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THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS CONFERENCE

13th JUNE 1998

Westminster Central Hall, London

RE-DISCOVERING THE TRUTH

Madeleine Beard

(published by The Latin Mass, Summer 1999)

I wish to say what a privilege it is to be asked to address the Faith of Our Fathers Conference. Particularly on this Feast of St Anthony of Padua. From Portugal originally, born at the beginning of the thirteenth century, St Anthony boarded a vessel sailing for Morocco, was blown off course, and ended up in Italy. There, as a Franciscan, he preached and laboured, crowds flocked to hear him and sinners and heretics were converted. Let us pray to St Anthony of Padua that on this day this Patron Saint of Lost Souls will intercede for this country. That England's lost souls shall be brought back to the full knowledge of the True Faith, in the land that is known as the Dowry of Mary. It was in Westminster Abbey that Richard II re-dedicated England to Our Lady. And it was St Edward the Confessor who first offered England to Our Lady following her appearance in the Norfolk fields at Walsingham during his reign in 1061. Let us pray to Our Lady that she shall continue to look kindly on what was once an Isle of Saints. That she who has seen her English children depart for so long from the Faith that was theirs, shall return to the Faith of Our Fathers, and this country of ours shall soon proclaim the One True Faith again.

I am speaking to you as a Catholic because of the faith of my grandfather, Vincent Beard. He, like so many hundreds of thousands of others, witnessed four years of hell in the trenches. He was one of the many hundreds of thousands who suffered but did not die. No one ever recovered from those hateful battles of 1914 to 1918. And after the war was over, he and my grandmother, Kate, were both received into the Church. It was the bravery of so many Military Chaplains on the Western Front who administered the Sacraments to the faithful, to whom we owe so much. It was they who introduced for the first time the very existence of the Last Rites to those who were not Catholics. They were priests who suffered for their country and suffered for their Faith during four long years of War. One of them said: "I have offered the Holy Sacrifice in many strange places - in huts, cellars, barns, in dug-outs, in the trenches, in the ruins of churches where rain and snow came through the missing parts of walls or roof, on a plough behind a haystack, on altars built of ration-boxes or shell-boxes, under camouflage in a gunpit, in the open-air in all weathers. My congregations were of men in great need, kneeling in faith and hope and love before their Redeemer, men who believed in prayer, men who frequented the Sacraments with splendid eagerness, who did not heed publicity for their confessions, nor poverty of circumstance for their Masses and Communions, men who knew that death was around them and were striving to be ready for their Maker if He summoned them." Another Army Chaplain recalled the battalion at rest before a battle. "I gazed out over the scene, there were hundreds of men sitting in the fresh grass under the shade of the thickly-blossomed fruit trees, praying, meditating, reading their prayer-books, saying their rosaries - silent, absorbed, reverential."1 And my grandfather and his family spent the rest of their lives living with the consequences of that war. Suffering in mind and body, he tried to convince his wife and children that everything was all right. "I'm fit," he would say. "There's nothing wrong with me." The courage and the bravery that he and hundreds of thousands of others showed in war and peace were nurtured and sustained by the one thing on this earth that could begin to heal and soothe him. The Sacraments. Let no-one under-estimate the extraordinary power, the supernatural privilege given to those who by the Grace of God freely embrace the True Faith. The Last Rites, administered by the brave Catholic chaplains in the trenches, introduced the True Faith to so many Englishmen who suffered and died in Flanders fields. Only the Sacraments could make sense of the slaughter. As Christ suffered and died in agony, only the soothing balm of holy oil could unite those of His faithful with Him, as they too came to know Calvary. And yet, such is the mystery of Faith that in my case I am speaking to you now as a Catholic as a result of an obscure novel which my grandfather read in the trenches. It was that, so my father once told me, which happened for some mysterious reason to tip the balance towards the Catholic Church.

