8 Ogle Street, London, W1W 6HS Tel.: 020 7636 2883

Sunday Mass: 9am, 11am, 6pm.

Weekday Mass: 12:30pm & 6pm.

Saturdays & Bank Holidays: 10am.

Confessions: On Call, Sat. 10:30-11am & 5:30-6pm.

She spent her youth among socialists, anarchists and communists and considered herself to be one of them.

She lived a rootless, bohemian life, the nights of bars and parties and unhappy love affairs. One child she aborted, another she kept, both conceived out of wedlock by different men – whom you could not call “fathers”.

She shocked her friends by being baptised and received into the Roman Catholic Church. They called her a traitor.
By the time she died in New York in 1980, she had become the conscience of the Church in the United States of America.

Tuesday 2nd February, is the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, also known as The Purification or Candlemas.

This "Feast of Light” - which is what Candlemas means - opens the transition from Crib to Cross, from Christmastide to the Passover Feast, and the 50 days of Easter.

The child, on the 40th day after his birth, is still in the arms of his mother, but already she is in the Temple in Jerusalem offering him in sacrifice.

Thirty years later she will hold him in her arms again. Then, on that first Good Friday, the sacrifice of her son will be complete, and the sword will have pierced her heart, just as Simeon, the old man, foretold.

Now she holds the warm living body of her baby. Thirty-three years later, she will hold the dead body of her grown son.

So important is the conversion of St Paul, that it is recorded three times in the Acts of the Apostles, in vivid language.

Saint Luke tells us how Saul fell to the ground on his way to Damascus, “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord”.

According to Sister Wendy Beckett, a famous ubiquitous nun and art critic, nobody could have better appreciated this all-consuming anger, than Caravaggio, who was probably the most violent painter in history.

All honeymoons end. Some honeymoons end on the honeymoon! In the language of today’s Gospel, “the wine runs out...” 

This rather downbeat message is what the church tells couples preparing for married life.  Yes, the wine of our first love, a strong beautiful love based on eros and desire, on our good will and generosity, can run out.  It does not last.

You can then end up with “water”, gallons of it.  Water will keep you alive, but it will not make your eyes sparkle.  For that you need wine.  The good news is that this water can be changed into wine, new wine, much better than the first wine.

The sign that this water is being changed into new wine is that you become vulnerable. Love makes you vulnerable.  When you start to feel really loved by another, you do not have to be self-protective.  Your defences start to relax.  You are free to be yourself. All of yourself.