Login 
A Gregorian of 30 Traditional Latin Masses for the repose of Dad's immortal soul has just concluded today. The following article is an updated version of an earlier tribute to him.
Christi Simus Non Nostri. This Latin phrase, immortalized by the great St. Columba, was carefully copied by Dad into the front page of his Missal. In English it reads: ''We belong to Christ, not to ourselves.'' Looking back over his life, one can discern something of the mysterious workings of grace leading Dad home to God from the very beginning.
He was born in Litherland, a suburb of Liverpool, during the crucible of World War II, on the 15th June, 1943. A short time later, he was baptized, as Gordon Kenneth Houghton, in St. Philip's Anglican parish church. From his earliest days, he would be known more familiarly to everyone as Ken.
Ken's childhood was not always the easiest, but he managed to get into the local grammar school and developed his interests in art and architecture. At the age of 16, he became a junior in the offices of the Norwest Holst construction company. In his late teens, he met his soul-mate Doreen and married her when he was 22-years-old; she was then aged just 19-years.Â
They were married at St. Philip's and spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Wight. They went on to set a good Christian example by being married for 47 years. Dad was always keen to highlight the importance of Christian marriage, by marking each wedding anniversary with celebration and thanksgiving to God. He bought Mum ruby-coloured rosary beads for their 40th wedding anniversary and she bought him sapphire-coloured ones for their 45th. Mum had been baptized in the Catholic Church, as a baby, and their marriage needed to be convalidated in the Catholic Church in the late 1980's, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Ken progressed through the ranks at Norwest Holst and, by his late 30's, had attained the position of Personnel Manager. He had also managed to get a mortgage on a nice little new-build as a home for the family, which now included us three children.Â
As you can see he was a snappy-dresser. This was the 1970's and Dad was, at this point, quite a party-animal. He liked to sing, dance and partake of homebrew beer with his friends. He purchased a powerful Dynatron music system and our home frequently resonated loudly with the likes of Abba, The Beegees, The Carpenters and James Last.
Nevertheless, these became years of intense religious searching. Dad first went through a brief period of 'dropping out' of going to church and sitting out in the sun, wearing flared jeans and white pumps, on Sunday mornings. I recall standing on the gate as an infant and laughing at my siblings going off to St. Philip's with Mum in their Sunday-best. I also remember poor Mum, tearfully remonstrating with him: ''Look what a bad influence you are having on that boy!'' Don't worry, Ken soon came good.
Around this time, Dad went through a deep and mysterious conversion experience and basically fell in love with Our Lord Jesus Christ. When he returned to the Protestant church, he was fired-up and quickly became disillusioned with, what he called, 'nominal Anglicanism'.
He met a young and dynamic vicar who was encouraging personal conversion, charismatic renewal and the formation of lay people to pray, evangelize and visit the sick. Dad began to study and pray the Sacred Scriptures, to visit the sick and to take part in street evangelization campaigns with the vicar. One time they even had some raw eggs hurled at them for their missionary endeavours!
Around this time, Dad was awoken from his sleep by a male voice instructing him to read Malachi 1 - 2:9; a voice which persisted until he got out of bed. It seemed crazy - and a little scary - to us all when Dad told us about it the next morning. That is, until he read the text out loud. If you have never read it, the aforesaid verses express God's indictment of unfaithfulness in the priesthood. How prescient they are for these times in the Catholic Church! Dad began to discern, at that time, whether he should go off and study for the Anglican ministry and he deepened his own prayer life accordingly. When he eventually attended an Anglican selection-conference, he was shocked to encounter many candidates who no longer saw conversion from sin to Jesus Christ as being as important as engaging in social action. Neither was Dad accepted for training...
This is Dad and I at Christmas 1981. He never wore a clerical-collar, but ended up in this surgical collar instead! This was because a fork-lift truck knocked a warehouse door on top of him as he was cycling past with my brother one evening. To make it worse, the driver ran out on top of the collapsed door to see if my brother was alright. He had to tell the driver that he was fine, but that Dad was all the while getting crushed beneath the massive door! Dad would suffer neck and spinal pain for the rest of his life. One of my own earliest religious memories dates to those times. It is one of Dad telling me that Jesus wants to have a deep friendship with each one of us; we need never think of Him being only a distant figure in Heaven, but as being always close to us.
Faith in Christ and family life were foundational aspects of Dad's life. In the early 1980's these helped him through some bereavements - one very tragic - of close relatives. As the decade unfolded, Dad's search for the full Truth grew deeper and more intense. This sincere search took him - and all of us! - through several Anglican parishes, a Baptist community and eventually to a free-church group. His neck injury caused him to be away from work for many months and his company actually made him redundant. Remarkably, the pay-out they gave him helped him to clear his mortgage and to purchase a bigger house. Some time later Dad found work as a secretary for the National Federation for Building Trade Employers (NFBTE); he would go on to work there for 10 years.
