The summer term draws peacefully to its close. As far as my own involvement at school is concerned, it is already concluded. I have celebrated Mass and Benediction and spent the day hearing confessions for my last Friday of the academic year.
One of its highlights was a recent visit by the chaplain to the John Fisher School. This school was founded by Bishop Amigo in 1929, before the canonisation of its patron, hence its nomenclature. It is situated in leafy Purley within the M25.
The school is famous for the number of its alumni who have become priests or – perhaps to be more accurate – famous for continuing to produce priestly vocations long after the flow dried up elsewhere in the mid-1970s. Like the school to which I am chaplain, the Fisher School had priests on the teaching staff. We too have an honours board of old-boy priests inscribed with a name from most years until 1975, when the gaps start to get bigger and bigger. The last name was added eight years ago. By contrast, the John Fisher School has maintained its strike rate. Two years ago they added a further three names to the list.
Over a cup of tea with the headmaster we discuss this phenomenon and the factors which might explain it. The presence of priests on the staff full time has to be of great significance. The John Fisher School retained them for far longer than we did and still has the ministry of a priest-chaplain for two days a week. (I use the term priest-chaplain for the sake of clarity. In fact, it is not permitted to apply the title “chaplain” to anyone but a priest, a custom now more honoured in the breach than the observance).
The John Fisher School was also the cradle of the Faith Movement. Several of the priests involved in its genesis were on the staff, as were some of the lay staff, like the redoubtable and inspiring head of the Religious Education department, Dan Cooper, the kind of teacher who becomes a legend in his own lifetime.
The first thing I saw on entering the site is a large and beautiful church. This is no hole-in-the-corner oratory or prayer room, but a fine chapel able to seat several hundred where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. Mass was celebrated daily until just a few years ago. For all of the above, it is in other respects typical of a large single-sex comprehensive school which draws its pupils from a wide catchment, has a rumbustious joie de vivre about the place and is celebrated for success on the rugby field.
That pretty much concluded our analysis until the chaplain mentioned a custom that every boy learnt to serve Mass in his first year. He maintains this tradition, teaching all the 11-year-olds to serve. They are tutored in small groups, then take a turn on the rota to serve at a voluntary Mass in the chapel before school. They are also shown and explained the meaning and use of the “gear and tackle and trim” of the sacristy: vestments, sacred vessels and linen.
For me, this was a eureka moment. Ever since I have thought about this single factor: that every boy is invited to enter into a way of both understanding and being involved more intimately in the action of the Mass. What if sociological or ethical factors are, in the end, barely relevant? What if it really is that simple: that if you can get a boy to engage more deeply in the celebration of the Mass, you are more likely to nurture a potential vocation to the priesthood? In that moment I recognised a truth so obvious that one can overlook it: it was in serving at the altar that I discovered the genesis of my own priestly vocation. Many priests I know would say the same.
As Pope St John Paul II pointed out, it is foolish to suggest that Christ is no longer calling men to priesthood. It would be equally foolish, therefore, to think that a particular school is creating vocations. But this one seems to have retained a way of enabling young men to cut through the static which might prevent them hearing the call. Some of that static we generate ourselves if we obscure the essence of priesthood, namely, that the priest is a man who stands before the altar and offers sacrifice in persona Christi Capitis. Everything else he does is of secondary importance and is ordered to it.
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