© 2005 - 2008 Friends of Augustine

Friends of Augustine - UK

With Your  Word You pierced my heart,  and I loved You

 

Pilgrimage 2008 Clare Priory

Decline and Fall?

This is a personal view from a now elderly Scot. I came to Ainsdale as a Presbyterian forty years ago but have been a member of the Congregation of St. John Stone’s for twenty eight years. I believe that while revelation may have finished with the coming of Jesus, God is still speaking to us in History.

 

All around us we hear prophecies of the demise of the Church. We do not seem to be attracting the young and others have just stopped coming to our services and spiritual events. It has all happened before. The prophets of doom ought to look back at history. Our own British Post Reformation history has periods when the established churches were at low ebb, even laughing stocks and other reformed churches were rent by dispute and schism but always fresh renewal movements sprang up with great success.

 

We had it in the Catholic Church too. A time to which we should particularly look back is Europe at the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century. Popes were in despair over the tottering Church. Suddenly the Orders of Mendicant Friars appear, inspired by St. Francis and St. Dominic, throwing in their lot with the people instead of being part of the Establishment, preaching the word and spreading rapidly. The Franciscans and Dominicans were completely new types of Religious, while older independent groups under the rule of St. Augustine, or hermits who had lived on Mount Carmel and had been expelled by the Muslim rulers during the crusades adopted the new model and came together as Augustinians and Carmelites: then came the Servites and then the Trinitarians, who begged for alms to ransome the captives of the Barbary pirates. The friars helped to rescue the Church and became so popular that masses of laity wanted to be ever more closely linked with them and their ideals instead of just listening to them: they started coming together in communities which became the Third Orders, officially recognised as fully parts of the Orders each with its own rules and constitutions.

 

The Second Orders were the nuns of the same foundation as the friars, usually enclosed although some nursing Augustinians were not fully enclosed. Some Augustinian Sisters had originally been associated with the Canons Regular but then became part of the Order of St. Augustine. Some Third Order groups ceased to be laity when their active work for the Church and society such as in nursing and teaching so developed that it could be better done as dedicated brothers or sisters: these are the Third Orders Regular.

 

Here in old Lancashire, where the Reformation was fiercely resisted, we are inheritors of Catholic England but we also have a great Irish connection with the large movements of people seeking a new life, especially in the nineteenth century. One thing that helped Ireland to remain staunchly Catholic and not accept the changes of church government of Henry VIII in the areas fully under Tudor rule is that the Orders of Friars and their Third Orders had become such a strong influence. In England, there was initial strong opposition, put down with great severity but mainly quietly accepted within a generation. Force was used as well as great inducements to clergy and laity to persuade them to become Anglicans on both sides of the Irish Sea but because the Friars depended for their living on the generosity of those whom they served, not on endowments or tithes, they could still minister to their flocks in the open air when church buildings were closed to them. Now Ireland is falling away as it becomes even more affluent than other western countries.

 

We have a Third Order group at St. John Stone’s, promoted twenty seven years ago by Father Robert Dunn. We members are growing older and our numbers have fallen but we still feel we have a role to play. What makes us different from other parishioners is not that we are more pious or spiritual, but we have found that trying to absorb something of the ethos of St. Augustine and of our Friars is a great help in our personal pilgrimages towards the Sanctification for which Christians are bound to strive. Having that slightly greater Christian knowledge than we would otherwise have had also helps us to be an even better part of the priesthood of all believers in our daily work and in our prayers for the conversion of the world and for vocations.

 

We are only under a very simple Rule of Life, to use our membership to help us be better people. We are an open group. Any Catholic who is interested, not just parishioners, is welcome to come to our meetings and see if what we do could be helpful to them. When some one new does ask to join us, we merely ask that they serve a probationary year before proceeding to membership. There is room for all sorts of people of goodwill in our number. There are many very active organisations in our parish. We are unique in not seeking to be active as a group but to further the prayer-life of the parish in a rather different way from our Prayer Group, to which some of us also belong.

 

At our meetings we pray Vespers, the Evening Office of the day from the Breviary, then go on to consider some Augustinian topic and how the events of the day are affecting the Church, hear what is going on in the Augustinian Order, and finish with friendly discussions on all sort of things. Jesus himself joined in the ancient Jewish offices of Morning and Evening Prayer in which the Psalms are prayed, which in their modern Catholic form, together with the services of Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Compline and Matins are the Divine Office. Monastic communities still say all of these daily but the clergy and "Active" Religious use the Office of Readings in place of most of these as otherwise they would be on their knees much of the day and night with almost no time for their work for us.. Many of the regular attendees at the Morning Daily Mass also join in saying Lauds, the Morning Prayer of the Church. The Divine Office is a great treasure which deserves to be better known to all Catholics

 

We don’t meet every month in the winter, a concession to the advancing years of current Members but meet once a month at other times.

 

I am sad that so few of our Church members come to our Holy Hours, the Stations of the Cross, the Churches Together in Ainsdale ecumenical meetings, the Prayer Group and the Forward in Faith events. Even making the Third Order only a part of the less formal Friends of Augustine does not seem to have attracted any more of our people. Is this symptomatic of our times where greater general prosperity has once again downgraded religion to an optional activity? Jesus said to Peter “So you had not the strength to keep awake with me one hour? You should be awake, and praying not to be put to the test.” Are our spirits willing but our flesh is week? The Old Testament is a witness to the frequent backsliding of the Children of Israel then imploring The Lord to return quickly to them when they realised the troubles that were besetting them.

 

Wake up Lord! Why are you asleep? Awake! Do not abandon us for good.

Why do you hide your face, and forget we are wretched and exploited?

 

For we are bowed in the dust, our bodies crushed to the ground.

Rise! Come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your love,

 

Peter Blain - St. John Stone Parish, Woodvale