Martyrs...

...of the Venerable English College, St Ralph Sherwin and his companions, were honoured at a Mass held at St Joseph's, New Malden, yesterday, with wonderful music and a glory of golden vestments. It was in the Extraordinary Form - which does not seen so "Extraordinary" if you have a lot of Latin as a regular part of parish liturgy anyway - and, most touchingly, at the end a Te Deum was sung - as was sung in Rome in the 16th and 17th centuries when news of a martyr's death reached the College. A sermon about martryrdom, noting that it doesn't begin with the arrest or trial or imprisonment, but with the decision to live for God and truth and the rest might be a result of that, accepted as part of that decision. Implications for today...

In the evening, to St Anselm's, Tooting Bec, for a meeting of South London members of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. This looks like a very ordinary London brick building from the outside, but once inside you suddenly have the feel of a basilica. Wonderful. Evening Mass was just finished, and people were still praying or generally about. In the adjoining hall, where we met, there is a fine picture of St Anselm, showing him in modern Tooting Bec with the children of the parish school in their maroon uniforms! I really like this idea, especially the Medieval saint alongside the Tube station...he realy did visit this area, and met the local tribe, the Totinge people...

I cycled back along the long straight road that runs through all this section of South London, following a very old route traceable back to Saxon times. What would St Anselm think of the mosques that are now part of the local scene? Probably he'd simply quietly continue with the plan of bringing Christ to everyone, whether Totinge's tribe or today's South Londoners...