Thursday April 19th 2007
YOUTH AT THE ORATORY
A beautiful and packed room at Brompton Oratory, where young people arrived for one of the regular monthly evening gatherings - well over 100 of them, with a friendly atmosphere and a sense of life and vibrancy. I was speaking on "Women and the Church" and the evening was really encouraging - good questions and discussion, a glorious buzz of talk over sandwiches and wine afterwards. One of the young priests got me a plate of sandwiches, as I was surrounded by a big circle of young people wanting to chat and follow up on the talk I had given.Things went on until a late hour, and when I finally got away, I found I was on almost the last Tube getting out to Wimbledon.
The Oratory is famous for being very traditional in its style of Catholicism, for its glorious music, and for being in a smart part of London and associated with beautiful weddings and great liturgy and so on and so on....and all these things make it very attractive. To have regular evenings like this, with vast numbers of intelligent, committed, interested young men and women, is a sign of life and hope in today's Church.
2 comments:
Wish we could do that at the Birmingham Oratory??
The irony is the more old-fashioned the liturgy, the less old-fashioned the congregation.
Fifties and sixties Catholic schooling must have been dire to disaffect a whole generation. Now there is effectively no Latin or catechis. The moral is, it is better to teach nothing than to teach badly.
Malcolm McLean
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