Category Archives: priests

Support our Seminarians

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This Sunday is the Day of Prayer for Vocations to the Priesthood. We welcome Daniel Stanton to our 3 Churches. He comes from Maesteg, and is studying for the priesthood for our diocese in St Mary’s College Oscott, outside Birmingham. Daniel will speak at three of our Masses. It’s good for us to meet him, and for him to mix with people from different parts of our diocese.

I recently reached 38 years since I was ordained priest at St Brigid’s on April 1st 1978. I learned many years ago that priesthood is not something you “receive” at ordination and then you just “do it” for the rest of your life. We live our priest lives under two ever changing influences. Firstly, there is you, the people of God. There are always new people to meet, new situations to encounter, new calls on our ministry. But more importantly, we are to be God’s men, and God is always doing something new. If we are really living and serving as men of God, brothers of Jesus the High Priest and filled with the Holy Spirit, then our lives will be the most exciting and rewarding that anyone could have. Like everyone, I have had my difficult times but I can honestly say I am both proud and humbled – and excited – to be a priest of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis recently encouraged the Church to pray for vocations, so that God may send priests and religious that are for Him only. Prayer is the source, the well spring of our Christian life. Everything we do as Christians should be in a spirit of prayer that our actions may flourish through the power of the Holy Spirit. Praying for vocations should be the very first act we do in order to promote vocations. Pray every day for vocations. Pray for everyone who struggles to find their God-given vocation in life that they may be open to the influence of the Holy Spirit.

There is a retiring collection today to support those in seminary for Cardiff – five at the moment. Please use a Gift aid envelope if you can.

Fr Matthew

The priest, the mass, and love

priests

Every so often you come across a thought or some words that remind you about what’s really going on and what’s important. We all need that grounding from time to time – to get things in perspective, and stop us taking things for granted. And that includes priests. Our most common “activity”, indeed the occasion when parishioners see us most often, is when we are celebrating the Mass. How easy it could be to think that we’ve “got it”, that we totally understand what it’s all about.

So here is the great Cistercian monk Thomas Merton offering an awesome and humbling thought about what is really going on each time we approach the altar…

If you are afraid to love,
never become a priest, never say Mass.
The Mass will draw down upon your soul
a torrent of interior suffering which has only one function: to break you wide open
and let everybody in the world into your heart.
For when you begin to say Mass,
the Spirit of God awakens like a giant inside you and bursts the locks of your private sanctuary.

If you say Mass,
you condemn your soul to the torrent of a love
that is so vast and insatiable
that you will never be able to bear it alone.
That love is the love of the Heart of Jesus, burning within your own heart
and bringing down upon you the huge weight
of His compassion for all the sinners of the world. 

Fr Matthew