HOMILY FOR OUR LATE CHAPLAIN MGR ANTONY CONLON

High Mass of Requiem was sung for the repose of the soul of our dear late Brother and Chaplain, who served the Order loyally for some fifty years, at the Church of the Assumption Warwick Street, following his wishes. The celebrant was Fr John Hemer MHM, assisted by Fr Nicholas Edmonds-Smith, Provost of the Oxford Oratory, and Fr Gary Dench. The homily, published below, was preached by Father David Elliott, Chaplain of the Oratory School, Reading. Grand Prior emeritus Fra' Ian Scott, Abbot Hugh Allen OPraem, and Monsignor John Armitage, present Chaplain of the Grand Priory, were in choir.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

FUNERAL ORATION PREACHED BY FATHER DAVID ELLIOTT

I would like to say a few words today about why coming to God’s altar in grief is a sign of a strong society and a strong Church. We will be familiar with the injunction in the Book of II Maccabees to pray for the dead. And while we pray for God’s mercy upon all souls, we especially seek to pray for those Christian souls who have responded to Christ’s message in this life, and who have sought to pass that message to others in Word and in Sacrament: ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me; and him who comes to me I will not cast out.’ (John 6)

While this address is not intended as a eulogy for Fr Antony, I hope at least he might assent to some of the sentiments contained herein. With that in mind, it would be remiss not to refer at least once to royalty. In the 2006 film, The Queen, which sought to chronicle the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, The Queen seeks counsel from Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. Uncompromisingly the latter complains, ‘you sit on the most powerful throne in Europe, head of an unbroken line that goes back more than a thousand years. Do you really think that any of your predecessors would’ve dropped everything and gone up to London because a bunch of hysterics carrying candles needed help with their grief…’

Whoever wrote those lines understood all too well our modern problem with grief: a problem which our dearly departed friend spent much of his priestly life trying to correct.

Now, some count themselves fortunate, the Church has embraced our modern world: presenting innovation as authentic religion rediscovered from the earliest Church, after having been suppressed for centuries. Mourning, we are told, shows a distinct lack of faith; praying for forgiveness implies a lack of godliness; and black is a most pagan colour. 

But this self-same novel attitude to grief has led to the hysterical masses and their candles which are quite literally meaningless. Mary Douglas in her anthropological masterpiece ‘Natural Symbols’ written in 1970 (note the date) lamented the divorce between rituals and their meaning. The demise of ritual, she says, leads to an individualisation of religion. The mistake is to see this as progressive in contrast to ritualism which is seen as primitive – a false distinction. The distinction is not between primitive and progressive but between weak society and strong society. A strong society preserves those ritual actions which build community and impart identity. The hysterical masses carry their candles: religious symbols emptied of meaning.

Just over a year ago in a series of midweek discussions on the Catholic faith I spoke to indulgences. The dearth of understanding even by Catholics of many decades standing was clear. One did mention the importance he attached to taking his sister to visit his parents’ grave in November, but when asked why they went the reply was ‘to remember’. No mention of indulgence, no mention of prayers for the souls of the departed, just to remember. Faith and ritual emptied of meaning, reduced to an act of remembrance, the stuff of the protestants and atheists. 

The hallmarks of a strong Catholic society is the adherence to the Corporal and Spiritual works of mercy. At Fr Antony’s all too brief and simple graveside funeral last year we did at least show that final act of mercy towards his body. But we also derive encouragement and satisfaction from his example in life as a priest and school chaplain and also in the effective work he did in his many years’ service to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and his other associations.

No less important were those spiritual acts of mercy. I believe the first of these: education of the ignorant, is something he saw as a particular task. In all he did he sought to bring others closer to the Church in an era when this was an increasingly difficult task. 

Our actions today are the actions of a strong society. A strong society here in earth but even more the bonds which tie us to that stronger society still – the Church in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant. The mutual co-operation which binds the three parts of the one Church.

St John Henry Newman in his Dream of Gerontius saw Purgatory as a necessary prison, indeed, a ‘golden prison’ 

‘Now let the golden prison ope its gates,

Making sweet music, as each fold revolves

Upon its ready hinge. And ye, great powers,

Angels of Purgatory, receive from me

My charge, a precious soul, until the day,

When, from all bond and forfeiture released,

I shall reclaim it for the courts of light.’


There is no name given to the soul of the old man. Not because he has none but because he can be any man. The task of our Mass today is to pray for the soul of our friend, ask for his soul stained with sin to be wiped clean, that the Angels’ return to waken him for Heaven may be quicker. That sacrifice on the Cross which broke down the doors of hell and unlocked the gates to Heaven is made here present today, upon the altar of the Church in which we stand. United in the Sacrifice of Christ we are given assurance that the soul of our friend lives on and through these prayers, the same gates of Heaven appear ever larger as, we pray, his soul comes closer to God. For the part of the Saints in Heaven they too urge on those self-same souls in Purgatory pulling them ever closer to their Communion of Saints. Just as Michelangelo in his famous painting of The Last Judgment depicted St Dominic drawing souls close to Heaven with his blessed Rosary beads, so today we know that the Saints pull the souls of the departed closer with their prayers as we press them on with ours. 

Those rosary beads were among the few possessions Fr Antony had with him as he departed this life one year ago. The Sunday after Easter Day is an auspicious day with its many associations: Dominica in Albis, Low Sunday, St Thomas Sunday (My Lord and my God), Divine Mercy Sunday declared by Pope St John Paul II who then himself died after first Vespers, and Quasimodo Sunday after the first word of the Introit: ‘As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation: If so be you have tasted that the Lord is sweet’. (1 Peter 2:2). To taste that the Lord is sweet for Eternity is what we ask for ourselves and those whom we love. Many in our world seek to take what is good and wholesome and turn it against itself. As an historian in his own right our dearly departed brother sought to address damage done by the previous centuries which had become a bar to others tasting the sweetness of the Lord. 

Indeed as we know Victor Hugo (he had to be a Frenchman) twisted the Quasimodo phrase: a deformed child abandoned, the archdeacon of the Church of Notre Dame who becomes increasingly twisted, represented that brand of thought diametrically opposed to Faith and Truth. Hugo and his twisted creations ultimately products of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror which knocked down the altars dedicated to Christ, tossed crucifixes into the streets, and introduced the cult of the goddess Reason. The spiritual patrimony, and in particular, the patrimony of Christianity were thus torn from their evangelical foundation. What the true historian sees is that, in order to restore Christianity to its full vitality, it is essential to return these to that foundation. The task of the true philosopher is to undo that which made Voltaire and Rousseau boast: ‘God made man in his own image, and man has repaid the compliment.’ But the candle of faith (not a hysterical one) still burns. It burns because of faithful souls who refuse to accept the recasting of God in their own image. And it burns because of that strong bond within the Church. It is this which attracted our brother and fed him throughout his service to the Church. For him, the Church and God could never be the disfigured caricature of Hugo’s imagination nor a narcissistic Hall of Mirrors. A life in search of Truth, of Beauty, of Reconciliation, and Salvation. A recognition in Our Lady’s words that ‘The Mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name’. 

Ὅτι ἐποίησέν μοι μεγάλα ὁ δυνατός, καὶ ἅγιον τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ.