Dom Bede at Worth

THE BBC AND THE COMMON GOOD The BBC’s publication of salaries paid to television and radio performers is an admirable step towards greater transparency, and predictably has produced and will continue to produce much discussion. Surely the injustice of the pay differential between the sexes will at last be dealt with. Then there is the obvious question about the scale of remuneration for people who have become celebrities through their work at the BBC. What does it feel like to wake up in the morning aware that your £1 or £2m package is being paid for by the man in the street through his taxes and the licence fee ? On the other hand if these levels are not paid, will the BBC lose these talented folk ?  And would that outcome be desirable or not ?  It is not my wish to pronounce publicly on these questions, though I have my opinions like everyone else. But I am interested here in how a Christian mind approaches them.  I want to be among the first to salute the BBC for its im

CHEAP GRACE AND DISCIPLESHIP “. . . No one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. . . . “  (Mtt 11, 27-28). So the only means of having contact with God our Father is through Jesus Christ his Son: and that is why Jesus calls us to follow him, to be his Disciples. In the 1930s the German Lutheran Pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer experienced anguish about the survival of Discipleship in his Church. The Nazi’s strategy to emasculate the Church worried him and he foresaw the direction in which Hitler was taking the German people.  His anxiety was intensified by some of his fellow Pastors such as Pastor  Gruner, who declared: “Hitler is the way of the Spirit and the will of God for the German people”. Bonhoeffer reacted robustly: “ We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of followin

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN EVIL IN MANCHESTER ! How heartening to read in the newspaper today that Ariana Grande has been made an honorary citizen of Manchester.  “Love is stronger than evil,” was the theme of the second Ariana Grande concert in Manchester which I watched on my computer screen. To be honest I felt the music belonged to a generation other than mine, and anyway I could not understand the sung words. But what a thrill to hear every performer, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry , standing before the throng, and proclaiming, “LOVE OVERCOMES EVIL, YES ? ”, and then readily receiving the vociferous agreement of that huge gathering of youth. It really was a magnificent ‘liturgy’, if the clerical purists will permit me to use the term in this context ! “Liturgy” means “the work of the people of God”, and whatever the allegiances of that mass of people, surely they were the People of God in that very moment of proclaiming what is in  the hearts of all  “ Believers of

A HOMILY PREACHED IN WORTH ABBEY CHURCH 25 th JUNE 2017 “ Do not be afraid ”, says Jesus to his disciples in Mathew’s Gospel Ch 10,26. You know, I really don’t think he meant them to try to eliminate or ignore the fear that would come into their lives. You can’t just wave it away, you can’t do that; and after all, Jeremiah lived with it: some of his enemies threw him into an abandoned well hoping that he would starve to death in the mud. Fortunately others came and rescued him. And Jesus in Gethsemane lived with it as he fulfilled his Father’s will for our salvation. No, the context of this teaching seems to say that we must not allow our fears or apprehensions to dictate to us. Three years ago on 23 rd May Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was beatified. His story is human and moving. He had been made a rural bishop, later being promoted to Archbishop in the metropolis at a time when conservative elements in Rome were making episcopal appointments; he was regarded as a ‘safe con

100 YEARS OF FATIMA : A homily in Worth Abbey church 13.5.17 This year the Church is celebrating the 100 th anniversary of the appearances of Our Lady at Fatima to the Portuguese peasant children, Lúcia Santos and Jacinta and Francisco Marto, her little cousins. These events, occurring in 1917, were much more than devotional events narrowly conceived:  they carried messages of  great import for us, the Church on earth. Many, out of genuinely innocent ignorance have misinterpreted Fatima. Some say ·          Our Lady wants us to pray the rosary daily, full stop. ·          Some have read into it a call to ecclesiastical and theological  conservatism, a return to pre-Vatican II days of an individualist devotional spirituality. ·          Others have found in it a political message such as, ‘down with Communism’ (as in the former Soviet Union) and ‘up with right wing regimes’, (as in Spanish Francoism of the 1930s). All these are, at best, distortions or half-truths, beca