Today’s homily: St Swithun

When Heaven Opened Over England: St Swithun and the Rain of Grace

MASS Sacerdótes tui
LESSON Hebrews 7: 23-27
GOSPEL St Matthew 24: 42-47
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Who, thinkest thou, is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath appointed over his family, to give them meat in season?”

There are saints whom the world forgets completely. There are others whom the world remembers for entirely the wrong reason. Saint Swithun belongs to the second kind. Millions know his weather; comparatively few know his holiness. His name survives chiefly in the old English proverb:

“Saint Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
Saint Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.”

The bishop, the confessor, the shepherd of souls and the faithful servant of Christ has faded from public memory, while the rhyme concerning his weather has endured.

England remembered the rain and forgot the grace.

Yet there is another rain for which the Church has always prayed. Every Advent she raises the ancient cry of the prophet:

Roráte, cæli, désuper, et nubes pluant Justum.
“Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One.”

The Christian imagination has never regarded rain merely as weather. Throughout Holy Scripture, it is an image of blessing, mercy, fruitfulness and grace descending from God. The parched earth cannot make itself fruitful. It must receive from above what it cannot produce from within. So too the human soul. Man cannot redeem himself by ingenuity, effort or progress. Heaven must open. Grace must descend. The Just One must be given.

The Church therefore remembers Saint Swithun not because of a rustic forecast, but because he was one of those servants through whom Heaven watered the earth. She clothes the altar in white and sings: “Let Thy priests, O Lord, be clothed with justice, and let Thy saints rejoice.” In the Epistle she places before us the everlasting priesthood of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel she asks the searching question: “Who, thinkest thou, is a faithful and wise servant?”

The answer is not the most celebrated servant, the most fashionable servant or the servant most praised by the world. It is the one whom the Master finds faithfully feeding His household.

This is the key to Saint Swithun’s life. He understood that episcopal authority is not possession but stewardship; not self-expression but service; not an opportunity to remake the household according to one’s own preferences, but the solemn duty to give the family of God “meat in season.”

We know comparatively little about his earthly life. He belonged to ninth-century Wessex, which was becoming the political and spiritual heart of England. Tradition remembers him as a counsellor at the royal court and tutor to Æthelwulf, the father of Alfred the Great. He became Bishop of Winchester in 852. His name appears upon royal charters; early sources associate him with the building of a bridge at Winchester’s East Gate; and medieval accounts praise his generosity to the poor, his care for churches in decay and his aversion to pomp. He died on 2 July, probably in the year 863.

There is something providential in the scarcity of information. We live in an age in which men imagine that importance is measured by visibility. A person must announce, display, promote and perpetually explain himself. Even within the Church, apostolic fruitfulness is too easily confused with public profile, bureaucratic activity or the cultivation of an ecclesiastical personality.

Saint Swithun left no famous theological treatise, no surviving collection of sermons and no dramatic controversy bearing his name. History scarcely noticed him while he lived.

Yet God noticed him.

Sanctity does not require the attention of the world. Indeed, the desire to be noticed is often one of its greatest enemies. The servant in today’s Gospel is not praised because he has cultivated an impressive reputation. He is praised because, when the Master returns, he is found doing what he was appointed to do.

The Church does not need famous bishops. She needs faithful ones.

The faithful bishop feeds. He does not use the household to feed his ambition, vanity or ideology. He does not starve his children while issuing documents about nourishment. He does not substitute stones for bread, confusion for doctrine, novelty for Tradition or sentiment for the sacraments. He gives the household what Christ entrusted to the Church: the word of truth, the worship of God, the forgiveness of sins, the discipline of Christian life and, above all, the adorable Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

This is why the Epistle directs our attention away from Swithun and towards the divine High Priest: “Jesus, for that He continueth for ever, hath an everlasting priesthood.” Every Catholic priesthood depends entirely upon His. The bishop does not possess a private priesthood of his own. He participates sacramentally in the one priesthood of Christ. His authority is not self-created. His teaching is not self-authenticating. His office is not a licence to replace what he has received.

The bishop is the steward of a treasure that does not belong to him.

His greatness consists in disappearing into the work of Christ, so that Christ may teach through his mouth, absolve through his ministry, govern through his pastoral charity and offer the Holy Sacrifice through his consecrated hands.

Saint Swithun became hidden so that Christ might remain visible.

A bishop should resemble the clouds invoked by the Advent antiphon. The cloud does not create the water it pours down. It receives, bears and gives. So too the bishop receives the Faith from the Apostles, bears it without alteration and pours it forth upon the Church. He is not the source of revelation, but its servant. He does not command Heaven to ratify his own opinions; he must permit Heaven’s truth to descend through his ministry.

When the clouds withhold their rain, the ground hardens and the seed withers. So too when pastors cease to preach the whole Faith, when reverence disappears from divine worship, when sin is renamed rather than forgiven and when the sacraments are treated as symbols of belonging rather than instruments of supernatural life, souls begin to thirst.

The faithful do not need an ecclesiastical climate endlessly discussed. They need the rain of grace.

Medieval tradition remembers Saint Swithun as a builder and repairer of churches. It is said that when churches fell into decay, he restored them at his own expense, and that he travelled on foot to consecrate those which had not yet been hallowed. Whether every detail can now be historically demonstrated matters less than the memory preserved by Christian England: Swithun was a bishop who repaired what was broken.

Here his example becomes urgently contemporary. We have inherited a Church in which much has fallen into decay. Altars have been disfigured, sanctuaries emptied, doctrine obscured, discipline neglected and sacred traditions treated as impediments to progress. Yet lamentation alone repairs nothing. One may become so absorbed in describing the ruins that one never begins to rebuild.

Saint Swithun went to the church that was falling down.

That is what sanctity does. It attends to the duty placed immediately before it. The priest restores reverence at his own altar. The father restores prayer within his household. The mother teaches her children the Faith. The Catholic learns his catechism, confesses his sins, assists faithfully at Mass, practises works of mercy and refuses to surrender his mind to the fashionable falsehoods of the age.

The Church is not renewed by slogans. She is renewed by saints.

She is renewed from the altar outward, never from the committee room inward.

Even the charming story of the broken eggs conveys this truth. Workmen are said to have knocked an old woman’s basket from her hands, leaving the eggs shattered. Swithun, moved by her distress, restored them. The story belongs to later hagiography, but its appeal lies in the kind of bishop it portrays. He notices the small catastrophe. He sees the poor woman whom others overlook. He does not regard her grief as beneath the attention of a prelate.

Divine charity descends into the particular. Our Lord counted the hairs of our heads, noticed the widow’s mites, received the children and provided wine for an embarrassed wedding household. The shepherd who speaks grandly of humanity but cannot see the person before him has not yet acquired the Heart of Christ.

More than a century after Swithun’s death, his remains were translated from their tomb outside the Old Minster into the church on 15 July 971. Miracles were reported, pilgrims came in great numbers, and his cult spread through England and beyond. It is this translation, rather than the day of his death, which the Church commemorates today.

Tradition remembers that rain fell abundantly upon the day of the translation. The earlier Christian instinct was not to interpret this as the saint’s displeasure, but as a good omen: a providential sign accompanying the glorification of God’s faithful servant. Only later did folklore transform the rain into the story that Swithun resented the moving of his relics.

The older meaning is richer and more Catholic. Heaven was not rebuking the translation. Heaven was blessing it. The rain was a visible image of invisible grace: the skies pouring down their benediction while the Church raised up the relics of a faithful bishop.

Roráte, cæli, désuper.

Let the heavens rain down the Just One.

In 1093, Swithun’s relics were moved again into the Norman cathedral, and for centuries his shrine stood among the most honoured places of pilgrimage in England. Kings honoured him. The sick came seeking healing. The poor came seeking consolation. Generations of Catholics entered Winchester knowing that they stood before the remains of a bishop who had faithfully fed the household of God.

Then came the English Reformation. In 1538, the commissioners of Henry VIII stripped and destroyed the shrine. Its treasures were seized, its stones dismantled, its relics scattered and its pilgrimage suppressed.

Yet the rain remained.

England kept the proverb but forgot the blessing. What had once been understood as Heaven opening over the glorification of a saint gradually became little more than a weather forecast. Rain became meteorology instead of theology.

That is a parable of modern Britain. We retain Christian customs after forgetting Christ. We admire cathedrals but neglect the Sacrifice for which they were built. We praise “Christian values” while rejecting the Faith from which they arose. We preserve the cultural memory of saints while dismissing the religion which made them holy.

A civilisation dies long before its churches become museums. It dies when its saints become folklore.

The Gospel therefore commands us to watch. Christian vigilance is not nervous speculation about dates and disasters. It is fidelity to vocation. “Blessed is that servant, whom when his lord shall come he shall find so doing.”

The priest must be found offering the Sacrifice with faith and reverence. The bishop must be found guarding the deposit and feeding the household. The ruler must be found governing beneath the law of God. The parent must be found forming souls for Heaven. The Christian must be found in a state of grace, carrying the cross allotted to him and performing the duty placed before him.

The commemoration of Saint Henry the Emperor reinforces the same lesson. Swithun bore the pastoral staff; Henry wore the imperial crown. One governed a diocese, the other an empire. Yet both offices were stewardships, and both men would be judged not by the splendour of their dignity but by their fidelity to the King above all kings.

Mitre and crown alike must bow before Jesus Christ.

Let us ask Saint Swithun to obtain for the Church bishops clothed not merely in office but in justice; priests who give the faithful the strong meat of Catholic truth; rulers who know that authority is accountable to God; and laymen who will rebuild Christian civilisation by restoring first the sanctuary of their own souls.

England remembers Saint Swithun when it rains.

The Church remembers the grace that the rain signified.

May Saint Swithun obtain for us that heavenly rain once more: that righteousness may descend upon the barren ground of our souls, that ruined sanctuaries may be restored, and that this dry and weary land may flower again with holiness.

Roráte, cæli, désuper, et nubes pluant Justum.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above. Let the skies pour down righteousness. Let Christ, the Just One, descend upon His Church.

Then the words of today’s Gospel may be spoken also over us:

“Blessed is that servant, whom when his lord shall come he shall find so doing.”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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