Sunday...

...and a long talkative lunch after Mass...

A sense of things reconnecting after the summer break. The Ladies Ordinariate Group meets again in Oct...speaker (Mon Oct 5th, Precious Blood Church, London Bridge) is one of our members telling of her adventures in walking the Camino to the shrine of St James in Spain...

It was the feast of St Pius X during the week...at Mass that day of course we heard about him...I read up a lot about him a while back when studying the 1900s and events in Europe and the Church in that era...he died deeply saddened - really broken-hearted - shortly after the outbreak of  WWI, a war he and others had tried so desperately to avert and which in retrospect seems even more tragic than was envisaged at the time...

He was responsible for a number of good things in the Church, notably inviting children to Holy Communion at a younger age: at the time First Communion had become something normally only approached in mid- or late-teens, and Pope St Pius instead linked reception of this Sacrament with an age at which chidren were able to recognise its truth, and differentiate between Holy Communion and ordinary bread...

It seems rather terrible that his name has been besmirched long years later by association with a breakaway group from the Church headed by Archbishop Lefebvre...although there are insider-rumours that the Lefebvrists - who split a while back, ridding themselves of their more extreme faction - might be ready to repent and return...