The novel was called Antonio. The opening page describes a Portuguese monk observing the word PAX inscribed over an archway in his monastery. And it was in Portugal on this day, on 13th June 1917, while the battles raged on the Western Front, that the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary appeared and said: "In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph." As Catholics, we have been always recognised for our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and devotion to Our Lady. These remain, and ever shall remain, the most powerful ways of leading us towards a stronger and firmer Faith, and it is a terrible tragedy when the focus is deliberately taken away from the Tabernacle in our churches and devotion to Our Lady removed. That was not the authentic spirit of the Second Vatican Council. The authentic spirit of the Second Vatican Council was that of a universal call to holiness. It was meant to be a glorious reiteration of the importance of all that Catholics hold most dear. Confession, reverence at Mass and devotion at Mass. What a tragic sequence of events were un-leashed in the Church when Catholics simply became bored with these life-saving traditions, when the souls of so many were put into such danger by the abandonment of these great gifts of the Faith. With the aid of the Sacraments it takes a lifetime to prepare to meet our Maker. Which is why we are given a lifetime.

The last thirty years in this country has seen a huge departure from our Catholic tradition. The Faith of my father and the Faith of my grandfather. For the last thirty years we appear to have reversed all the progress that had been made in re-building the Catholic Church in this country from the early years of the nineteenth century until about 1968. In 1998 we have little to be proud of. A second Reformation took place suddenly and with apparent effect during the relatively short time of thirty years. I do not have to list for you the results of this most recent stripping of the altars. But what I can say to you is this. That Christ spent thirty years of obscurity in Palestine before he entered his public life. Let us pray that after thirty years of obscurity, those in authority in the Church that we love will speak and act with the authority of Christ. That they will have the courage and the determination to proclaim the Catholic Faith, both to Catholics and those millions of English men and women who are not even Christian. We are a chosen people. We are a people set apart. And our missionary work starts in this country today.

When you proclaim the Faith, you make yourself deeply unpopular. When you speak out for what is right and what is true you un-leash all sorts of abuse and venom, lies, cowardice and deceit. All hallmarks of the devil. Whose greatest success has been his oblivion in the minds of those who believe. There is a battle to be fought. And if like Our Lady those in authority freely choose to co-operate with God in this battle, then they like Our Lady shall quell the Serpent at their feet. The Serpent shall always be there. But with her guidance, Satan shall remain trodden under foot. Because, when you abandon devotion to Our Lady, when you abandon the rosary and public devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, then the Faith is lost. Our Lady is waiting to help us revive true devotion to her Son in this country. The abandonment of the Faith to the obscurity that it never deserved can only be revived through true devotion to the Blessed Sacrament truly present, and to the Mother of Christ. It's a mystery. But it's true. You can spend your life meditating on mysteries. Which is why we glory in the mystery of Faith.

I am speaking to you now as an English Catholic who wishes to publicly proclaim the Faith as a result of a faith that was caught, not taught. Like so many of my generation, I went to a Catholic school run by good, kind and scholarly nuns, and yet through five years between the ages of 13 and 18 spent at one of Britain's leading Catholic girls' boarding schools we received not one shred of Catholic doctrine. We never once said the rosary. We never once had Benediction. Mass on Sunday. That was all. It was thanks only to the Sisters of Mercy in Midhurst, still thankfully alive and well and in their habits and teaching the Faith, that between the ages of 11 and 13 I had the chance to understand the ethos and the joy of a truly Catholic education. How ridiculous it is to deride a truly Catholic education. And yet, for me, after all the martyrs suffered for the Faith in this country, a Faith that had just a few people among its number at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which grew so fast and suddenly from then on, when the Truth was gloriously re-discovered, when schools and chapels and monasteries and cathedrals, convents and parish churches sprung up again throughout the land, where the foundress of my school was asked by the Pope to establish schools for the education of those English Catholic girls who would otherwise have to go away to convents in France or Belgium, I found myself at such a school in the 1970s where the Faith was not even taught.

