The Benedictine Oblate
Newsletter of St. Gregory’s Chapter
Perth – Western Australia
Oblates affiliated to Holy Trinity Abbey – New Norcia
New Norcia Web Site – www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au
e-mail – schillingmj@optusnet.com.au

Period June – August 2006 Issue 2/2006
MEETING PLACE

Chapter meetings are held at St. Joseph’s Convent, 16 York Street, South Perth. Meetings are held each 3rd. Sunday, commencing at 2.00pm sharp.
June – There will be no Chapter meeting this month. Our annual retreat at New Norcia will replace it.
July – Chapter meeting to be held on Sunday, 16 July. Discussion on Rule 53 & Lectio on the Gospel of the day – Mk. 6:7-13.
August – Chapter meeting to be held on Sunday, 20 August. Discussion on Rule 54 & Gospel of the day – Jn. 6:51-58.
PRAYER LIST

Please remember all our sick oblates – in particular Tom Gollop, Pat Cockett & Michael Kent.
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Fr. David’s brother who died in February.
Prayers requested for Fr. Anthony’s mother and also Rhod’s mother.
Also and always, continue to pray for our parent community in New Norcia.
Would you please remember all our deceased oblates.
ITEMS OF INTEREST

This is the final reminder to oblates, that our annual retreat is due to commence at NN, Friday to Monday 9,10,11,12 of June. Please advise our Secretary on 9388 3026 if you have to cancel for any reason.
Several oblates travelled to New Norcia to be present at the final profession ceremony of Dom Stephen Roll, which occurred on 9 March 2006.
Most oblates would have been advised by now of Dom Steve Storer's departure from New Norcia on 19 April. After a stay of some four-plus years, Steve has decided to return to Melbourne and spend time with his mother, who is very ill, his children and grand children. We wish Steve all the best for his new vocation.
ADDRESS BY ABBOT PLACID
Dom Stephen Roll solemn profession - 9 March 2006
Exodus 3.1-6, 9-12 1 John 4.7-16 John 15.9-17

I’m pretty sure, that the first time I ever heard of Steve Roll, was when a letter arrived from him, a very long letter, all about rowing. Well, I’ve had many another letter since then, some of them long and I’ve heard and read plenty more about rowing too. But I’ve heard a lot more about Hazel and their family, about Steve’s parents and their family, about Fr Michael Kelly, who alas couldn’t get here today, about Joey’s – St Joseph’s College at Hunters Hill, – about Jamberoo and about a whole lot of other people and events and things that have shaped and been shaped by the monk, Dom Stephen, whose solemn profession we are about to celebrate.
It is right and proper, that many of those past commitments have gone very deep into his character. It would be wrong and improper to wish or to expect that they would now have no further influence on his life, on his monastic life. Yet at the same time, there would be something wrong if his profession as a monk were not to affect the way he and we, will in the future, interpret all the things that he has done and all the things that have happened to him in the past. It is important to read the seven years since he first visited this place, in continuity with the sixty something years that went before them and important to read his whole life and the lives of all of us who have been associated with him, in the light of what God is asking of him for the rest of his life on this earth, in the light of what God intends for him for the whole of eternity.
At this moment, God is calling to him as God called to Moses, calling him by name, to offer worship to God on this mountain. Well, New Norcia isn’t much of a physical mountain, but we’ve made it a hard enough climb for Dom Steve and we believe that it is, like Horeb the mountain of God - holy ground.
Steve has asked himself many times – ‘who am I, to be called by God to do this strange thing?’ God has answered him many times – ‘I shall be with you and this is the sign by which you shall know that it is I who have sent you - you are to offer worship to God in this holy place.’
‘Do not be afraid, I am with you, I have called you by your name, you are mine, you and all whom you love.’ This is the love I mean - God’s love for us when he sent His Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.
There is sacrifice every time a man or woman takes up the monastic life and both you, Steve and your family will go on feeling the sharpness of losing what you are giving up. But you are doing it for the love of God and neighbour and you will be doing it in community and in communion with your monastic brethren and sisters, in communion with the Son of God sent to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.