Throughout this time, Christian hospitality was a hallmark of our parents' marriage and they provided many meals and supper-evenings for fellow Christian friends and for the wider family. Dad also supported his Mum, sister and a great-aunt, who seemed to us to be one of the last great Edwardian ladies! He also enjoyed gardening, book collecting and studying wildlife. In 1983, my brother passed his driving test and we bought our first car. It was a bright red Austin Maestro and we shared holidays at favourite locations, such as Llandudno, Settle and Keswick.Â
This picture was taken by my big brother at the summit of Skiddaw, near Keswick. Remarkably, the nearby Protestant Keswick Convention was to become a most unlikely setting for a totally unexpected Road-to-Damascus-Experience for Dad.
For a few years, we had been members of a virulently anti-Catholic free-church and had imbibed their fundamentalist reading of the Bible. The pastor there even held that the pope was the Antichrist and Rome the Whore of Babylon! In those years, Dad was always on the look-out for polemical texts with which to try and convert Catholics to Evangelical Protestantism. He thought he had found one in a bookstore at the Keswick Convention, when he gleefully bought a book entitled The Facts About the Catholic Church.
In reality though, it was Dad who was about to be knocked from his theological horse, because this was not anti-Catholic rhetoric at all, but rather an articulate work of Catholic apologetics aimed at sincere Protestants and written by a Redemptorist priest, called Fr. Cummings, in 1956.
Some years later, Dad wrote inside the front cover of his copy that he believed that God had led him to find it and opened his heart to learn from it that the Catholic Church is the True Church, founded by Jesus Christ, and where Dad ultimately found the fullness of Jesus Christ and joy in His Name.
Sometime later he attended an Ecumenical Stations of the Cross at the Roman Catholic parish of English Martrys in Litherland. This was a time that ecumenism worked, because the good priests involved never tried to water-down the Catholic Faith. Quite the opposite in fact! After this, Dad began to frequently attend Holy Mass and also Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Dad was awestruck by the beauty and reverence of the Catholic liturgies and devotions that he experienced. He had discovered the One True Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.Â
He next began to help Mother Teresa's Missionary Sisters of Charity with their soup kitchen for the homeless in Seel Street, Liverpool. One day, Dad shared his joy that these nuns were not just speaking about religion, but living it. I was amazed at the changes in Dad when he told me that some of the homeless men could be aggresive and rude, and that he just accepted this because of his desire to serve Jesus. He also began attending the Blessed Sacrament Shrine in Liverpool City Centre in his lunch hour. He found the Holy Mass and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament there to be an oasis of peace in the heart of the busy city.
A couple of very orthodox old priests helped Dad at this time to see, as Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman said, that to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant. After months of prayer, studying the Creed and learning Church History, Dad was received into the Catholic Church by Canon Michael Culhane on 22nd December, 1989. That night in the Catholic parish, I said towards the Tabernacle: ''Lord, all my life I have been taught that You are not there. If You are there though, please help me to accept it.'' As the years unfolded, I very gradually received a deep love for the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.Â
This picture was taken of Mum and Dad on their 25th Wedding Anniversary, which occured around that time. Mum and I noticed a transformation in Dad to now being a person marked by deep and prolonged peace. We acknowledged to each other, that the Catholic Church must indeed be true to bring this change in him.
Dad joined the parish S.V.P. to help the disadvantaged and went to a weekly Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. During that year, he actually wore holes in the knees of his trousers through all the praying he did in the church!Â
Almost one year to the day after Dad's conversion, Mum was also received into full communion in the Catholic Church at English Martyrs. This was a great consolation to Dad and it became a testimony to the deep union of married couples, who receive together the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion.
As I reached adulthood in those years, my own relationship with Dad was deepening and maturing. I hope to be eternally grateful to him for the time he spoke to me about John 6:53-58.
Dad told me that he was worried about my immortal soul, because I was not receiving the Body and Blood of Christ and - by Jesus' own teaching in that text - I could not have divine life in me.Â
Although I was angry with Dad at the time for suggesting this, I could not avoid the fact that Jesus Christ - Truth Himself and the Lord that I had loved since I was just 7-years of age - had said this and He had even acknowledged that many would leave Him because of this teaching. It took several more years for this to really get through to my stubborn heart, and finally to my will, but, at Easter 1993, I was also received into the Catholic Church at English Martyrs.Â
Finally, we could receive Holy Communion together. In those days, I still remember the local Catholic churches as being places of reverent silence before and after Mass. It was one of the striking differences of Catholic churches to Protestant buildings.
