By Bishop Nicholas Hudson
Advent is a time to look both forward and back. We look forward to the coming of Our Saviour. We look back over the year that has passed. I will always remember 2019 for the canonisation of St John Henry Newman. I felt very privileged to be in St Peter’s Square for the Mass. It was a powerfully prayerful liturgy. One of the most poignant aspects was the presence, close to the sanctuary, of a large family. They were the Villalobos family, recipients of the miracle which had enabled the canonisation. It was deeply moving to see eight-year-old Gemma walk up the steps to greet the Holy Father, a child whose life had been saved in the womb of her mother Melissa through the intercession of St John Henry.
I had the joy of meeting Melissa and her seven children a few days later at a Mass of thanksgiving in the London Oratory. Melissa addressed the boys of the London Oratory School at the end of the liturgy. What impressed me was not just her fluency of expression but the fact that she resisted telling them anything of her story and Gemma’s. They had all heard it. She simply told them how Cardinal Newman had become a friend to her through prayer.
Ever since she heard of him on television and received a prayer card with his image, she said, she had called on him regularly to help her. So it was natural, when she was in danger of losing, because of desperate complications in pregnancy, the eight-weeks-conceived Gemma that she should call on him in her peril. She knew her prayer was heard as the bleeding stopped instantly and her bedroom was filled with the most beautiful fragrance of roses. ‘St John Henry Newman does not need to be the saint whom you choose to befriend, she told the boys, but do choose someone; make him or her your special friend, call on him or her in your moments of greatest need, and know that your prayer will be heard.’
One of the saints whose help I call on every day is my own patron, St Nicholas. Each of us meets him, as children, in the person of Santa Claus. But we easily confuse Santa Claus with Father Christmas. For Nicholas, Sint Claus, Santa Claus is the patron saint of children. Accordingly, in many European countries, children receive lavish gifts on his feast day, 6th December. Hence the confusion with Christmas.
I like to think of St Nicholas as the ‘saint of generosity’. For generosity really was his way of being. He is the patron saint of children because of his generosity towards three boys and three girls. Nicholas was a Bishop in sixth-century Myra in Turkey. Tradition has it that one day he was told of three boys who had suffered a dreadful fate: they had been captured by an inn-keeper who killed them and hid their disremembered bodies in a barrel. Nicholas prayed over the barrel and the boys were restored to life.
Even more touching is the tradition around his spontaneous generosity towards three poor girls. One day, he overhead three girls lamenting the fact they could not marry because their father was unable to afford a dowry. So he collected three bags of his own gold and threw them over the garden wall where the three women lived. The women married without ever knowing who was the cause of their transformed circumstances. Stories abounded of similar acts of generosity by Nicholas towards people in need.
Since Nicholas is my patron, I ask him to make me generous too. ‘Teach me to be generous, Nicholas’, I pray. At Christmastime we might think of asking Nicholas, the original Santa Claus, to make each one of us more generous; to give us the grace and imagination to surprise with generosity those who have much less than we do; seek, with his aid, to lavish anonymous generosity on someone less fortunate than ourselves. And for a New Year’s resolution? Why not choose a new saint to befriend and be befriended by; a saint who will hear your prayer in the hour of your greatest need and help you start living more like the One whose feast we wait with joy to celebrate?