Like that Son of God, St John says we too and anyone who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in us. He doesn’t make a distinction between Christians and the rest, or between saints and the rest. He says it’s true of anyone who lives in love.
Anyone who lives in love lays down his life for his friends. All parents have to sacrifice much of their personal freedom for the benefit of their partners and their children. All monks have to sacrifice much of their self-will for the benefit of their brethren. It’s not a one-off event - you are undertaking it for the rest of your life.
We give that sacrifice three different names here - stability, conversatio morum and obedience. But it also has another name - love.
Dom Stephen, you have asked yourself many times – ‘who am I, to be called by God to do this strange thing?’ Jesus the Son of God has answered you, is answering you now – ‘you did not choose me - no, I chose you. What I command you is to love.’
REFLECTION -HOSPITALITY
Taken from ‘The Oblate’ newsletter of St. John’s Abbey.
‘Let all guests who arrive, be received like Christ’. RB53

Hospitality - a word rich with overtones of brotherly love and acceptance, has been perverted from its true meaning. Today the good host is the one who serves the best drinks, the choicest foods. Somehow, hospitality has been equated with partying, with an opportunity to impress someone, it is no longer an everyday event.
Guests are special, but not because they are to be impressed. We rejoice to have them and show special concern for them, but not because we can get something from them. We celebrate with them, whether rich or poor, because they are people. Every person has need of a home, just as every person is on a journey. Today we may give a home to someone, tomorrow we are given a home.
In fellowship with one another we support each other on the way home to the Father. As Christians we have the assurance of Christ in our presence, in our guest (Mt. 25:31-46), that he/she is Christ.
NOTHING DEARER THAN CHRIST
By Andre Borias OSB taken from the 'Saint Benedict of Nursia' publication

A hermit called Martin used to live not far from Saint Benedict's monastery and in order to ensure that he would not abandon the cave in which he was living, he bound himself to the rock with an iron chain. Far from approving of such an action, Saint Benedict sent Martin this message - ‘If you are a true disciple of the Lord, you would do better to bind yourself to Christ.’
This bond is the mainspring of Saint Benedict's own life and inspires his work from beginning to end. Christ is at the very heart of his Rule, which shows and prepares a path on which one can meet Him, love Him and follow Him. The true monk ‘holds nothing dearer to him than Christ’ (RB:5). His answer to the Christ who has loved him more than everything, is to ‘love absolutely nothing more than Christ’ (RB:4).
This love is infused with deep respect. Saint Benedict reacted fiercely against the Arian heresy, which the Goths tried to impose on Italy and which sees the Word of God merely as a created being. With all the strength and righteousness of his faith, he kept insisting on the divinity of Christ, who is, for him, the Lord, Ruler of the world, the true King into whose service a monk enlists and fights (RB Pr:61).
He mentions Christ's humanity with discretion, to the point of never giving Him His human name, ‘Jesus’. Like Saint Paul, he emphasises the central event of His life on earth, which shows forth His total, filial obedience towards His Father; His Passion and His Resurrection.
Christ is not simply a figure of human history. He is Someone permanently alive. His presence among human beings is the very presence of God. It encompasses past, present and future, thus He is present everywhere in the monastery. The monk lives in close contact and communion with Christ, whom he has been called to follow.
Christ is the real spiritual Master, who teaches his disciple and guides him along in his life, particularly by means of His Gospel. Christ talks to him in the Old and New Testaments, in the course of the Divine Office and in his spiritual reading. So before acting, the monk listens attentively to his Lord. The abbot (who represents Christ in the monastery) speaks in His name, teaches doctrine founded on Holy Scripture and demonstrates by his life, Christ in action. His life must be an open book, so that the brothers may read in him the teaching of the Lord (RB 2:64).
The Lord teaches this same lesson through His own life - a supreme and unique model to be imitated – ‘I have not come to accomplish My own will, but the will of Him who has sent Me' (Jn 6:38, RB:5,7). This obedience has led Him unto death, a death on the cross. It perfectly realises the total love of Christ for His Father and for all mankind.
