At this time of year, we should celebrate God’s gift of His life and the gift of our salvation, writes John Studzinski.
“Alleluia!” Around the world, regardless of location, contextual culture and language, that word is proclaimed every day, except in Lent, before the Gospel at every Holy Mass. Exhorting us to praise the Lord, it exemplifies the way each one of us, through our faith and through shared ritual, occupies a place at the core of the universal church. Though born and raised in Massachusetts, I have been based in London for the past 40 years. My work in banking and finance involves frequent and extensive travel. Whatever the time zone, I do my utmost to start my day with Holy Mass.
My Christmas morning this year will be spent working at The Passage, a centre for homeless people near Victoria Station. I will first attend Mass at Westminster Cathedral, just a short walk away. Some people see Christmas as an excuse for a pub crawl. For me, it is an opportunity for a “Mass crawl” – and for three different and complementary experiences of the seasonal liturgy. My first stop, in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve, will be the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street. At around 11pm, I will head to Brompton Oratory for Midnight Mass. On Boxing Day, St Stephen’s Day, I will leave for Barbados, where each day of my stay will resound with Christmas carols at the Church of St Francis of Assisi in Mount Standfast.
Not only does the Mass invigorate us, it never fails to illuminate, broaden and deepen our faith. Discipline, and that includes rising early, undoubtedly plays a role in fostering and sustaining that faith. Often I am told there is no demand for communal worship early in the morning; the more I travel, the more I witness the contrary. If a church opens its doors, people will come. On my first visit to Myeong-dong Cathedral in Seoul, for Mass at 6am, I was agreeably surprised to find myself in a congregation of maybe 400 people. In the heart of that buzzing modern Asian city, I heard the chime of bronze, Buddhist-style bells at the Consecration and absorbed the sense of deep devotion in the cathedral and, beyond it, the vibrancy of a local tradition of Catholicism that reaches back to the late 16th century and the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in that part of the world.
Seoul is an occasional port of call, but my “home” communities for morning Mass are in London, New York, Greater Los Angeles, western Massachusetts and, during the summer, western Spain.
There is the Tridentine Mass at 9am on Sunday at Brompton Oratory, packed with families, often with babies in strollers; the service (using the 1962 Missal) might hark back to the years before Vatican II, but the next generation of worshippers has joined us. Across the Atlantic, there is the 7am weekday Mass led by Cardinal Dolan at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue – a service that always offers superb music and a pithy sermon. It makes a big impression, reaching a huge audience through SiriusXM radio and livestreaming.
On the opposite coast of the US, there are St Monica’s in, appropriately enough, Santa Monica and Our Lady Queen of Angels in Newport Beach. These are both churches that offer a sunny, open-armed welcome. The architecture of St Monica’s evokes the Romanesque, but Our Lady of the Angels is a striking modern building, filled with light. The slight rake to its floor ensures excellent sightlines to the altar and a strong sense of participation. The kind of comfort cooling you find in Southern California is conspicuously absent from the venerable Convent of San Miguel and Santa Isabel in Trujillo, a town in Extremadura, in Spain, where I spend time each summer. There, the ladies of the congregation deal with the heat in classic Iberian fashion, by flicking and fluttering their fans with seemingly instinctive skill. Acting as our hosts for the duration of the service are the Dominican sisters of the convent, who take their places behind a screen at the back of the church, and to whom we wave in lieu of giving the Kiss of Peace. (When I am visiting Asia – Seoul, Tokyo, Kyoto, Taipei, Hong Kong or Singapore – I witness another alternative to the Kiss of Peace as the congregants, in a gesture that is both companionable and respectful, bow to each other.)
Environment, atmosphere and nuances differ from country to country, from community to community, and from church to church, but the foundation of the Holy Mass remains reassuringly consistent across borders and cultures. The Consecration and Eucharist never fail to affirm the mystical power of faith and its central position in our life.