I mentioned recently that Dad, Mum and I went to Lourdes in 1999. It was the only time that Dad left the British Isles in his whole life. He loved Our Lady and prayed the Rosary to the end of his life. Sometimes he wore a set of Rosary beads around his neck, as a witness, when he was out and about.
When I left the seminary, Mum and Dad were the number one support to me through a dark and lonely time. Had Dad not walked me through that period, I do not think that I would have made it through. He often listened to me, gave advice, stayed with me and put Holy Water on my head and about my room at night.
Dad loved the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the union with Jesus Christ which this central mystery provides. On the Rock of Peter, and in the harmony of Sacred Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium, he had found what he had always been looking for. Better than me, Dad could nevertheless see beyond the battlelines of the present Culture War, in order to love the souls of the Church's enemies, who need our prayers rather than mere angry condemnation.Â
When his career came to an unexpected and disheartening end in his 50's, Dad became a daily Mass-goer. He loved the gift of the Real Presence and desired for all of his family, friends, neighbours and former Protestant confreres to enter into this peace. To bear witness, he wore a Benedictine Crucifix over his jumper, carried a Missal through the streets to Mass, and - in a throw-back to his Protestant mission days - made little tracts about the Catholic Faith to hand out to people. Towards the end of his life, he even appended his personal phone number to invite potential converts. When he was eventually forced to resort to the use of an electric wheelchair, Dad decorated this with key texts from Sacred Scripture. Each Christmas he placed an illuminated crib-scene in the front window at home and at Easter, and other times, made evangelistic posters to put there. At the end of his funeral, as flowers were presented to the statue of Our Lady, Dad's eulogy was read out. He had written this himself to counter the modernistic trend of celebrity-culture-funerals, by offering an urgent and Christocentric call to all present to seek Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church and inviting them to pray for the repose of his immortal soul.
Here are Mum and Dad with the Tabernacle just after my wedding in 2002.Â
For years, Mum and Dad hosted a weekly prayer group at home. This included the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, intercessory prayers, praise and worship songs, and a period of study of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Dad kept a book with prayer requests and newspaper cuttings of local tragedies and crimes in order to pray for those who suffer and for those who need conversion.
When Mum retired, they went to daily Mass together and, for years, they prayed parts of the daily Divine Office together. Every day, they also prayed for the conversion of all their children and grandchildren, and that their six grandchildren would be kept safe from the works of the devil. Dad made a picture depicting this last request and framed other little pictures to express the importance of Sunday Mass, daily conversion and also to offer words of consolation for difficult times from Sacred Scripture. These still adorn the home today.
Both Mum and Dad were a strong support to this Torch of The Faith apostolate. Just prior to his diagnosis with cancer of the stomach, Dad came to our flat to sign the on-line petition to the British Government to stand against so-called 'Gay-Marriage'.
Soon after that, he received a deep sense that he was being called to suffer, but that Christ would sustain him. He said to all of us: ''God is closer to me now than my own shadow.'' Poor lad, he tried his very best to carry the heavy cross of cancer after his shock diagnosis and even used the opportunity to evangelize the nurses and - during the times he had to visit the hospital - his fellow patients.
A few days before he died, just 5 months after being diagnosed with cancer, Dad made his last Confession. Then, when Fr. Barry McAllister held up the Host to give Dad his last Holy Communion, he looked up and said to the Lord: ''I know I am dying Lord. I accept this. Please forgive me for all the sins of my life.'' He was unconscious for the last couple of days, but we kept at his bedside to pray the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet and to offer frequently the prayer to St. Joseph for a holy death. There was also a blessed candle burning in the room and Dad had his hand on his Benedictine Crucifix. He received the Last Rites and the Apostolic Pardon from two priests on his last day. As he left this life, I gently sang the In Paradisum over him. It was the 19th October, 2012.
A few days later, as he was laid out in his best suit, Brown Scapular and wearing the Jesus Lives badge that he had worn so often in life, I had a real sense of the Resurrection.
Perhaps the best way to conclude this tribute to Dad, is to let his final diary entry speak. It witnesses so eloquently to the priority of grace working throughout Dad's life and to his loving response to this. Sometimes I am in awe of the graces we have received. Â Â
''This evening was bad again, with much pain. Sometimes it is so bad that it brings tears to my eyes. But I do offer it up for all those we are praying for. Lord Jesus, continue to give me the strength through your grace to cope with all this suffering. I was suddenly drained of all energy... it is as though you are dying - everything seems to drain away. It is at these times I realize I can trust in You Lord Jesus, for I can only rest in Your Love.''
At the conclusion of the Gregorian of 30 Traditional Latin Masses, I say today: ''God bless Dad. May you rest now in His Truth. Truly, Christi Simus Non Nostri.'' Â
