Catholic Homilies By Fr Linus Clovis

The Eucharist is a vast topic, it is essentially about God Incarnate, Christ who dwells amongst us, God who wishes to live with us. When we read St. John’s Gospel, we hear, ‘I will come to them’, ‘he who believes me, I will come to him, My Father will come to him, We will dwell with him’. This desire for God to dwell with us, is something we cannot even begin to grasp. We want to be with God, yet when we look at God’s creation, it seems to be so much more attractive. But if so much of what we see is beautiful, how much more beautiful must be He who created it. Whilst we admire, whilst we love the creation, the visible world that we see, we must remember that there’s a creator, an author and someone who has originated it and He must be much more satisfying and beautiful to us… For Fr. Linus’ complete retreat on the Holy Eucharist please listen to the Audio.

What do we have that has not been given us? There is only one thing that is essentially our own, and that of course is our sins. Everything else is a gift to us, we begin with the gift of life. This is the most basic, this is the fundamental gift. If we do not have life, if we never existed we cannot possess any other gift. So, once God had brought us, as is said, loved us into existence; because He loves everything He creates. Once He’s loved us into existence, He then adds gifts to us. The gifts are those of the body and then He adds those of the soul. Then those of the spirit. We are meant to use these gifts as stewards, we are not lords or masters of the gifts God has given us, but we are to use them as stewards. That means we are to use them for the greater glory of God, for the assistance and the help of our neighbour, and of course for the salvation of souls. If we are to do this, we must have a clear vision of what we are and who we are. What are we? We are creatures, created by God and t

Today we celebrate the annunciation of Our Lord. The great mystery of the union between God and man. When majesty puts on lowliness, where power puts on meekness, where eternity puts on time and immortality puts mortality. These are the words of the great pope, St. Leo the first. We are in the midst of this great mystery, the mystery of our redemption. How can we contemplate it? If we are to summarise it, we can say one thing, that humility confronted pride. Divine humility confronts human pride. We know from the scriptures, we know from the teaching of the fathers, that the greatest sin of all is pride. It is to overcome our pride that God displayed this incredible humility which we are even unable to fully grasp. What is pride? Pride is many things, yet one thing is certain it’s the root of the first sin. The first explosion of pride is found in the angel who dared to say he would be like God. This in fact gives is immediately an idea of what pride is, to be like God. But then we think about i

Quite some years ago, President, Vice President at that time George Bush, represented the US government at the funeral of the recently deceased former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved, clearly by the behaviour at the funeral of Brezhnev widow. During the whole ceremony, she didn’t say anything at all, she stood there completely motionless, until just before they were about to close the tomb, coffin. And then this old lady did, what probably was the greatest act of civil disobedience in the history of the world. She came over to his tomb, leant over and very clearly traced the sign of the cross on his chest. Here in the citadel of atheistic communistic power, she makes a gesture to say her husband was wrong. That this so-called utopia on Earth was wrong. She showed her belief in the real utopia, the place where our Lord Jesus Christ is the President, Paradise. Why? Well in His ministry Jesus raised from the dead the daughter Jairus, “talitha kum”, she comes back to life. He raised t

A silly illustration, but one which is necessary for a difficult topic. Once upon a time the was a place called Flatland. And in Flatland, Mr Square was walking along one day. This is a two dimensional world, boring place. Mr Square met someone though that changed his life forever, Mr Sphere. Mr Sphere said he came from a different place called Spaceland, which was three dimensional. Mr Square had no experience of a three dimensional world what so ever. He couldn’t fathom what he was talking about in any way. But he believed him. Mr Sphere was a nice chap and he believed him. He was convincing. But later on, talking to other inhabitants of Flatland, Mr Square was taken to be a crazy person, because they had no experience whatsoever of a three dimensional world that he was talking about. This is a silly illustration, but it’s not that different to where we find ourselves if we think about and imagine the Holy Trinity. Because the Holy Trinity is a multi dimensional being. We have no experience of

So we’re talking about the communion of Saints today. But a silly joke first. There was a painter and decorator, called Jock. He was very dishonest, he was habituality dishonest in his work, because he thinned out his paint with turpentine. Well one day the Church was up for renovation, the parish priest offered people the chance to put in their bids. But Jock got the job, because he put in the lowest bid, because he used the cheapest paint. However, on the first day of work, he just about finished the first coat of paint on the front of the Church, when the heavens opening up the rain started to come down and not only did Jocksy, all that paint get washed off, it was so thin that it hadn’t even dried. But he also fell of the scaffolding. Landed on the lawn, but he wasn’t hurt thankfully. But he did understand that this was a message from God. So he said Lord I’m sorry, forgive me what shall I do. Hands clasped together. The heavens bellowed out through the thunder, repaint, repaint and thin no m

There was a great British writer called G K Chesterton and he said, the difficulty I have in explaining why I am Catholic, is because there are ten thousand reasons, but all those reasons amount to one, Catholicism is true. Mr Chesterton believed in the Holy Catholic Church, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church and indeed we have reached this article of our faith today, which is I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. We are going to look at these three parts of this article of faith today. We’re going to start back to front. Church, what does church mean? It’s a translation of the Latin word ecclesia, which is a translation of the Greek word ekklesia, which means to call out from, to assemble to convocated, it means convocation, convocation of who? The Holy people of God, why are they Holy, because the assembly to which they belong is Holy. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. Why is she Holy? Well, Our Lord is the fount and source of all holiness, right? But our Lord is present in the Church, li

I said we were going to talk about the article of Faith, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’, principally that refers to sins being forgiven, original sin, through baptism. But people sin after baptism, people need forgiveness. Jesus also came to give another type of forgiveness, the type that Zacchaeus received. Forgiveness of sins, it’s a get out of jail card for every time we commit grave sin. That’s what we’ll talk about today. Suppose one of your friends offended you, was nasty, hurt your feelings. But later on they came back and said they were sorry. You probably forgive them, because you’d probably have many different reasons to forgive them. For instances, perhaps you are a person whose of an easy going nature and you don’t want the hassle of a feud, so you forgive. Or maybe you’re a person who forgives the other one, because she moves in better circles. She’s little miss popular, and you want to stay moving in those circles so you forgive her for that reason. Or maybe you just don’t lik

Before we introduce a theme and we talked about virtue we mentioned that virtue is a good habit, which prepares a person, to act, to carry out other actions in accordance with right reason. To act rationally. With all moral virtues, justice, fortitude, prudence, any of these, right reason indicates to the person with regards to their actions, the right measure, the need of moderation. The virtue we focus on today is temperance, this specially measures, moderates and even teaches us to hold back the most animalistic inclinations that we have. I like to talk about today what this virtue is, why it is important and what are those vices which are contrary to it, which will diminish ouch chances of growing the virtue of temperance. So, what is it? In the wider sense, it means moderation in actions and passions – like all the virtues. But in the strict sense – temperance means – moderation in the sensual and the carnal pleasures… For Fr. Nicholas’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

So today we want to focus on the virtue of Justice. But to make it a little bit easier for the younger ones here, a little story that highlights the main elements. There was a young price called Prince Lapio. He was making a lot of mistakes in the kingdom because he didn’t have good judgement. He used to decide cases in favour of the person who was better looking, the best dressed, who was charming. A lot of people complained to the king, so he decided to send his son off Prince Lapio, with one of his councillors to settle various disputes in the kingdom so that the Prince might learn the nature of justice. First they got to this place where there were two tribes. The Minimums and the Maximums, these guys shared with each other food stuffs. The Minimums were hunters, so they provided the meat. The Maximums were the farmers so they provided the fruits and vegetables. But they didn’t know how to make a fair sharing. So the wise men asked the Prince to think about it and then to give his judgement. T

We’ve been studying together about virtue. Fair question though, is if we are talking about fortitude, who do we consider strong? Who do we consider courageous? The soldier who defends his country in battle, certainly. Any person who risks their life to save someone else’s life, certainly. There are also examples which are less well known, courage. Take the young lady for example, she’s pregnant. She gets pressured by family friends, boyfriend, partner, whatever, to get rid of the baby, for trivial selfish reasons. But she says no, she insists on no. Take the man in the workplace, he’s offered a promotion, more money, an easy career path if he will go against his principles. But he says no, he insists no, against what everyone else is saying to him. It takes courage, newspapers don’t write about that a lot. But this is written in our conscious and most of all, these acts of courage a written God’s book of our life. Today, I wish to pay tribute to all the unknown courageous people, who have the stre

We are good people. But we all know, that just as it’s hard to become better, it’s very easy to become worse. We know that we become better by the practise of virtue, God makes us the light of the world the salt of the earth. But we become worse by the practice of vice. Over the last year and a half since I got here, I have had the occasion to talk about sin and vice. I have been very surprised at the reception with which people have accepted this topic. It takes humble people to accept humiliations. Every time we talk about sin and vice, there is an accusation for all of us because none of us are perfect. So frankly I’m a little humbled, that it’s been received so well. Difficult topics. However, as I promised a couple of weeks ago we’re going to turn that over now. Let’s put vice aside for a while and concentrate on that beautiful aspect, which is virtue, virtue. I want us to know more about it, I want us to love it, I want each and everyone of us to be more virtuous. So what will we say about

We enter into this new set of teachings today on the four cardinal virtues. What’s the motive? It’s quite simple really. This is the overarching point. If we do not prepare the natural terrain, God will not enrich us supernaturally. If we do not have the principle natural virtues, God will not give us the supernatural virtues. Or not enrich us with supernatural virtues which as we studied last year, faith hope and charity. Problem is if we without the supernatural virtues, we’re without salvation. So it’s very important to prepare the terrain, this is the purpose of the next five weeks of homilies. Today’s an introduction to the topic, in which we will look a little bit of the human being. The different bits of the human being, particularly focusing on the passions, because as we will see in the weeks ahead, the passions are controlled by us or they control us. The controlled by us if we have virtues, virtues are what directs the passions. So basically what I’m doing today is setting the backgroun

Christ has come to make us like God. There is in the heart of every human being a desire to be like God. If there were not, our first parents would never have fallen into temptation. The temptation presented to them is to disobey God, to eat the fruit and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil. Our Lord who knows of this desire in every human heart to be like God, has come to fulfil it in the case of all those who would follow him. The path that He chose, was not one of disobedience but rather of obedience. And so He tells us the way in which we can imitate God. God is by His very nature good He loves all His creatures. The scriptures themselves tells us that He hates nothing, He holds in abhorrence nothing that He has created. The nature of each creature is good, even the nature of the demons. What is wrong, is that these creatures who are free, have chosen to pervert God’s gifts and to use it not for the glory of the Creator but to bring glory to themselves, which is an act of creating darkne

In this the third talk on Fatima, I’m going to focus on something that two Popes have said about Fatima very succinctly. The first is Paul VI who in 1977 on the sixtieth anniversary of Fatima, he said that Fatima is a compendium of Gospel, meaning that the whole Gospel message is summed up in the events that occurred in the Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. Then on the thirteenth of May 1982 when John Paul went to Fatima to thank Our Lady for the preservation of his life. He said if the Church has accepted the message of Fatima, it is above all because the message contains the Truth and a call whose basic contents is the Truth and the call of the Gospel itself. Fatima does not contradict the Gospel, quite the contrary it can be regarded as the summary of the Gospel message. This year we are not only celebrating the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of our Lady of Fatima but there is also a commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the protestant revolution, which in fact destroyed the essence

