds had undoubtedly brought her straight to heaven.

You don't need to remind me that this assumption is not quite what poor dear Fraterculus Luther thought he meant when he was plugging Justification By Faith Alone. But it is in line with the tens of thousands of funerary inscriptions dating from the ensuing Protestant centuries, postulating certain and immediate sainthood for every deceased person on account of their unbelievably virtuous lives (there is that old story about a little girl who read the gravestones in a churchyard and asked "Mummy, where are all the bad people buried?"). 

I wonder if anyone has ever written an interpretative account of how the academic doctrinaire Protestantism of Luther and Calvin (Faith, not Works) led with such immediate and apparently automatic ease to its precise and polar opposite (Works), a practical popular Pelagianism.

I do have a theory about this. It is that it was precisely the much-derided 'chantry' system, with its financial link between clergy remuneration and masses for the welfare of the souls of the Faithful Departed, which de facto reminded common unacademic medievals that we are all sinners who depend upon God's gracious mercy for our salvation. De facto, take that away and common unacademic folk, needing to fill a conceptual vacuum, will replace it in their own minds with the assumption that since the recently departed Mary Smith doesn't need Masses said for her soul - the government has just declared this and has sequestrated all the assets of all the chantries - ergo if we love Ms Smith we need to be convinced that her good deeds outweigh any sins. 

It becomes psychologically important to shy away in our minds from the disturbing consequence that, if this is not so, then she is, er, in Hell. 

Moreover, if there is no Purgatory, then she is already in Heaven ... or Hell. So ... this is my tentative hypothetical proposal ... the paradoxical emphasis in popular Protestantism upon salvation by works (which is ultimately to feed into a facile Universalism which assumes that everybody except probably Adolf Hitler and Myra Hindley will end up Saved), emerged in 1548 from a mass crisis of popular rethinking about soteriology and the Departed.

On the back of the brass, in the reused original dating from 1492, we have a potent reminder of the complex and deep-rooted system which was destroyed by the suppression of the chantries. It is an account of bequests to the Guild of our Lady in Aylesbury for Masses and Dirges. Presumably it came on to the market in the despoliations which followed the suppression of the chantries (statute of December 1547). 

It reminded me of the manuscript* description of endowments made by Sir John Percival, Lord Mayor of London in the reign of the first Tudor, which hung by his tomb in the London City church of S Mary Woolnoth; presumably such public declarations were at least partly intended to ensure the compliance of future generations in fulfilling the dispositions.



*Rediscovered at the back of a cupboard in S Mary Woolnoth; the interested can find an account in a piece I published in 2007 in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association (they might also reread Duffy Stripping pp 515ff.). Sir John's document survived because, amid all the provisions for masses for his soul, which will have become obsolete in 1548, there were a few other provisions for benefactions which did not thus become obsolete. A later hand has marked these surviving provisions with an arrow in the margin.

Saint Sara Smith of Golders Green?

Have you ever meditated upon what a chancy business the awarding of the Victoria Cross ... our most significant award for military gallantry ... is?

Where a conflict is at its fiercest, the chance must be greatest that there will be no surviving witness to describe the heroism of the most heroic.

I hope you will forgive a certain crudity in a comparison I am about to make.

The 'Saints business', our preoccupation today, All Saints' Day, may be a bit like that.

If we attain beatitude, we may be surprised that the greatest figures in Saint-land are men and women we had never heard of. I have in mind a passage in C S Lewis's The Great Divorce where the Narrative Persona [Sorry!] is being taught about Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. "The under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light ... some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

"First came bright spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers ... Between them went musicians and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. ... only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face."

The Narrative Persona naturally wonders if this Lady might be the great Mother of God, Mary Most Holy; but Lewis is careful to keep this speculation from becoming explicit.

"'Is it? ... is  it?' I whispered to my guide. 'Not at all,' said he. It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.'

"'She seems to be ... well, a person of particular importance?' 

"'Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.'"

The Guide goes on to describe the wonders of the Lady's earthly life, and the effect she had on all those ... even the animals ... with whom she came in contact. "And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them ... there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life."

So many Great Ones in Christ; so many gracious intercessors; so many of whom we may never have heard. 

Orent, nihilominus, pro nobis.