"If with all your heart you truly seek me, you shall ever surely find me." (Jer.29)

The gospels contain many instructive references to the great saint whose feast we celebrate on 22^nd July, St Mary Magdalen. She is one of the most honoured women in the whole Bible. Tradition has long identified Mary of Magdala as that woman of ill-repute who in a turmoil of intense repentance anoints Our Lord's feet with her tears. We learn from the fourth gospel that she is also the privileged first witness to the resurrection. Outside the empty tomb she once again sheds tears of love for the Master's Body. She weeps outside the empty tomb because she believes that the Lord has been lost to her. Then she finds Him. Perhaps it would be truer to say that He finds her. He reassures her with the sight of His risen and living Body, and commissions her to take the good news to His brethren. It is that same good news which the Church He founded has been proclaiming down the centuries ever since that first Easter day. It is the same good news we celebrate in every Holy Mass; the good news that Christ is truly risen from the dead, that He now lives and reigns for ever in the glory of the Father, and that we find Him at His altars.

The gospels are rich in detail about St.Mary Magdalen's life but they do not tell us how much time elapsed between the many sins she committed and the moment when the she received the grace of repentance, a grace so clearly evident by the time she came to anoint Christ's feet with tears of perfect contrition. We do not know how long she had lived in sin. If she is indeed the one from whom the Lord cast out seven devils, then we may reasonably suppose that sin and error had long been embedded in her soul before she came to Christ. The spiritual privileges bestowed on her, the most passionate of penitents, should certainly encourage all souls oppressed by sin to cast themselves down at the feet of Christ and beg His mercy, however entrenched their long continuance in sin might be. Year upon year of sin can be dissolved into nothing in one single moment of grace, one instant of merciful absolution.

This is one of the reasons why the passing of time is such a mercy. If our spiritual lives were not lived successively, moment by moment, and if the passage of time did not give us the distance to view our sins with a certain perspective, a certain dispassionate detachment, if we did not have the hindsight afforded us by the passing of time, would we ever repent? Would we ever mend our ways? How easily we immerse ourselves in thoughts of iniquity, or just in plain stupidity, without ever a thought for the future. Is it not often the case that only the graces brought by the passing of time bring us to our senses. Only as time passes do we stand back sufficiently and then seek repentance and amendment of life. The passage of time is often the means that God gives us to look back with a greater clarity at our past failures and errors of judgement. The passage of time is often the means that God gives us to understand with the benefit of hindsight our need of a new start.

With the passing of years comes growth in wisdom, sometimes. This can be true of us as individual members of the Church. It can also be true of the Church as an institution. The life of this institution functions on a number of interconnected levels. There is of course the supernatural level. The Church is divine in her origin, her constitution and her destiny. One of the sublime gifts with which Christ endowed the Church He founded is the gift of infallibility. In matters of faith and morals, Holy Church is incapable of error. The Church is not able to depart by one iota from the will of her Master in what pertains to the doctrines of the faith. The Lord will not allow error to hold sway in His Church. Individuals may hold erroneous beliefs, fallacious opinions, but such individual errors will never be the official teaching of the Church. Doctrinal integrity is guaranteed by the Church's indefectibility. That is one level on which the Church's life is lived. Alas, it is not the only level.

There is also the all too human level on which the Church functions, and that level is all too often the level of sin. The sins of individuals besmirch the plausibility of the institution. Our sins weaken the Church's mission. Fortunately, this tragically flawed human aspect of the Church's life is not irremediable. Sin weakens the Mystical Body, but cannot kill it. The Lord defends His Church, and part of that defence takes the form of giving sinners the grace to repent, to confess, to do penance, and to change their lives for the better. Day in and day out, year by year, century by century, the graces of repentance, contrition, and amendment are poured down from heaven with a startling prodigality. Not by measure does God give the Spirit. The grace of repentance which the Lord showers down on all who seek it is like an inexhaustible fountain. In every individual human life, in as many people as will ever be born, for as many generations as will ever be, for that unimaginable number of souls, God's grace is sufficient. It is more than sufficient, it is grace abounding.

In these two ways the Lord defends His Church. He defends her from doctrinal error by the gift of infallibility. He defends His people individually from the corrosive effects of sin by His gift of forgiveness. In that sense the future of the Church is assured. Truth is guaranteed. Sin can be dealt with. May we not then relax? With salvation's walls surrounded, may we not smile at all our foes? Perhaps, but only partially. In this context smiling might be dangerous. Truth and mercy we have in abundance. But there is also a further level on which the Church's life is conducted. And this third level is humanly speaking the most problematic. It is the level of prudential human judgement. On this level, the prudential level, we have real problems: the quagmires of limited human prudence and the shifting sands of fallible human judgement.

Much of the Church's daily life is governed not by infallible pronouncements, nor by individual spiritual triumphs and failures, but by something much more down to earth - fallible human judgement. This is what the Church runs on day by day, not exclusively, but largely. The shepherds of Christ's flock have the arduous and thankless task of trying to govern the People of God not just with the truths of revelation that we find in the Catechism. They also have to try and regulate the life of the People of God in countless matters on which revelation has nothing directly to say. This is the area of quagmire, the work of human hands. This work of human hands is clearly open to errors of judgement. It is in this area of fallible human judgement that things can go so wrong for the Church as she makes her pilgrim way across the ocean of the centuries. At the same time we need to remember that fallible human judgement will often have the best of intentions. We should not make the uncharitable mistake of automatically attributing malicious motives to wrong judgement, or labelling it as necessarily sinful.

One may well ask, what about the Holy Spirit in all this? Does not the Holy Spirit guide us in our daily tasks and sustain us in our decisions? Well yes He does, but His tranquil guidance is all too easily thwarted. We all know from our own daily score-card of spiritual progress and spiritual failure how easy it is to impede or occlude the gentle influence of the Holy Spirit. Our fallen minds and hearts are all too prone to waste His gifts and distort His counsels. Our very incomplete apprehension of reality, our small-mindedness, the fashions of the age, the pressures of political correctness (secular and ecclesiastical), all these contingent influences can be detrimental to the soundness of our judgement. So often it is only with hindsight and with the passage of time that the Church comes to see clearly how distorted our man-made policies can be. What in one generation might confidently but inaccurately be touted as 'the mind of the Church', in another age, another year, can also be presented as the clumsy errors of flawed human thinking and passing fashion.

In the life of the Church as a body, as well as in our own individual lives, there is always room for us to learn again and again the lessons that are so beautifully exemplified in St Mary Magdalen. The principal lesson is the gospel message of contrition, repentance, amendment of life, and the renewal of love. St Mary Magdalen teaches us to pour-out our hearts at the feet of Christ. Her radical devotion should also inspire us to seek Him out above all else, and when we find Him to try and change our lives for the better, by accepting God's message for what it really is, God's message, and not some human thinking.

Equally important, we should pray for the corresponding grace – the grace not to accept too hastily mere human thinking as if it were actually a word from the Lord; not to espouse too rashly the latest contingent opinion based on mere passing fashion, not to embrace it as if it were actually a matter of faith and morals, to be accepted as binding on all the faithful for all time. One of the devil's most effective tricks is to encourage us to think that by ruthlessly pursuing our own ideas and preferences we shall find Truth, or that by pursuing our own fads and fancies we shall possess Him.

FROM THE PROVOST