Portsmouth Roman Catholic

Every Sunday at Mass we say the Our Father and immediately after there has been added in recent years a Sign of Peace.   Well fine I have no objections but is this shaking of the hands, this mutual inclusive or exclusive friendship all that there is to Christian Love.    Or put it another way is this 'love of neighbour' all that Christ wanted when he established his Kingdom.    Love can be a very deceptive word and as human beings we use it on many occasions for our own motives and the 'feel good about ourselves' factor.  And I judge myself as often guilty of this.   As creatures made by God we all have that capacity to love within us whatever our faith and whatever our background.  No one race, no one creed, can claim a monopoly.   This love is nurtured in us by our parents, their love for one another ended in our birth and through  the experience of a loving home and a loving family we learned to love others.  But family love is a...

I was thinking the other day of the Church I grew up in.  I loved that Church.  It was a community in every sense of the word, something the present Church in England is striving to be but failing miserably.   We knew all our Catholic neighbours and we spoke eagerly of what was happening in the Diocese, in Rome, and the many issues that came up which affected the Church.   Today many Catholics have to remain silent or they will be silenced and sadly although many call themselves Catholic they have dispensed with any belief in the Catholic Church and the Catholic Faith.   You are not free to talk to anyone about your faith since you do not know what side they are on and if they share you love of the Church or not.   This is the stark reality.   Of course, there are claims of 'open to all' and the 'loving community' but in practice this does not work out, a small minority are in charge of many parishes and will have things their way.   I have experi...

I will not say it was an easy time for many Catholics.  Prior to the publication of Humanae Vitae society in the West had changed drastically.   It was an affluent society in which people tried to better themselves and often for good motives such as giving their children the kind of lifestyle they had never known,  motor cars, televisions, the latest gadgets for the home, and having the luxury of owning their own home.    However those selling the goods, especially houses, were out to make as much money as they could and it soon became compulsory for both parents to work if they wanted to enjoy all the things the world could offer.  A single wage was no longer enough to get a mortgage from the Bank of Mortgage lenders.   The big threat become children.   Children became costly.    But among the young there was the Contraceptive market taking away the risk of pregnancy and encouraging a growing indulgence in sexual activity.   It was...

What is Evangelisation?  What are the resources needed to evangelise?   One answer is to bring people to the love of Jesus by bringing them to a warm friendly Church.  This seems to be a very popular answer  but it has many drawbacks.   In a warm friendly Church there are people who have one image of Jesus, "Here is Jesus, the non-judgemental Jesus who does not care how we live as long as we praise him and give money to the poor"  Then "Here is Jesus with a firm policy to rid the world of poverty and hunger"   Then of course there is the least popular "Here is Jesus, the one who spoke about sin and hell, who uncompromisingly said "Do not commit adultery, do not bear false witness, do not steal" to the rich young man who asked him how to earn eternal life.    So the prophecy of Jesus that there would arise false Christs and Prophets has been fulfilled in todays Church.     So there is a difficulty but it was solved by the most vocife...

Great things are happening in the Portsmouth Diocese.  We have a bishop who not only believes in the Catholic Church an the Communion of Saints Butalso is brave enough to stand up and be counted as a follower of Jesus Christ, who believes in everything that Jesus taught, yes even on divorce, and is giving succour to the too long persecuted faithful.   I remember the battles of the past when in my parish such things as Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament were a battle ground because those with itching ears had read that 'the host is for eating and not adoring' by some prophet.   Children at their first Communion were taught nothing about the host, it was all about 'community'.  There were plans to move the tabernacle from the altar on the grounds that its presence on the altar  was not liturgically correct'.  There was the attempt also to stop the girls wearing their white dresses at First Holy Communion.   And of course those meetings where much was dec...