Message of Abbot Paul - Tuesday 27th December 2022

Yesterday I wrote a few lines about the village of Olivares San Fernando in Peru. Today I’d like to share another Christmas Day memory, this time from 1986. The Leon family in Sullana, an important commercial town about an hour’s drive from Tambogrande, had become good friends and supporters of our work since the floods on 1983. The head of the family died on Christmas Eve aged 100. He was Chinese and had come to Peru to work on the haciendas while still a boy. In Peru the Chinese were imported to replace black slaves. Ultimately, he became a well-known business man. I was asked by his children to celebrate his Requiem Mass at the entrance to the cemetery on the afternoon of Christmas Day. As I prepared the altar and could hear the procession approaching in the distance, (big funerals are always accompanied by a band), half a dozen or more poor family groups came by carrying a dead baby in a shoebox for burial. Seeing me standing there, waiting to say Mass, they came one by one for a blessing with holy water and a prayer. I assured them that their child would be in heaven with the baby Jesus and included the words of baptism as surely most of them had not yet been baptised. The infant mortality rate remains high in northern Peru to this day, as it does in many parts of the world. Even my father, buried 19 years’ ago in South Wales, is surrounded by children, some no more than a day old. We are born to die, this we know, but the sadness of losing a child far outweighs that of losing a parent. Let us never forget to remember and pray for the departed. May they rest in the peace Christ came to bring us at his birth.

 

​Today we keep the feast of the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel, St John the Evangelist or St John the Divine. Our Gospel comes from John, (Jn 20: 2-8), and is the account of Mary Magdalene running to tell Peter and the Beloved Disciple that she has discovered that the tomb of Jesus is empty and of how it is “the other disciple” entered to tomb after Peter. “He saw and he believed.” John is the disciple who sees and believes, who in his Gospel presents us with the Word made flesh, who tells us that, “the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.” He teaches us that, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the Father’s only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth.” God bless and keep you in his love this Christmastide. Amen.