Issue 75 - The Pilgrim - September 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

The Pilgrim October 2018
Feature
great liturgical scholar: the Mass is a
serious form of play, of doing
something simply for its own sake,
not because it is functionally
necessary like mending a car.
A really superb team of young
actors then made a drama
presentation on adoration of the
Eucharist – beautifully done.
The day had a glory about it. Vast
crowds, an atmosphere of goodwill.
Even the queues for food at
lunchtime were chatty and friendly.
I went out to see the Mersey and got
a rain-drenched glimpse of what
Liverpool meant to generations of
seamen and travellers: the grey sea
and river, The Liver Birds and the
city and the near Atlantic.
Bishop Barron’s second talk was,
if anything, even better. He spoke
of ordering our lives as in the great
rose window of a Gothic cathedral:
Christ at the centre. Thomas
Aquinas listed four substitutes for
God in our search for happiness:
wealth, pleasure, power and
honour. All will disappoint us. Only
God satisfies.
He spoke of the greatness of
things – of having “greatness of
heart”, of magnanimity. Hans Urs
von Balthasar emphasised our need
to seek the “theo-drama” over the
“ego drama”: life is not about me.
There were presentations from
Youth 2000 – young people
describing how adoration of Christ
in the Eucharist had changed their
lives – and from Aid to the Church in
Need, asking us to go to Mass on
behalf of those who can’t: Catholics
whose churches have been burned
down, who have been tortured or
imprisoned for their faith.
And the day ended with a solemn,
humble, powerful time of adoration
before the Eucharist, Cardinal
Vincent Nichols preaching and
speaking of penitence and prayer,
and leading us in kneeling with the
vast, silent crowd: something I will
remember for years to come.
More? Of course there was more.
A pleasant meal with family and
friends. Nightfever at the Blessed
Sacrament shrine, packed with
people, glittering with candles.
Liverpool streets filled with
Saturday night revellers, girls on
hen nights, much shrieking and
shouting. And some of them – many
of them, the most unlikely of them –
came in to pray, invited by the
young congress teams.
Sunday 7th September
Every Liverpudlian calls it Paddy’s
Wigwam or the Mersey Funnel or
some such name, so any southerner
who thinks it is clever and rude to do
so massively misses the point:
Liverpool Cathedral is a big
construction with a funnel on top
and it can pack in vast numbers of
people for Mass and that’s that. It
was filled to capacity twice this
morning for the eucharistic congress,
and after the second of these Masses
we streamed out in a great
procession, bearing the Blessed
Sacrament through the streets.
And the Lord caused rain to fall –
great, grey steady sheets of it. We
were all completely soaked. The
long, long column of priests in white
vestments, the men carrying the
huge golden embroidered canopy,
the Papal knights and dames in
robes, and above all the vast
congress of people – and we all just
marched on, drenched and united.
It really was glorious. It was the
most powerful Catholic gathering in
Britain since Pope Benedict XVI’s
magnificent visit in 2010, and had
something of the same atmosphere.
There was unity, prayer, and peace –
and great reverence for the Blessed
Sacrament, a real understanding of
the reality of the Lord’s presence
among us. There was a poignancy
about it all, too: Archbishop
McMahon had reminded us in his
homily that we should have a spirit
of penitence following the grim
revelations of sin in the Church, and
the rain seemed to echo that.
A priest near me began singing
Sweet Sacrament Divine in a fine
voice and we all joined in, and went
steadily from hymn to hymn. We
found it increasingly difficult to use
the booklets provided, because the
soaked pages stuck together – but
the hymns were all those that we
know well anyway.
The route took us back to the
cathedral: as the Blessed Sacrament
was brought up that great flight of
steps beneath the bell tower, the
sun came out and Benediction took
place in a sort of radiance.
It was intensely moving: the
Tantum Ergo rising to Heaven, and a
great roar of voices repeating the
Divine Praises. Cardinal Nichols and
a great phalanx of our bishops, a
great monstrance held high and a
blessing descending….and then, as
things came to an end, the
cathedral bells ringing out, and a
sense of something powerful having
happened.
There has only ever been one
previous eucharistic congress in
Britain: it was 110 years ago and
since then we have had two world
wars, lost an empire, and been
through massive social changes of a
kind unimaginable in 1908. In
Liverpool in 2018, with sunshine
breaking through after rain and on
our knees before the Blessed
Sacrament, we have humbly
entrusted our future to the Lord
who holds us all in his great heart.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols
leading the Blessed
Sacrament procession.
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