This weekend we remember the taking of Mametz Wood, part of the Battle of the Somme, in which 600 Welsh soldiers died and thousands were wounded.

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin. This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

Copyright 2005 Owen Sheers, South Wales poet, author and presenter

Well there we are, then, it’s Brexit. Putting my (voting) card on the table, yes, I did vote for Remain, in common with the majority in Cardiff, though not Wales. I stayed up to hear Sunderland and Newcastle, which seemed to point the way to the eventual victory for the Leave campaign.

The Catholic Church did not have an “official view” on the matter, though several people last week asked what I was voting. The issues are many and varied, and I think a lot of people ended up confused or fed up. It’s interesting that a lot of the original thinking behind what was to become the EU had its roots in Catholic social teaching.

A few months ago I treated myself to the DNA test that you can get from ancestry.co.uk. Samples from your DNA are run past thousands of samples from people from all over the world. I already knew that by immediate 5-10 generations back, I am mostly Welsh and Irish with a dash of Lithuanian. But, of course, the Celts came from central Europe, and so the results came back that I was up to 60% Irish and only a maximum of 17% British, and the rest – you guessed it – European, at least 23% and perhaps a lot more. I’m a lot more European than I thought! It’s that Celtic blood coming through.

So now here in the UK we have to find a new path through our world, and changes are surely coming our way. But, as Christians we should be used to change. The great season of Lent is an annual reminder of something that is in fact always true. In the words of Blessed John Henry Newman:

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Fr Matthew

On Friday evening Archbishop George Stack confirmed a large group of young people. Many congratulations to them! We were joined by about ten from St Philip Evans, but from our 3 Churches there were the following: