FEATURE
Father Michael remembered A sermon on the late Fr Michael Clifton from Fr Christopher Basden, preached before Archbishop Peter Smith of Southwark
“I believe that the one great reason for which I was born was my ordination to the priesthood.” These famous words – by Fr Louis Merton OCSO - could very well have been uttered by Fr Michael George Clifton, commonly called “Cliffie” or “Ernie” by his students at Fisher’s School. He has been one of the great characters of our Diocese and to the fingertips he was quintessentially a priest. The priesthood is (to use the American adjective) simply “awesome.” It is a unique vocation; to stand in the place of Jesus Christ; to sow the seeds of the Word of God; to sanctify the faithful with the life of the sacraments! We need priests and, on the occasion of losing one, it’s a good time to appeal to you to pray for and encourage vocations; or, if there is anyone who is not as bald as I am, or as grey as some of my brothers here, to actually consider the call because it is so wonderful and urgently necessary! The readings today set forth an extraordinary panorama, Ezekiel 34: 11-16, the beauty of the good shepherd; then 2 Peter: 1-10 on the horrendous infiltrations into the church and society, for which we need good priests to courageously resist. Finally, the Gospel, St Matthew 11: 7-12, “the kingdom of Heaven has been subjected to violence.” The sacrament of the Kingdom is the Church and both have been taken by storm by the violent. Fr Clifton has been a voice crying in the wilderness against the storms of pseudo-phycology, destructive theology and the most awful erosion of Christian belief in the history of the Church. Michael Clifton, like many of our best Catholics was a convert but few know that he had another profound conversion in his life in 1968, as he recounted on his blog “Father Mildew”. Before that time, he had been a member
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Fr Michael Clifton: a gift for friendship of Slant, a left-leaning Catholic journal published in Cambridge between 1964 and 1970 and thought the Church needed to be shaken up. He was (to use the incorrect political terminology) a “progressive” and a “liberal” demanding complete change. Also in that very year, one of the foremost “Periti” of Vatican II, Joseph Ratzinger, also changed his mind. He later prophetically declared, “At the heart of the ecclesial crisis is the state of the liturgy.” As Catholics, we have always believed in the principle of “Lex Orandi – Lex Credendi”, in other words the way you pray expresses the way you believe. The chaotic, fashionable, priestcentred, showy, utterly intelligible, and neo-protestant type of Liturgy no longer really squares with the belief of
traditional Catholicism (especially its Eucharistic theology). Fr Clifton came to realise that there had been a divergence and that that departure from the roots of our faith had resulted in a terrible haemorrhage of Mass attendance, ordinations and conversions that has left Europe a spiritual wasteland. Fr Clifton could smell the sulphur even before the reforming Pope Paul VI did in 1972 when he said: “We believed that after the Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church – but instead there has come a day of clouds and storms and of darkness – and how did this come about? … We will confide the thought that there has been a power, let us call him by his name – the
SPRING 2018
