Ivybridge Parish part of Plymouth East RC Parishes.

04/09/2026

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Luke 5:33–39), people ask Jesus why he doesn’t encourage fasting among his followers. Jesus’s answer is wonderful: “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?” (That’s a typically Jewish style, by the way, answering a question with another question.)

This great image of the wedding feast comes up frequently in the New Testament, most obviously in the wedding feast at Cana narrative. And it is echoed in the tradition. Jesus is the wedding of heaven and earth, the marriage of divinity and humanity; he is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride. In him, the most intimate union is achieved between God and the world.

Could you imagine people fasting at a wedding banquet? Could you imagine going into an elegant room with your fellow guests and being served bread and water? It would be ridiculous! The mark of the Christian dispensation is joy. Exuberance. Delight. God and the world have come together. What could be better news?

03/09/2026

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Luke 5:1–11), Jesus climbs into Peter’s boat without asking permission. He simply commandeers this vessel that is central to the fisherman’s life and commences to give orders. This represents something of enormous moment: the invasion of grace.

Though God respects our relative independence, he is not the least bit content to leave us in a “natural” state. Instead, he wants to live in us, to become the Lord of our lives, moving into our minds, wills, bodies, imaginations, nerves, and bones.

This commandeering of nature by grace does not involve the compromising of nature but rather its perfection and elevation. When Jesus moves into the house of the soul, the powers of the soul are heightened and properly directed; when Jesus commands the boat of the natural human life, that life is preserved, strengthened, and given a new orientation.

This is signaled symbolically by the Lord’s directive to put out into the deep water. On our own, we can know and will within a very narrow range, seeking those goods and truths that appear within the horizon of our natural consciousness, but when grace invades us, we are enticed into far deeper waters.

02/09/2026

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Luke 4:38–44), Jesus declares his mission: “I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent.” And he continues to pursue his mission among us in our efforts to do the work of evangelization.

Do we need evangelization? The statistics couldn’t be clearer. Did you know that the fastest-growing category in polls of religious affiliation is “none”? And did you know that there are far more nones than Catholics in this country?

So, Catholics cannot avoid the demand of evangelization, proclaiming the faith. Vatican II couldn’t be clearer on this score, seeing the Church itself as nothing but a vehicle for evangelization: It’s not so much the case that the Church has a mission, but rather that a mission has the Church.

St. Paul VI and St. John Paul II made this idea central to their teaching. In fact, John Paul famously called for a new evangelization. Bringing people to Christ is not one work among many; rather, it is the central work of the Church, that around which everything else that we do revolves.

01/09/2026

Friends, today’s Gospel (Luke 4:31–37) reports that Jesus came to Capernaum, entered the synagogue on a sabbath, and began to teach. So far, so ordinary. Any bar-mitzvahed adult had the privilege of speaking in synagogue and commenting on the Scripture.

But then it says that the people “were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” Once again, we’d probably pass over this rather quickly, but it meant the world to a first-century Jew. The ordinary teachers would have appealed to their own teachers and authorities, and finally to Moses and the Torah, which were unassailable.

The Sermon on the Mount gives a wonderful example of Jesus’s authoritative teaching. He appears as the new Moses. Like Moses, he goes up on a mountain, and like Moses, he brings down a kind of new law. But here the comparisons get strained, for Jesus does something that even Moses could never do: He claims authority over the Torah itself. “You have heard it said... but I say.”

What he means is that they have heard it said in the Torah! And this was the authority beyond which there was no appeal. That’s why the people “were astonished at his teaching.”

01/09/2026

31/08/2026

Friends, in today’s Gospel (Luke 4:16–30), Jesus begins his Galilean ministry with a prophetic message in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

The moment has arrived, the privileged time, the kairos; something that human beings have been longing for and striving after and hoping to see has appeared. In Jesus of Nazareth, the divine and human have come together in a salvific way, and this reconciliation is the long-awaited kingdom of God.

One motif in Scripture is persistent: the passionate desire for deliverance, the cry of the heart toward the God from whom the people feel alienated. What Jesus announces in his first sermon, and what he demonstrates throughout his life and ministry, is that this wild desire of his ancestors, this hope against hope, this intimate union of God and humanity, is an accomplished fact, something that can be seen and heard and touched.

30/08/2026

Friends, last week we heard the great Gospel (Matt 16:21–27) describing Peter’s confession. Because he says correctly who Jesus is, he is declared rock, the firm ground upon which the Church shall be built. And just moments later—our Gospel for today—he is told that he is a Satan, a stumbling block, thinking not as God thinks but as men think. What accounts for this rather remarkable reversal?

In the Gospel, it’s always relatively simple: He doesn’t get the cross. The entire momentum of the life of Jesus is toward the cross. All sorts of forces are trying to keep him from it—some out of self-interest, some out of genuine concern. But they all have this in common: They don’t get it; they don’t get him.

So Peter, probably out of genuine love for Jesus, urges him away from the passion: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” Having correctly confessed who Jesus is, Peter promptly forgets what that entails. Being the Son of God, he thought, meant power and lordship, not ignominy and death.

30/08/2026

Some memorable moments from Fr Victor’s final Mass at the Priory. Canon Mark O’Keefe concelebrated, and thanked Fr Victor for his time with us! He will be sadly missed!

29/08/2026

Friends, today’s Gospel (Mark 6:17–29) tells of the passion of John the Baptist, and it suggests to me “the Herod principle” that I like to apply to contemporary atheists. The Gospels tell us that Herod Antipas arrested John the Baptist because the prophet had publicly challenged the king. Herod threw John into prison, but then, we are told, the king loved secretly to listen to the prophet, who continued to preach from his cell.

A basic assumption of biblical people is that everyone is hardwired for God. As the Psalmist prayed, “My soul rests in God alone.” My wager is that everyone—and that includes Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins—implicitly wants God and hence remains permanently fascinated by the things of God.

Though the fierce atheists of today profess that they would like to eliminate religious speech and religious ideas, secretly they love to listen as people speak of God. So I say to Christians and other believers: Be ready for a good fight, and get some spiritual weapons in your hands. And I say to the atheists: I’ll keep talking—because I know, despite your protestations, that your hearts are listening.