THE
P RTAL
February 2013
Page 20
F a t h e r P e t e r ’s P a ge
Reality Check...
“Unless I can actually touch it
or see it, I don’t believe it is real .
. . and you can’t prove it is real”.
Such statements
are frequently made by people who are keen to disprove the existence of
someone like ‘God’; sometimes by people who one would have thought would already recognise the
limitations of their statements e.g. Richard Dawkins.
It doesn’t take a very bright
schoolboy/girl,
who
knows
a little about Philosophy, to
quickly expose the fallacy of such
arguments: “Aren’t Love, Beauty
and Truth, real? Yet, they cannot
be seen or touched?”
What is, though, readily
accepted is that the opposite
statement is true: The reality
of something that actually can
be seen or touched cannot be
denied.
‘second-birthday’ present
The recent news that The Ordinariate has been
given the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and
Saint Gregory, Warwick Street, as a central London
Church specifically dedicated to the life of the
Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is
not only a most apposite ; but specifically it confounds
the gainsayers and cynics who – till now – were
constantly claiming that The Ordinariate was purely
‘theoretical’because it ‘lacked reality or substance’.
Blessed John Henry Newman visited
Not only is this historic church, situated in Soho,
and which previously served as the chapel of the
Portuguese, and later Bavarian, embassies a most
beautiful building; but it has recollections which
identify it with the very beginnings of the Oxford
Movement: For in his ‘Apologia’, Blessed John Henry
Newman mentions a visit to the church as a young boy
with his father.
Graham Leonard, late Bishop
of London, (later Monsignor
Leonard after his ordination
into the Catholic priesthood). I
remember him saying – which
seemed extraordinary at the time,
but the more I have reflected on
it, the truer it seems to be: “You
must remember, Cardinal, that
the English would be prepared to
become Buddhist, as long as they
had their parish church to go to!”
not essential or not important
What I believe he meant was the fact that for many
people the existence and reality of a Church building
was more important to them than what they actually
believed. Rightly we would question the morality
of that, since ‘belief ’ is fundamental to the Catholic
faith, For many generations of Catholics who often
had to celebrate Mass in open fields or temporary
accommodation, would be the first to proclaim that
buildings are not essential; but that is not the same as
saying that they are not important.
In fact, throughout history – including that of the
Old Testament – places and structures where God
can be encountered are very important indeed.
Architect Norman L. Koonce has suggested that the
goal of sacred architecture is to make “transparent
the boundary between matter and mind, flesh and the
spirit.” ; whilst Richard Kieckhefer suggests that “entering
into a religious building is a metaphor for entering into
a spiritual relationship”.
For The Ordinariate to now have a specific locus
When I was involved in discussions with Cardinal makes this historical fact an important and vital
Basil Hume about the possibilities of the Catholic theological one. Deo Gratias!
Movement of the Church of England being reconciled
with the Catholic Church, a fellow participant was Bishop
Father Peter Geldard