BE ALERT! December 1, 2024

Our Lord’s urgent message in today’s Advent Sunday Gospel would have had a very special place in the minds of our Catholic forebears only a few hundred years ago in a time of persecution in Elizabethan England.

     Anyone who has read of Harvington Hall will recall the wonderfully ingenious priests’ hiding places and the small chapel in the attic with windows overlooking the drawbridge, the only entrance from the outside world. This was a house built for vigilance, designed with permanent watchfulness in mind. When a priest arrived, always in disguise and known as a priest only to a very few trusted persons in the house, preparations would be made for confessions and Mass to be celebrated as quickly as possible lest word got out, or some servant betrayed the priest for the sake of the large reward offered by the government for information leading to the capture of any priests. A trusted servant, a Catholic of course, would be posted at the window overlooking the drawbridge so that if any sudden posse of armed men came to search the house, hoping to capture the priest, there would be time hurriedly to hide the Mass vestments and vessels, and, even more importantly, the priest himself. After all, once a priest was found, Catholics knew that there was little chance he would ever escape custody but would be put on trial for treason and executed by hanging and quartering.

     No wonder these words of Our Lord meant so much to them. Vigilance was the price you paid for your faith and for the lives of your priests. Nowadays, we feel no need for such vigilance. Our lives and the lives or priests in most places do not seem to depend on our keeping such a constant and careful look-out for danger.

     Yet Our Lord said those words not only to His immediate followers, but to all people. “Be alert at all times!” How can these words apply to us, then, in each of our own concrete circumstances?       ~ FR. PAUL DOBSON