His obedience is grounded in the resurrection, in which the monk already participates and which even now illuminates the monastic life. The most minute details of daily monastic life are part of the rhythm of the mystery of the resurrection. The succession of the diverse daily activities – Divine Office, reading of scripture, individual asceticism, communal work, time for rest and even meals, everything is determined in the light of the Feast of Easter. The life of the monk is a participation in the paschal mystery of Christ, dead and risen again (RB:Pr).
Therefore the monastic life is founded on the great love and tenderness of the Lord, solemnly brought to mind in each one. This love, of a kindly disposed and merciful Father towards His sons, is penetrated by the sadness caused by their evil deeds (RB:Pr). It is the love of the Good Shepherd, overflowing with tender care towards the lost sheep and it is the duty of the abbot to imitate Him in his turn, by giving his very particular attention to his weak and stumbling brothers (RB:27,28).
In writing a Rule, Saint Benedict insists mainly on the love for Christ, which is the mainspring of his disciple's life. He loves to repeat this traditional phrase - ‘ Not to place anything above the love of Christ’ (RB. 4:72). The monk follows the ideal presented to him by the love of the Son for His Father. In order to achieve this, he roots his own will in the will of the Lord. His life is not ruled by a law coming from outside, however well he follows it. It comes to life from within, loving the Person to whom he has given his heart, which holds ‘nothing dearer’, so his whole life belongs to Christ (RB:5). This is why, faithful to his vocation, the monk ‘renounces himself entirely to follow Christ’(RB:4). He renounces himself, not for the sake of renouncement, but in order to belong to Another. He cannot follow his Lord, without abandoning all forms of self-seeking.
This love takes its concrete form, in the obedience he has promised - a prompt, total, lively and cheerful obedience to his abbot. To obey him is to obey God. In this way, the monk simply imitates Christ, as Saint Benedict insistently reminds him. Obedience is the most perfect form of the imitation of Christ. For the love of Him, the cenobite undertakes to follow not only the will of his elders, but even, of all his brothers (RB:71,72), In order to achieve this, he does not hesitate to sacrifice his personal preferences and wishes, so that he can give himself wholly to all the others, even in the most difficult, humiliating and outrageous circumstances - whether they are deserved or not (RB:7). As Christ on the cross, ‘he prays for his enemies’ (RB:4). In this world, by his enduring patience, he takes his share of the suffering of His Lord, so that, one day, in the company of all his brothers, he will also share in the glory of Christ's kingdom and life everlasting (RB:Pr72). So monastic life does not always offer a smooth and easy path. At its beginning, particularly, the Rule may often be felt as stony and hard to follow (RB:Pr.58). Difficulties can also be caused by others. In this case, the monk ‘prays for his enemies for the love of Christ’ (RB:4). When the Evil One intervenes to hinder him on his journey, ‘he dashes straight-away against the Lord’ the wrongful thoughts which have come to tempt him (RB:Pr). As he travels along, ‘he runs on the path of God's commandments with the ineffable delight of love' (RB:Pr). When he reaches the top of the ladder of humility, he discovers the sweetness of doing what is good, which has become natural to him. All his actions are inspired only ‘by the love of Christ’ (RB:7). He is waiting, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, for the Eternal Easter, yearning for the risen Christ (RB:49).
Living in this constant communion with Him, the monk discovers Christ in the manifold events of his life. He is able to recognise Him in the diverse forms which he is able to take. With the eye of faith, he sees Him and meets Him very particularly in those whose life he shares in his Community, from his abbot to the 'most humble of passing guests'. In loving them he reveals the warmth of his love for his Lord Christ? He is seen first of all in his abbot, ‘who is in the place of Christ at the heart of the Community' (RB2:64). This makes him the father, the spiritual master of his brothers. He is their guide on the path towards God. He knows how to interpret the strictness of the Rule according to the strength of each one of them. He leads them with discernment, discretion and prudence. He shows the greatest human and spiritual care towards the humble and weak, as well as towards the sinners and the undisciplined. He encourages the strongest to continue their progress whole-heartedly. He remembers that his responsibility is ‘to serve and not to dominate' (RB:64). He aims at being loved rather than feared. In return, his brothers will love him with a sincere and humble love. Their filial and generous obedience to him is their obedience to Christ.
