De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

  I take me camera out into the wilds of the Essex countryside to explain what happened at Baptist Bible study last Monday when I was accused of Mary worship:

Following the wonderful feast of the Assumption this weekend, I thought I would share this video where Matthew Leonard and Dr. Brant Pitre delve into some amazing insights into Catholic theology about Mary, focusing particularly on the Old Testament. This will absolutely transform your view of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He also reveals where the Ark of the Covenant is (hint: Spielberg was wrong in Raiders). Also quite a lot of hysterical laughter!

I found this recent article in the Catholic Herald both familiar and painful, as it speaks to a real truth we likely all witness in our Church on a regular basis: Catholics do not always edify and evangelise non-Catholics; indeed, “We can also dis-edify, discombobulate and de-evangelise them without ever trying… simply by dint of our sheer laziness and complacency and our lack of reverence for sacred things. This is something I often wrestle with, and, especially over the last couple of weeks when I have been enjoying watching this series with Fr Jeff Woolnough and parishioners at St Peter's Catholic Church in Eastwood: As a young, uncatchesised Catholic Father, this is the kind of evangelisation that brought me ardently back to my Catholic faith. Erudite, intelligent and rooted in Scripture. One of the insights gained while attending these sessions with Fr Jeff is that the parishioners enjoying this series are amazed by the depth of sacred Scripture and the truths ...

Ulf Ekman was a hugely prominent mega-church founder in Sweden who entered the Catholic Church a little over a year ago. I think Catholics find it hard to understand just how big a move this is for someone who is brought up as a Protestant; but to put it in some perspective, most Protestants see Catholicism as the anti-room to hell, as the author Sherry Weddell (a convert herself) explains well here: Ekman revealed that the Blessed Virgin Mary led him and his wife to the Catholic Church, and said that loving Jesus means to love the Church. "It was a real experience for us. It was like several missing pieces fell into place, and so much started to make sense. There was a deep sense of 'arriving' that came to us," Ekman explained in an interview with The  National Catholic Register , talking about the reception with his wife, Birgitta, into the Church on May 21, 2014. Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/former-evangelical-megachurch-lead...

Since the news of his appointment,  the days have been largely full of prayers of thanksgiving and information sharing regarding our new bishop, Alan Williams. Bishop-elect Willams viewing his Cathedral. I could not help but observe that there seemed to be a lot of non-plussed clergy out there to start off with. Alan who? No one had heard of him! The appointment was described as "a surprise", "a shock". But for those who know Walsingham, England's Nazareth, there was no shock, for they knew Fr. Alan very well. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII made a pronouncement. Some might even call it a prophesy, when he asked the English Bishops to consecrate their country to Mary, the Mother of God, recalling the ancient title the land enjoyed of being “Our Lady’s Dowry”. When England returns to Walsingham, Our Lady will return to England. This claim, to be Our Lady’s Dower, or Dowry—confirmed by Pope Leo XIII in 1893—is an extraordinary one, shared by no other land. Ne...

Today is the first day of a New Year. I want to thank everyone who has read my blog in 2013, and hope you will continue to visit in 2014. I like New Year, it is a good opportunity to take stock and make an assessment about what was good and bad in the last twelve months, and try to pledge that the next twelve months will be better. I can think of no better way to start the New Year, than with a beautiful reflection such as the one the Church gives us today: The Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, one of the most ancient Marian feast days of the Catholic Church. In today's Office of Readings  there is this wonderful excerpt from a letter of St Athanasius: The Word took to himself the sons of Abraham, says the Apostle, and so had to be like his brothers in all things. He had then to take a body like ours. This explains the fact of Mary’s presence: she is to provide him with a body of his own, to be offered for our sake. Scripture records her giving birth, and says: She w...

The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple ~Willem Vrelant (Flemish, died 1481, active 1454 - 1481) Today is the Feast of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as The Entry of the Most Holy  Theotókos into the Temple, in the East.This feast celebrates Mary’s “dedication” of herself to God from her infancy, inspired by the Holy Spirit, whose grace had filled her ever since her immaculate conception. The feast is associated with an event recounted in the apocryphal  Protoevangelium of James , which tells us how Mary's parents, Joachim and Anne, who had been childless, received a heavenly message that they would have a child. In thanksgiving for the gift of their daughter, they brought her, when still a child, to the Temple in Jerusalem to consecrate her to God. Later versions of the story (such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary ) tell us that Mary was taken to the Temple at around the age of three in fulfil...

"Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."  Ps 119:105 Welcome to this, the fifty-second of my reflections on the theology of the Sunday readings at Mass. I am off to Lourdes this weekend so will be enjoying Mass with Brentwood Catholic Youth Service on Sunday in St. Joseph's Chapel. I have undertaken this project, regularly posting background information on the readings at Sunday Mass as part of my own prayer life. I have found it helps me to do a little study before I go to Mass about the readings, what the theme of the week is, how it follows on from the previous week's readings and what is being said. In sharing this, I hope to help you too get more from the Bible and Sunday Scripture readings. Perhaps it might give you confidence in the value and legitimacy of the Bible, or perhaps it might inspire you to pray the Divine Office or investigate the weekly readings for yourself. I see this as very clearly part of what the Church teache...

The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is hugely misunderstood. The first thing to point out is that it is about Mary’s sinlessness. Here's a brief excerpt from an essay I wrote on the subject a while back. Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula originalis non est in te.  Vestimentum tuum candidum quasi nix, et facies tua sicut sol.  Tota pulchra es, Maria,  et macula originalis non est in te.  Tu gloria Jerusalem, tu laetitia Israel, tu honorificentia populi nostri.  Tota pulchra es, Maria. From even a perfunctory look at the doctrine of the New Eve, it is possible to see how a consciousness of Mary’s role in the work of salvation began to be realised and develop. It is from a growing consciousness of the unique role and status of Mary in the work of salvation that, beginning in the early patristic period, the Church began to develop the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was dogmatically defined by Pope Pius IX in the Bull In...

Dear Friends This week's lesson was entitled: OUR TAINTED NATURE'S SOLITARY BOAST: MARY, THE MOTHER OF GOD. Everyone seemed to really enjoy the programme and found it beautiful, familiar and emotional. Fr. Barron's presentation began by looking at the Annunciation  a word which has been anglicised from the Latin Vulgate (the 4th century translation of the Bible by St. Jerome) Luke 1:26-39: Annuntiatio nativitatis Christi. Unlike the stories of the gods of the Greeks, Roman's and ancient Pagans, the God of Israel is not forceful or violent. Rather, He extended an invitation that respected Mary's free-will. Mary is visited (Fr. Barron goes as far as to suggest 'courted') by the Angel Gabriel and gives her assent; her fiat, opening the door to our salvation and cooperating and collaborating with the work of her Son. "Mary's role in the Church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it." ( CCC 964 ). Mary's li...

There was a time, before I understood anything about Mariology, when I considered that the teaching of the Church with regards to Mary's virginity was irrelevant and probably misogynistic. What difference could it possibly make in any case? I did not understand the interconnectedness of Catholic dogma that means that Mary is the nexus mysteriorum inter se . In many ways Mary is the lens through which we look to properly understand how the mysteries of faith relate directly to us and to our lives. Of course the doctrine of Mary's virginity is not about sex being dirty, or virgins being better than women who have had sex, those are relatively modern ideas we have imbued the story with retrospectively. In fact the whole idea runs somewhat contrary to expectations of the time, which saw virginity in a negative way. Probably the key insight is that Mary's virginity has Christological significance since it emphasises the central mystery of Christian faith; that Christ has o...