Nothing. For five years. No rosary, not even once. A rosary was neither seen nor heard. No Benediction, ever. No Adoration. No Angelus Bell. Mass on Sunday, yes. And yet, even if the Faith had been taught and passed on as it should have been, there would still have been one profoundly important element missing. Looking back I realise now that the Catholic ethos in schools can never properly have the chance to really survive unless pupils also come from a home where religion is actually taken seriously. Let us pray that the Church will emphasise again the strength, the power and the goodness of a family united in Faith. Let us give thanks for those heroic Catholic parents who do so much to nurture and spread the Faith by their example. Whose homes are places where the Faith is discussed and passed on not only to their children but to others too. You are more likely to become a Catholic if you spend time in the company of Catholics who care about their Faith. A family that prays together does stay together. And for me there was nothing more moving than seeing a priest kneeling alongside small children at their family prayers. And for so many like that priest it was such a brave thing to do to leave the Protestant anti-Catholic tradition of his own family and actually embrace the True Faith, which is what so many hundreds of thousands did in this country until about 1968. I remember that year in particular because it was then that the priest who had baptised me nine years before suddenly left the priesthood. It was commonplace then. Let us give thanks that this departure from Holy Orders is not commonplace now. Thirty years later, there is room for hope. But how tragic it is when even those who wish to be instructed today are sold short by a patchy and watered down version of the Faith. The courses that now exist, known as RCIA - surely that must stand for Roman Catholic something or other? - no, it stands for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults - these courses depend entirely on the priest in charge. How terrible that we cannot now rely on sound Instruction for those who are genuinely seeking the True Faith. Who wish to use the short time that they have on this earth to re-discover the Truth.

For the re-conversion of England to actually happen, so many of us, born into the Faith or received into it, need courses of re-Instruction. Because in the past, when someone said they had become a Catholic, this would be greeted with joy. Now, tragically, one needs to be more cautious. Instructed by whom? In which parish church? When? Was the priest himself a convert? Did the priest himself have doubts about any aspect of Catholic doctrine? Did he have doubts about devotion to Our Lady? Did he have misgivings about Humanae Vitae? If the priest had doubts about the Immaculate Conception or contraception, then you have a doubting convert. And if you have doubts about the divine intervention of Almighty God not only at the first moment of the existence of Mary, but also at the first moments of the existence of your own children, then you have doubts as a Catholic. And where the Faith is abandoned, the having of children is abandoned too. A large family? They must be Catholics.

I believe that we must take our inspiration from those Catholics who did so much to revive the Faith in this country during the last century. My book, Faith and Fortune, is precisely about the many courageous men and women who re-discovered the Truth and made it known. People who had everything to lose in worldly terms by embracing the True Faith and yet held fast to that which is good. In my book I describe the journeys they made to Rome and the glories they discovered there. I also describe those who re-discovered the Truth in this country without setting foot in the Eternal City at all. So many of the converts whom I follow on their different journeys entered the religious life. And I think in particular of the Hon. George Spencer, now known as the Venerable Ignatius Spencer. Son of the second Earl Spencer, born in the last week of the eighteenth century, he became a Catholic in 1830 and later on became a priest in what is now a largely unknown Order to many of us, the Passionists, dedicated to the Passion of Our Lord.

The Order was founded in Italy by St Paul of the Cross. At the beginning of the eighteenth century St Paul of the Cross had a vision. He saw Our Lady, who was dressed in a distinct black habit with an emblem with the words "The Passion of Jesus Christ" written in Latin. Our Lady asked St Paul to found a congregation of religious who would be dressed in this way. Later St Paul of the Cross was praying before the Blessed Sacrament. He found himself reflecting on what he referred to as those misguided men who deny the Real Presence of Our Lord in this mystery. He saw England. From that day until his death he never knelt in prayer without praying for the conversion of a country he had never known, whose language he had never spoken. Thirty years after the death of St Paul, Blessed Dominic Barberi had a vision of England in that same chapel. He could never foretell that he would later be summoned by the Venerable John Henry Newman to receive him into the Church in an Oxfordshire village. It was because of this presence of the Passionists in England that the Venerable Ignatius Spencer, dressed in the distinct Passionist habit, walked the streets of Whitehall and St James's, using his aristocratic contacts to try to further the Faith, when not tramping the cold streets of industrial England in his quest to save souls.