Always we begin by invoking the Holy Spirit, so that He Himself might speak to us. So that He brings to our minds the light of understanding. Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of the faithful… Our Lady seat of Wisdom… Well welcome to this second talk on Fatima and our times, in which I first of all intended to do give a description and a meaning to many of the individual details that occurred when Our Lady came to Fatima. But there are so many and some of them are so interesting, that I decided to focus on two or three aspects of this. As I mentioned the last time, Our Lady came to Fatima in 1917 on six successive months. There was a seventh month when she came, that was twice in August. The reason, the children had been kidnapped. Then she promised she would come a seventh time, which she did, but much later. In the apparitions, the children, in May, were looking after their sheep when Our Lady came. They had resolved to say nothing about it, but Jacinta couldn’t keep quite and told her parents and n

I think we all would agree that we live in extraordinary times. There is a feeling in the air of uncertainty. We sense that there is, to use the words of scripture, something menacing in the world. Our governments, whatever authorities we have that rule over us no longer seem to be their own master, it’s almost as if they are puppets. The Holy Father recently complains and warns us about fake news. How are we to know what is fake and what is not? We know we can’t trust the media. And even the social media is not reliable and there’s so much information coming from so many directions that it is confusing. As Christians and in particular as Catholics we have a firm anchor. In fact the scriptures are very clear, ‘Hold fast of that which you first receive’ that’s the bottom line. Hold fast to what you first receive, it’s in every one of the epistles; St. Paul’s letters, St. Peter’s letters, St. John, St Jude, hold fast to what you first received. Because what we have received was from Christ who is the

So this text gives us an opportunity to talk about the second last article of faith in the creed, ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body.’ But the context here is important to have in place. You see Jesus apart from being persecuted by Herod and his political allies, He was also persecuted by the two groups; one the Pharisees and the other the Sadducees. They had a common goal, the destruction of Jesus of Nazareth. But they were different in the practices and beliefs. The Pharisees we know, were men who were extreme hypocrites, many of them. There were people who were just a religious body, whereas the Sadducees, were religious and political. The Sadducees were the nobility and most of them were priests and they were big into politics and the religious life, particularly in the temple. The Pharisees, they followed the law of Moses, the Profits and about a thousand other little, tiny, minuscule rules and regulations for everyday life. The Sadducees weren’t interested in that. They followed the wr

Ave Maria! In the beginning, at least the first third of the nineteen century, 1830, a young girl just in her early twenties entered the convent in Rue De Bac. She had joined the Daughters of Charity an order founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Her name was Zoe Laboure. Zoe was the ninth of eleven children of her parents, who were farmers and were fairly well to do. At the age of nine, her mother died and Zoe who was pious, stood on a little stool and picked up a statue of Our Lady which was kept on the mantle and said to her, ‘From now on you will be my Mother’. She began at that early age of nine to cultivate an ever growing love for the Mother of Jesus and of course our most gentle queen and Mother. She was looked after by her aunt and then she returned at about the age of sixteen where she took over the chores of the household. She would go to mass everyday, getting up from bed at four o’clock in the morning and walking to the church, where she would devoutly attend mass. And of course we shouldn’t be

Christmas is certainly about Christians or what Christians like. We like holidays, we like eating well, we like a drink or two or three. We like presents and gifts. I love Christmas, for all these things, they are mad for it in my house. Even a lot of the time we get gifts, they are not even things we are interested in half of the time, but we like the fact that somebody cares about us enough to get us a gift. It’s nice. But Christmas, this whole holiday everything that we have here is because of His birthday. That’s where it all comes from. So yes, Christmas is about Christians, but also Christ and Mass. Seeing as we are in Mass, we’re Christians, it makes sense to talk about Christ, right? So let’s see, who is Jesus Christ? What do people say about Him? What did He say about Himself? And why did He say it? What was the point of Jesus Christ coming here? You have come here today, so I’m going to tell you why… Who is Jesus? I don’t need fancy theology and philosophy to explain this too you. Ju