Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale1036

VIII

Ad Sodales venerabilis Anglici Collegii Romae.*

Your Eminence, dear Brother Bishops,

Monsignor Hudson,

Students and Staff of the Venerable English College,

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you today to the Apostolic Palace,

the House of Peter. I greet my Venerable brother, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-

O'Connor, a former Rector of the College, and I thank Archbishop Vincent

Nichols for his kind words, spoken on behalf of all present. I too look back

with great thanksgiving in my heart to the days that I spent in your country

in September 2010. Indeed, I was pleased to see some of you at Oscott College

on that occasion, and I pray that the Lord will continue to call forth many

saintly vocations to the priesthood and the religious life from your homeland.

Through God's grace, the Catholic community of England and Wales is

blessed with a long tradition of zeal for the faith and loyalty to the Apostolic

See. At much the same time as your Saxon forebears were building the Schola

Saxonum, establishing a presence in Rome close to the tomb of Peter, Saint

Boniface was at work evangelizing the peoples of Germany. So as a former

priest and Archbishop of the See of Munich and Freising, which owes its

foundation to that great English missionary, I am conscious that my spiri-

tual ancestry is linked with yours. Earlier still, of course, my predecessor

Pope Gregory the Great was moved to send Augustine of Canterbury to your

shores, to plant the seeds of Christian faith on Anglo-Saxon soil. The fruits of

that missionary endeavour are only too evident in the six-hundred-and-fifty-

year history of faith and martyrdom that distinguishes the English Hospice

of Saint Thomas à Becket and the Venerable English College that grew out

of it.

Potius hodie quam cras, as Saint Ralph Sherwin said when asked to take

the missionary oath, "rather today than tomorrow". These words aptly

convey his burning desire to keep the flame of faith alive in England, at

whatever personal cost. Those who have truly encountered Christ are

unable to keep silent about him. As Saint Peter himself said to the elders

* Die 3 Decembris 2012.