A great urban cathedral like St Patrick’s, Westminster Cathedral or St Mary’s in Sydney epitomises the power and universality of faith. At the same time, the presence of homeless people, sleeping safely in the side pews, reminds us of our commitment to Christian values and philanthropic action. I have been involved with serving the homeless since the age of six, and helped to establish The Passage, which is now one of the UK’s leading charities for the homeless. At Farm Street, another of my home churches, there is a contemporary sculpture that I find movingly resonant: the work of Timothy Schmalz, it shows a man sleeping on a bench and is called Homeless Jesus.
Meanwhile, certain smaller churches – or the intimate chapels in such monuments as the Brompton Oratory or the Sacré Coeur in Paris – are especially conducive to private prayer and meditation. The Church of St Maria Loreto, in Salzburg, which serves sisters of the Capuchin order, is for me a quintessential “prayer church”. It is a place for daily devotion that is nourished by a long history – nearly 400 years. The church’s exterior is modest, but inside it burgeons with baroque decoration. Here, as real wax candles burn fragrantly, you pray in silence and contemplation at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and, as if Covid never happened, take Communion on your tongue.
Keeping watch from a corner of St Maria Loreto, and intensifying my prayers, is a 20th-century religious luminary in the form of a statue of Padre Pio. A phenomenon associated with him is bilocation, and he must also have been present in some form on a morning I attended Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, a splendid neo-Gothic edifice that took over 100 years to build. As it happened, I had my Padre Pio prayerbook with me, though no one could have seen that. A member of the congregation came up to me after the service and told me that he knew I was devoted to Padre Pio. He represented a small church about 150 miles from Sydney. It was home to a statue of Padre Pio that had been severely damaged in an accident. The church needed a few thousand Australian dollars to replace it. I listened to the man’s story and, having prayed for guidance on the matter, donated to his cause. A few months later, I received an invitation to the inauguration of the new statue.
At St Francis of Assisi in Barbados, the altar in this small neighbourhood church offers a view to the turquoise ocean – and to the infinite – through the windows that flank it. The congregation honours God with a solid liturgy and marvellous voices – to hear them singing “Go Tell it on the Mountain” is truly a Christmas treat – and by tending solicitously to the building and the people who visit it. It makes me think of the early years that Mary spent dwelling in the Temple, entrusted by her parents Anna and Joachim to the care of the priests and elders.
The “Temple”, for the world’s community of Catholics, is St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, but when I am in Rome, my customary choice for morning Mass from Monday to Friday is the Church of Santa Anna. It is the only place of prayer within the walls of the Vatican that is open to the public. Roman clergy constitute some two-thirds of the congregation and the other third is a microcosm of the global church… sisters religious, priests, monks – people working on the “front line” under all kinds of circumstances. On Saturdays, I go to St Peter’s at 6.30am. Once I would witness dozens of priests saying private Mass in the chapels, turning the basilica into a kind of spiritual beehive. For private early-morning prayer, I make my way down to the Crypt of St Peter beneath the basilica, a solemn, austere place where you might find yourself surrounded by pilgrims. In such close proximity to the bones of St Peter, it seems possible to relive 2,000 years of religious history. Popes come and popes go, but the façade and institution of the Church remain constant.
For each of us, there are sacred spaces, generating a distinctive sacred energy, and saints that particularly capture our heart and our soul. In St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I feel a special bond when I see the expressive face on the statue of Mother Teresa, with whom I spent time in Calcutta as a young man. In Westminster Cathedral, I often reflect at the tomb of Cardinal Basil Hume, who mentored me in working with people who were homeless or living in poverty. Having a birthday on the feast day of St Joseph, I feel a personal affection for the chapels dedicated to him in the Brompton Oratory, St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Sacré Coeur, sanctuaries where I can meditate quietly before and during Mass.
Participation in Holy Mass, in the mystical early hours of the day on my travels around the world, constitutes one of the most powerful experiences in my life. It has nurtured, strengthened and broadened my faith and my devotion to the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The dedicated spaces where we worship together and the saints to whom we pray are all gifts to us from God. As it says in Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” Wherever we are in the world, whatever the time of day, we can be sure that Christ is with us as we celebrate Holy Mass and the Eucharist. At Christmas, across the globe, we celebrate the gift of His birth and the gift of our salvation. It truly is a time for us to praise the Lord. Alleluia!
John Studzinski CBE is founder and chairman of the Genesis Foundation
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