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Another lady who welcomed me at my reception into the Catholic Church was also named in honour of Our Lady. At that time, she was a joyful, young wife and mother who attended Mass and traditional devotions, like Benediction, Novenas and Stations of the Cross, each week in the parish. Her faithful reception of the sacraments flowed out into service in the parish and public acts of pro-life witness.
A few years later she too received the shocking diagnosis of cancer. The heaviness of this Cross can be glimpsed by considering the youth of her husband and children, together with the hardships of her chemotherapy. Nevertheless, with God's grace and the love of her family, it was a heavy Cross which she did indeed carry.
During those painful months, she gave me a little image of St. Martin de Porres and a beautiful wooden crucifix. This was especially poignant. Around this time we encountered her on a pilgrimage. She passed us by and we witnessed her speaking in a very natural and unaffected way to a framed photograph of St. Padre Pio. Looking back, it seems that she had already begun to live more in the next world than in this. Please, do not mistake this for some kind of escapism. This lady went right through her grim sufferings, helping her family practically and forgiving her enemies as she struggled on.
A priest told us - in hushed tones of awe - Â that in the last days of her sufferings, a nurse had been washing our friend's feet for her. The nurse had suddenly exclaimed that she thought she had been washing the feet of Christ when, looking down, she had seen the nails.
The recollection of such mysterious happenings can aid our faith and encourage us. We seem to glimpse in them the intimacy which Jesus grants to those who embrace their crosses and join them to His, accepting His will even when they seem to be losing everything. And such union with Christ draws souls. When this lady went home to God, her house was full for the final Rosary, and the Church was packed for her funeral. It was the first Catholic funeral I had ever attended and I was struck in a new way by the words 'In Baptism she died with Christ, may she now rise with Him to new life.'
One only has to look at this lady to see the love of Christ shining out!
Mrs. Campbell was a Catholic mother and grandmother who attended Mass every day at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine in the city-centre of Liverpool. During her life she had given birth to 12 children and had travelled to serve in Lourdes for 34 consecutive years. One of her grandsons became a Catholic priest.
In the late 1980's Dad was searching for the Truth and he began to attend the Shrine to pray and discern. Mrs. Campbell spotted him as a newcomer, befriended him and took him under her maternal wing. She began to reserve a seat for him at the daily lunch-time Mass.
It was not professional-looking meetings, lay leadership, liberal theologians or 'new models of being church' which attracted Dad to Catholicism. Rather, it was truth, beauty, holiness, reverence, Our Lady, the Real Presence and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. All of these mysteries were made accessible to him by little people like Mrs. Campbell, who, though well grounded in the heart of the city, shone with the light of Christ. In them one could glimpse the Church as both a human and divine institution.
When Mrs. Campbell passed from this life in 1992, Dad wrote a letter of tribute to the Catholic Pictorial. He explained: 'As a tribute to her and in remembrance of her life, I would like to say that it was because of her influence, her reverence, her love of God, of our Lord Jesus Christ, His Holy Mother and of the Mass and through her prayers that I became a Catholic.'
Matthew 25:35 announces: 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me.' In these times, when Modernists are pushing 'Gradualism' and pastoral programmes become ever more bureaucratic, we do well to reflect that it is the welcoming of sinners by ordinary but holy people, and never the welcoming of sin, which will attract people and lead them home to Christ and Salvation in His Church.   Â
