In the Middle Ages Our Lady was often presented in art as holding in her arms the infant Jesus clutching a bunch of grapes. This was a reference to her presence at Christ’s first miracle (water becoming wine) at what was probably a family wedding. At the end of the same Gospel, Mary is present…
Author: Fr Michael Campion
Homily, Baptism of Jesus (C) 2022
In just three short sentences we are presented in the Gospel (Luke 3:15-16, 21-22) with a most decisive moment in the life of Jesus – his baptism in the River Jordan. This event was so important that all four Gospels record it at some length. His baptism is the moment when Jesus became fully aware…
I now believe in the power of prayer – not because it works, but because it helps
by Lamorna Ash in THE GUARDIAN 25 December 2021 I keep a list of words that are strange to me. Any time I find one I half-know or do not recognise, it goes in the list. I find its existence reassuring, as if having more words at my disposal will make it easier to decode…
Homily, Second Sunday of Christmas 2022
I was eight or nine years of age when I was chosen, with a few of my school friends, to be an altar server in our local Church. With the priest facing the sanctuary wall, his back to the congregation, Mass then was mostly a private ritual conducted by the priest, entirely in Latin, which…
Homily, Christmas Day 2021
When the COVID pandemic first hit us in March last year, some of us here at Holy Name took inspiration and hope from the words of the poet Seamus Heaney: ‘If we can winter this out, we can summer anywhere’. Just when we thought the ‘summer’ had arrived, thanks to the invention of successful vaccines,…
All life’s roads don’t have to lead to London
James Marriott in THE TIMES, 23 December 2021I I spent most of my adolescence regretting whatever celestial filing error planted me in Newcastle upon Tyne, rather than (as the Almighty had surely intended, before some low-level cosmic bureaucrat messed things up) Hampstead or Islington. By the time I reached adulthood, I had rejected Newcastle so…
Homily, Fourth Sunday of Advent (C) 2021
Here in modern Western society, it can be difficult for us to imagine how women in the Middle East in first century Palestine could never do anything alone. They either had to always be in a group of women and children, or under the watchful eye of their father, brother, husband or some other responsible…
‘Everything is Gift’
Shelagh Fogarty in THE TABLET, 9 December 2021 The words I said to myself like a steadying mantra as I left my mother’s house two hours after she had died. I wouldn’t see her again but she is forever with me because she is, was and will always be the very definition of gift I…
Homily, Third Sunday of Advent (C) 2021
As the feast of Christ’s birth draws closer, this third Sunday of Advent is traditionally known as Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday. And the encouragement to rejoice or be happy for what Jesus has achieved for us opens the Second Reading from St Paul and underlines this message. Nevertheless, and for the second Sunday running, it…
Homily, Second Sunday of Advent (C) 2021
One of the two most common prayers we have in the Church to Mary, Our Lady, the Mother of Jesus, is known as the ‘Salve Regina’ in Latin or ‘Hail, Holy Queen’ in English. In the prayer we call ourselves the ‘poor banished children of Eve’ and ask her: ‘Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine…
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