How did he become to be a Catholic? After Eton and Cambridge he travelled to France in the late summer of 1819, arriving on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, a day which he said was "the first on which I trod Catholic ground and entered a Catholic church". At a cathedral in northern France he saw Mass celebrated for the first time. He was struck immediately by the devotion in the silent congregation in the presence of a silent priest. Needless to say, thanks to the false spirit of the Second Vatican Council, such silence has been entirely lost in our churches, whether before, during or after Mass. We must not be surprised therefore that in this noisy world we attract only few converts. Indeed when the father of John the Baptist received a message from an angel that in her old age Elizabeth would conceive a son, Zachary emerged from the temple unable to speak. It was his very silence which was the sign of the beginning of our redemption. After this silent Mass at Amiens, on this same visit to the Continent, Spencer went to the opera. It was at the end of Don Giovanni, when Don Giovanni is engulfed in flames in the midst of his licentious career, that Spencer knew "that God, who knew what was within me, must look on me as one in the same class with such as Don Giovanni, and this holy warning I was to find in the opera-house in Paris". Still an Anglican he was then ordained vicar of the parish church at Althorp but became a Catholic not long after.2 I would recommend you read my book Faith and Fortune, to see how Almighty God's divine providence worked through this holy man and all that he and his fellow converts did for the revival of the Church in this country. Let us all pray that through the intercession of Blessed Dominic Barberi and the Venerable Ignatius Spencer, the hundreds of thousands of secular pilgrims who make their way to Althorp this summer will come to know of this saintly Spencer, who did so much for the conversion of this country to the True Faith, and which this country so desperately needs today.

A distinctive habit can do great things for the Church. As the Venerable Ignatius Spencer, whose family's beautiful London home overlooks Green Park, encountered the ridicule of so many, so too, until only a few months ago, the distinctive figure of Monsignor Gilbey could be seen shuffling his way along Pall Mall and Piccadilly. And I am speaking to you now with the confidence of a Catholic thanks to him. Despite the complete lack of any Catholic teaching at my Catholic boarding school, I found myself later on attending a course of Instruction aimed specifically at Catholics who had not been taught the Faith. This was given by the then Catholic Chaplain at Cambridge. Himself a convert of Monsignor Gilbey's, the University Chaplain was continuing a tradition set out in Monsignor Gilbey's We Believe, which was itself a continuation of the tradition of such talks given by Monsignor Ronald Knox at Oxford. Just by chance, I was given a second chance. And how heartening it is to see the vocations which have resulted from those crowded gatherings in that upper room, the Library at Fisher House. In the heart of the University, yet huddled away, over the years many hundreds of undergraduates sat the feet of a priest who actually taught the Faith.

Finally, the importance of wearing a distinctive habit was demonstrated to me yet again in Rome. Sixty years younger than Monsignor Gilbey, I caught a glimpse of a priest dressed in precisely the same way. Then based at the Institute of Christ the King in Gricigliano outside Florence, were is this priest now? In America's Mid West, contributing to the extraordinary revival of the Faith in mission lands far from here. This revival of the Faith happening today is due to those in authority in the Church who are acting and speaking with authority. Let us draw inspiration therefore not only from those who suffered and died for the Faith in this country, but from those in Authority in America who are actually fighting battles on behalf of the Faith today. How lucky we are that today in this hall we are able to hear witnesses for the Faith from America.

I return to the faith of my grandfather Vincent Beard, to whom my family owe everything. It was my great-grandmother Eliza Beard who said to him: "Vincent! Don't become a Catholic while I'm still alive." To which my grandfather replied, "Well actually Mother, I already have." Let us remember that the God-given love of Truth is so strong that no human obstacle can ever suppress it, it can never be taken away, it shall rise again. It was for the love of Truth that the martyrs died. It is because of this God-given love of Truth that England shall one day return to the True Faith, watched over as it is on this day by St Anthony of Padua. As G.K. Chesterton said, "We are the people of England that have never spoken yet."

1 T. Johnstone and J. Hagerty, The Cross on the Sword. Catholic Chaplains in the Forces, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1996, pp 104-5.

2 Madeleine Beard, Faith and Fortune, Leominster, Gracewing, 1997.

© Madeleine Beard 1998