Christ? As Saint Benedict loves to repeat from the Gospel, (Mt.25). Christ is also that sick monk for whom his brothers will care, as if he were the Lord Himself and who, in return, must not be unreasonably demanding towards them (RB:36). For Saint Benedict, there is no charity without reciprocity. Christ? He is the guest who is welcomed with even more care and respect when He is pauper, stranger or pilgrim (RB:53). Christ? He is, in fact, each member of the Community, old or young, priest or not. By virtue of their baptism, they are all brothers. It is the reason why the Rule recommends the many marks of deference, courtesy and affection which they show to one another. No one considers his brother as someone to be used for his own ends. He sees in him the image of Christ.
Thus he meets the Lord everywhere. It is the joy of his life, the reason why he feels at home in his monastery and ‘lives happily in the house of God’ (RB:Pr). He is in communion with the One who has called him close to Him. He feels close to his brothers. His heart knows only the one love which enfolds everybody else, for they are all in the image of the One he loves.
Then all monastic life is concentrated in the fulfilment of the Gospel's double commandment of charity, which kindles in the heart of the monk the fire of generous love. His reverent love for God, Creator and Father, is lived out amid the daily life with his brothers. Saint Benedict recommends to his disciples several ways of behaviour which help in communal life. Monks will show attentive mutual respect, so necessary to endure patiently the physical or moral weaknesses of other people in the daily, close proximity of a lifetime. They will listen to each other and obey each other with the utmost care. They will seek the interest of their brothers, rather than their own. They will deal with them in a spirit of generous altruism (RB:72).
In the conclusion of his Rule, Saint Benedict leaves a last word to his disciples - to love God and their brothers truly. He insists strongly on the essential message of the Lord. He sums up all his teaching in this last admonition and ardent wish, that is at the same time a prayer – ‘The brothers shall love absolutely nothing above Christ - may He bring us all together to Eternal Life with Him.’ (RB:72).
In binding himself to Christ with all his heart, the monk has discovered in Christ, the model and source of his own existence - to live in full communion with his Lord and King, to live in generous communion with his brothers. Then, all together, they will reach that eternal life with Christ, who has been dearer to them than everything else in this world.
A TIDE OF FAITH
By Robert Winder – taken from The Tablet – 5/4/05

Some people in Britain have greeted the accession of ten new member nations to the European Union with dismay. But amid the anxieties about the way in which the arrival of Eastern European migrants may change the texture of British life, the extent to which it might influence the nation’s religious life has been little mentioned.
Aside from the present alarm about extreme Islamic groups, the emergence of foreign religious sensibilities rarely tops the political agenda. Yet migration has historically been one of the driving forces behind spiritual change. One specific effect of last month’s growth of the EU, may well be greater numbers of Polish Catholics arriving in Britain. If so, they will join a large number of overseas congregations who have settled in Britain in recent times – from Spain, Portugal, Italy, South America and the Philippines. If we look even further back, we can say that without immigration there would barely be a Catholic Church at all in Britain.
In the years that followed the Reformation, the opposite was the case - the marital whims of Henry VIII, made Britain a magnet for Protestants fleeing persecution in their own lands. They came from the Low Countries, Switzerland, the German principalities and in the great Huguenot evacuations of seventeenth century France. Fearful dissenters fled the dragoons and crossed the English Channel hidden in casks of wine or bales of straw, to add their weight to the commercial revolution that was making Britain a great power.
In one neat flourish, a group of Huguenot hat-makers settled in Wandsworth, south-west London, lured by the ultra-soft waters of the River Wandle – ideal for dyeing cloth. There they perfected a brilliant scarlet and for more than 100 years, in a nice historical irony, those brilliant cardinal’s hats in Rome, were manufactured by Protestant refugees in London.
The way Britain absorbed and exploited the skills of these migrants was of decisive importance, partly for practical reasons - the refugees tended to belong to the skilled or mercantile class – and partly for ideological ones. In the space of a generation, Britain imported a useful attribute – the Protestant work ethic. The arrival of William of Orange and the creation of a Protestant supremacy, sent the Catholic Church underground for centuries. It’s re-emergence as a force in national life is almost entirely due to the inwards migrations that have patiently and in the face of much adversity, rebuilt it.
The rebirth came, at first, from Ireland. Technically, the Irish were not immigrants. Between 1800 and 1922, the Irish left home as Britons and were no more foreign than travellers from Cornwall or Cumbria. But Ireland was a strange and unassimilated part of the United Kingdom – its people spoke little English (despite a programme in the 1830’s to spread the language) and above all were Catholic. Far from being greeted as fellow countrymen, they were seen as barbaric. They were poor, uneducated and sometimes expressed themselves with their fists. They looked to the strait-laced Victorian, like the wildest emblems of a feckless life.
It was the worst of both worlds. When not denounced as spongers (‘mumpers’) they were castigated as wage-cutting subversives and Papist spies. The slums of London’s docks were nicknamed Knockvargis as a sneering echo of Carrickfergus, the port William III had used en route to the Boyne. Anti-Irish riots were routine.
The 1841 census lists 289,404 Irish-born people in Britain - by 1851 there were nearly 520,000 and by 1861, more than 600,000. By the 1880s, there were 1.5 million Irish in Britain. Anyone who thinks that recent immigration is ‘unprecedented’ has a short memory. They made up only 5 per cent of the population in London, but accounted for 13 per cent in Bradford, Manchester and Paisley, 18 per cent in Glasgow, 19 percent in Dundee and 25 percent in Liverpool. All of these cities were radically changed. The Irish brought their priests and publicans.
Protestant Britain reacted with fury. The Catholic Emancipation Act passed in 1829 and the subsequent arrival of so many famine-driven Irish, gave credence to the idea that the Act was to blame. The feeling that the country was being ‘swamped’ was given weight by the way some leading Catholics greeted the appearance of the ‘holy poor’ as a miracle and a blessing. Cardinal Newman for one, called it a ‘Second Spring’.
The backlash was severe. A royal commission in 1836 said the Irish were invading towns with their ‘uncleanly and negligent habits’, bringing ‘filth, neglect, confusion, discomfort and insalubrity’. Invariably, people saw the Irish not as victims of slum conditions but as their cause. Churchmen and social theorists saw shoddy housing as a fitting echo of Irish people's pernicious Catholicism. ‘Ireland’, cried a Times leader in 1847, ‘is pouring into the cities and even into the villages a fetid mass of famine, nakedness, dirt and fever.’ Liverpool would soon be ‘one mass of disease’. Onlookers were quick to attribute this to moral delinquency. In 1855 the Liverpool Herald said, ‘The lower order of Irish Papists are the filthiest beings in the habitable globe - they abound in dirt and vermin and have no care for anything but self-gratification.’
The reaction in Scotland was especially severe. ‘No compromise with Popery!’ howled the Scottish Guardian in 1861. The paper argued that the famine was a just revenge for the Irish people's ‘barbarous spiritual destitution, its moral and intellectual poverty’. The Scottish Church was more militant and Utopian than the Anglican Church and clung more zealously to the dream of a Protestant arcadia. The arrival of so many Catholics was, as the dossiers of the day put it, a clear and present threat. ‘It must be the time of up and doing’, said one fundamentalist. ‘No rest for ourselves and our children until every college, convent, monastery and church of the anti-Christ has disappeared from our land.’ The Glasgow Herald wrote that the Irish had been misled and should be shipped home right away, for their own good. ‘We fear they are induced to leave Ireland under the most disillusive notions of the comfort and abundance that awaits them here.’ Bishop Murdoch put it even more succinctly, proposing in 1848, in a strikingly Christian turn of phrase, that the best solution was ‘a skinful of bullets’.
A large number of the newcomers joined the sizeable Irish contingent in the British armed forces. Elsewhere they were factory fodder, toiling for farthings in construction, gas works, the docks, railways, coal mines and quarries. For a people characterised as lazy drunkards they did an amazing amount of heavy lifting. Country people, they congregated in cities, the only places they could earn or scrounge a living. Awful, rat-plagued slums - Liverpool's cellars, Glasgow's tenements, Manchester's ‘Little Ireland’ and the ‘rookeries’ of Leeds and London - mushroomed in the direst quarters of Britain's inner cities.
Somehow, in these grim circumstances, they engineered a Catholic revival that was quick to attract anti-Catholic fury. Shop girls as well as zealots jostled nuns and priests in the street. One cleric, the Revd Samuel Garral, worked with Irish paupers for two years and saw them as lost souls. ‘It is not the Irish air in infancy’, he wrote,’or Celtic parentage that has made the Irish in London what they are. It is nothing else but the withering curse of the anti-Christian system which blights where it falls ...’
One of the more baleful side effects of the Irish migration then, was that it ushered in a renewal of an old hatred, sectarian rage. An Orange lodge opened in Manchester as early as 1798 and all over the country there were scenes reminiscent of today's marching seasons in Ulster. Things were especially serious in the north-west. In 1852 a procession of Stockport's Sunday schools was banned by a proclamation from Disraeli, who explained that he wished only to ‘prevent trouble’. The marchers ignored him and insisted on trudging past a gauntlet of banners that read ‘Down with the lousy Irish’ and ‘To hell with the Pope!’ The next day, a priest was burned in effigy and the place exploded. Scores of homes were wrecked, a pair of chapels were smashed, an Irishman was killed and 50 more wounded. Furniture was piled up and torched. St Peter's Square, in the centre of Stockport, was taken and retaken as police advanced and were rebuffed. In the end, an infantry regiment marched in to restore order and literally, read the Riot Act. The authorities were in no doubt where the blame lay - of 113 prisoners, 111 were Irish.
Rather less has been written about the thousands of Italians who walked across Europe to Britain in the nineteenth century. At first they came as beggars, pushing their barrel organs around the streets. There had always been a layer of Italian musicians and artists in courtly circles and this was now echoed at street level, where Italian clowns and jugglers entertained crowds at fairs. The barrel organists were much derided as a public pest and there were strident calls to have them removed. But slowly they expanded their range of operations. They went into chestnuts and ice cream and looked for alternative jobs, as tilers, stonecutters, artisans and instrument makers. London's Holborn became a 'Little Italy' and was described as such by Dickens when he followed Oliver Twist down the streets behind Leather Lane.
In 1863, these Italians acquired a new spiritual home nearby, when St Peter's Church in Clerkenwell was unveiled – the first Catholic church built since the Reformation. The original design for a 3,400-seater was reduced, in the end, to a 1,500 seat building. It was constructed from imported Italian marble and looked every inch a Renaissance classic, modelled as it was on the Basilica of St Crisogono in Trastevere. It was a dramatic cultural symbol and in 1893 Britain was treated to a sight it had not witnessed for hundreds of years - the parade of a swaying Virgin in a public procession through streets lit up with lights - and with the smell of Italian food and wine in the Clerkenwell air.
If the Church was thoroughly reinvented by these major Irish and Italian migrations, it received a further boost after the Second World War, when 120,000 Polish members of the armed Forces, deprived of a country to return to, settled in post-war Britain. They were joined by another major surge of migrations from Italy. Britain was undergoing a culinary revolution and every high street had to have its trattoria or pizzeria. It was, if you like, a Third Spring and it provided the impetus for new churches, new priests and a new social confidence for Britain's often beleaguered Catholic population.
Modern Britain tends to look for the bleak flipside of immigration, the extent to which it represents a social challenge or a political difficulty. To reflect on the ways in which it has revived the Catholic faith in the United Kingdom is to remind ourselves that foreigners bring as much, if not more, than they take.
ONE LINERS
- A few more to think about

1. If you think meek is weak, try being meek for a week.
2. GODISNOWHERE – (Now read it again).
3. You’re on heaven’s Most Wanted list.
4. Don’t give up. Moses was once a basket case.
5. Wisdom has two parts. 1. Having a lot to say. 2. Not saying it.
6. Speak well of your enemies, you made them.
7. Aspire to inspire before you expire.
8. Seven days without prayer makes one weak.
9. God wants a whole heart, but will accept a broken one.

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