Given at the Memorial Service for Thomas Stonor, Lord Camoys, at Westminster Cathedral on 21st April 2023
This afternoon we are enriched by many noble sentiments and gracious memories. I thank all who are contributing to this Memorial Service.
For my part, the words of the first reading had special resonance - in part because it was one of the shortest readings I have ever heard, and no harm in that! These few words, from the Book of the Apocalypse, reassure us that in our sense of loss, there is a greater peace that awaits us, most certainly.
‘Then I heard a voice from heaven say to me: “Write down: Happy are those who die in the Lord! Happy indeed, the Spirit says; now they can rest forever after their work since their good deeds go with them”.’
The Funeral Mass for Lord Camoys took place at Stonor Park on 21st January. At the same time, a Mass was being celebrated in the Church of The Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, to give thanks to God on the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Jesuit Province in England, Scotland and Wales.
It struck me at the time, as it does again today, that there was a providential symmetry about the coinciding of those two occasions.
This new Jesuit Province grew out of the Jesuit Mission to England, established some 40 years earlier, in 1580. The first of the Jesuits sent to establish that mission was, of course, St Edmund Campion. His name and that of Stonor Park are forever linked, for it was at Stonor Park that he was given shelter, friendship and heroic support.
The attic rooms of Stonor Park contained the secret printing press used to produce Campion’s famous defence of the Catholic faith, the ‘Ten Reasons’. Its distribution, together with his ‘Challenge to the Privy Council', caused a great sensation and led to his arrest, torture and martyrdom. He died, in great agony, with words on his lips wishing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ‘a long and quiet reign with all prosperity’.
This steadfast loyalty to the Faith shown by the family brought them a share in this suffering, with exile, long-term arrests, huge recusancy fines and loss of estates. But nothing has deflected this great family from its Catholic identity and fidelity, clearly expressed in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity at Stonor, a place of Catholic worship of unbroken lineage from its construction in the thirteenth century to the present day.
Today we give thanks to God for this fidelity and courage, coming to us across the centuries and carried forward with such determination, skill and sense of service by this Lord Camoys, whose memory we honour this afternoon and for whom we pray.
The rich and remarkable life of Tom Stonor can only be fully understood from the perspective of his faith in God, his embrace of Jesus the Christ as his Saviour and his willing service of the Catholic Church, a service whose willingness found, on occasion, a counterpart in threads of admonition and criticism. But his loyalty did not waver for it was so deeply rooted, and can be understood even in the terms of the Scripture passages we have just heard and the words we sing.
For the Seventh Baron Camoys, God was his ‘dear Lord and Father’ and his faith was as profound and direct as the invitation of the Lord, in the words of St Matthew’s Gospel, that those who trust in him will find ‘rest for the soul’ and strength for the tasks at hand.
This Gospel passage is, of course, resonant with the mystery of the Blessed Trinity: it is the Father from whom all life proceeds, who expresses his life in the person of the Eternal Son, incarnate in Jesus, who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, draws us to that loving Father, relieving us of our labours and overburdening anxieties. The Chapel at Stonor Park, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, must have been a place of great comfort and resolution for a man of such faith.
There was another fidelity which marked the life of Tom Stonor: a great faithfulness to the monarch, especially to Her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. As we have heard, he served her with loyalty and affection, working always for the good of her realm and its prosperity.
Today we remember a good and faithful servant in both of these spheres: to the Catholic faith and to the monarch.
And a third must be added, too, intimately linked to the others: a faithfulness to his family, especially to Lady Elisabeth in whose mourning we all participate today. This is a family, like many others, whose great tradition is moving on through its history, and ours. We ask God’s blessing on all its members.
And there is a forward vision to encourage and embolden us today. As St John has told us this afternoon: ‘We are already the children of God, but what we are in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is that when it is revealed we shall be like him (our Blessed Lord) because we shall see him as he really is’.
This is the hope that nurtures us today: not a hope that our personal strengths will see us through whatever uncertainties lie before us, but a hope and belief that no matter the present uncertainties we face, there is a sure and certain hope of a future and lasting fulfilment, awaiting us with God, secured for all time by the promises of our Saviour. This is the hope on which we build for an eternal future, a hope which is a gift of God, made evident and unshakeable in Christ's victory over death, a hope nurtured and sustained among us through the ministry and life of the Church.
May this hope reign strongly in our hearts, our actions and our lives so that we, in our turn and in every circumstance, may we be witnesses to these great promises of faith that sustained our departed brother. May his witness and his memory long be treasured.
May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.
✠ Cardinal Vincent Nichols
Archbishop of Westminster
Photo: Mazur/CBCEW.org.uk