On the feast of St Thomas the Apostle...

...a great gathering in Westminster Cathedral. A mass for the repose of the soul of Phyllis Bowman, tireless pro-life campaigner. The celebrant was Archbishop Vincent Nicholas, with a great number of other priests, and all the Canons of the Cathedral (who sung their Office beforehand in the sanctuary - rather a splendid sight as they trooped in, red-robed, and took their places in the stalls). The music was by James MacMillan - rather a fine English Mass - with a Purcell motet at Holy Communion...the cathedral was full, and I saw many old friends. Memories came flooding in - of the early 1970s when as a recent school-leaver I'd be helping to put leaflets in envelopes and roll off letters on a Gestetner (remember gestetners? before photocopiers? all that ink and the hassle of typing things out on to a 'skin'...)in a house in Eaton Place where Society for the Protection of Unborn Children had first come into being. Memories of a later, cramped, office in Chiswick and the electricity occasionally running out because it came via a meter and we had to keep putting in 10p coins...Memories of big London rallies and lobbying of Parliament, of learning how to write Press Releases and of a sense of "We're winning! We're winning!" which we weren't, but back then it felt as if we might be. In the 1970s and 80s most people in Britain still thought abortion was horrible and wrong, and a number of Parliamentary initiatives to restrict the 1967 Abortion Act were introduced, some only narrowly failing to become law...today only the Catholic Church and some Evangelical bodies still firmly assert what was once commonly held as normal and reasonable, ie that the child in the womb should be protected. It is horrid living in a country where both law and common practice regard the killing of children as normal: it's a country which is killing off its own future. After the Mass, tributes to Phyllis were paid by, among others, David Alton and Ann Widdecombe. Several speakrs quoted John Paul apt description of our culture as a "culture of death". Pray that we may have a future, that God may in great mercy restore to us a culture of life...