New home for Ordinariate SBVM

The new religious community of the Personal Ordinariate, the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, have a permanent home for the first time since they were received into the full communion of the Catholic Church on New Year’s Day. They are to move on Tuesday (August 27) into a convent in Birmingham which is the former home of the Little Sisters of the Assumption.  

Mother Winsome, the Superior of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, said: “We are absolutely overjoyed to have been given the opportunity to live in this convent.  We have prayed long and hard and the Lord has opened up this way for us. It is a gift from God.”

The community, established as part of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham adopting the Benedictine rule, includes eleven sisters who had been part of the Anglican Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage Oxfordshire and one, Sister Carolyne Joseph, who belonged to an Anglican  community in Walsingham.

With no endowments to keep them afloat financially, the sisters have been living for the last eight months as guests at an enclosed Benedictine abbey on the Isle of Wight. “The abbess and the community there shared their Benedictine life with us and welcomed us into their hearts in the most wonderfully generous way”, Mother Winsome said. “It has been a life of complete harmony and joy and it will be a wrench to leave. But we are pleased beyond measure that our journey of faith has taken this new direction”. 

The provision of Benedictine hospitality through retreats is central to the community’s charism. Their intention is to earn a living at their new home by offering retreats and the ministry of spiritual direction.

Support for Guide Leaders who want to keep the traditional promise.

An Anglican Bishop yesterday urged Christian Girl Guides leaders to  continue to fight plans  to scrap the promise to ‘love my God’.
Michael Nazir-Ali, formerly Bishop of Rochester, said they should follow the example of ‘rogue’ leaders who are defying their national HQ’s controversial orders.
From next month youngsters will instead promise to ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’ after it was decreed the old promise could discourage new members from joining.
However, a group of Guide  leaders in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, are resisting adopting the new promise, saying the organisation has ‘God at its core’.
Bishop Nazir-Ali said: ‘If there are others like this group – indeed I would hope that there are many others like it – why should they not be allowed to continue to have a reference to God? If these people really believe in diversity they would allow them to do that. Why should they face  expulsion from the Girl Guides movement which is rooted in the Christian faith?’
Warning the row could lead to a split in the Guides as a whole, he added: ‘Ultimately if there is not going to be any diversity permitted, these people may need to group together in a way that they can support one another.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2400651/The-Girl-Guides-Bishop-backs-Guide-leaders-refuse-drop-promise-God-favour-non-religious-alternative.html#ixzz2cmkSZHwE

Red Tomato Chutney!

A surfeit of tomatoes - time to make some chutney!
Before:

And two and a half hour later!

Looking good!

Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Maximilian Kolbe was born in Poland in 1894, became a Franciscan friar as a teenager, and was later ordained as a priest who served a small parish community. But when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, tragic events of human suffering where set into motion in which Kolbe's destiny would be sealed and his holiness revealed.
The story is well known. In his labors to protect many Jewish refugees, Kolbe found himself a Nazi target, was arrested, and sent off to Auschwitz in 1941. There, in the midst of the death camp's unimaginable daily horrors, he worked to encourage his fellow prisoners by setting an example of faith and hope.
One day a prisoner escaped, and, in order to bring an end to any future plans of the same, the guards decided to punish 10 inmates of cellblock 14 by condemning them to death by starvation in an underground bunker. One of the ten was Franciszek Gajowniczek, who began to weep and cried out, "My poor wife and children! I will never see them again!" At that moment, Fr. Kolbe calmly and purposefully stepped forward.
"I wish to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children." Such an unusual offer surprised the deputy commandant, who asked Kolbe to identify himself. His response was simple and direct: "I am a Catholic priest." Those words said far more about the saint than any name possibly could. The commandant agreed to grant the request.
Thrown into the dank, crowded underground bunker with the other men, Maximilian Kolbe continued to set an example of faith and hope, leading them in prayers of praise and adoration to God, singing hymns, and encouraging them to focus on the certain and irrevocable promises of Christ. Looking back on those events, we see that Fr. Kolbe's food, in imitation of the Saviour, was to do the Father's will (see Jn 4:34), for weeks later it became necessary to kill him by lethal injection.
Maximilian Kolbe, a martyr for charity, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 10 October 1982, with the surviving Franciszek Gajowniczek present.