News

Advent & Christmas Mass Times

15 – 23 December

The Filipino Simbang Gabi novena of Masses in preparation for Christmas will be celebrated at 7.30pm (6pm on Sat 16 & 23, & 3pm on Sun 17 Dec).

Sunday 24th December 2023

Sunday Masses

8.30am, 10am, 12noon, 2pm Dominican rite Mass (Latin)

Christmas Eve

5:30–6:15pm Confessions

6:00pm Vigil Mass of Christmas

11:00pm Confessions

11:30pm Service of Carols & Midnight Mass of Christmas

Monday 25th December 2023

Christmas Day

8:30am Dawn Mass

10:00am Family Mass with carols

12 noon Solemn Mass with carols

5pm Adoration & 5.30pm Solemn Vespers

6pm Dominican Rite Mass (Latin)

Schedule after Christmas

Boxing Day 26th – Friday 29^th December

Mass at 6pm Only

Saturday 30^th

10am Mass

6pm Vigil Mass for Sunday

Sunday 31^st December 2023

8.30am Mass

10am Family Mass

12noon Solemn Mass

5pm Adoration & 5.30pm Solemn Vespers

6pm Dominican rite Mass (Latin)

Confessions at the usual times on 30/31 December

Monday 1st January 2024

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God and New Year’s Day

5pm Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament & Confessions

6pm Mass

7pm Marian Procession and blessing of new statue

The Dominican Friars here at St Dominic’s Priory would like to take this opportunity to wish you and your loved ones a joyful and hope-filled Christmas, and every blessing for the new year.

Drawing by Br Augustine Chen, O.P. [2022]

“The shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.’ And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.”– Luke 2:15-16

Owing to ongoing building works in the church, the 6pm weekday Mass will be held in the hall (not the church).

Temporary Daily Schedule

Good News! Fundraising for Heating Beats Target

We are delighted to report that, just a few weeks since publicly launching our campaign – and soon after we began the works on the floor – we have not just reached our fundraising target, but gone beyond it! This means we can pay for all of the current underfloor heating works taking place in the church.

This is good new for the friars too, as any funds that are left over from the underfloor heating project for the nave of the church, will be put towards a heating solution for the seats either side of the main altar where the friars sit during Mass and prayers, currently unheated!

If you have not yet contributed, but would like to, we would welcome your gift, which will be put towards this extended need. Donate now.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all of you who have given so generously towards this project. Soon we hope to be able to provide you with some warmth in church as well as a smart new floor.

Pew Restoration

We have received several enquiries about the restoration of the pews: yes, this is happening alongside the work on the floor. This will be an additional cost for us, and we are currently looking at allowing people to sponsor a pew in memory of a loved one, with a brass plaque. If you would be interested in knowing more about this, please contact the parish secretary, Iroma.

Photos of the Works in Progress

Not many people are aware that our province of the Dominican Order has two houses in the Caribbean, in Jamaica and Grenada.

This weekend at our Sunday Masses, we are joined by our brother Fr Clifton Harris OP, from Jamaica, who will be speaking about the work undertaken by the Dominican friars there, providing aid to the poor and promoting education.

At www.english.op.org/missions you can find more information about our mission houses, including a 17-minute video explaining this work, featuring several local voices from the communities there.

Preview Clip (90 seconds)

• Watch the Full Video
• Make a Donation

Amid a timely snap of cold weather, last weekend we launched a public appeal for donations to help our parish to purchase a new underfloor heating system for the church.

This is because the current system, using gas burners all too close to our wooden roof beams, is now obsolete and cannot be safely turned on any more, leaving the church currently unheated. With works due to begin in early November, we are fundraising to ensure we can cover the costs (c. £220k)

The appeal was made after all Sunday Masses by Fr Dominic White, the Prior, and Fr Joseph Bailham, the Parish Priest, together with Mr Richard Brown, Development Director for the Dominican Friars.

Before this public appeal, personal fundraising approaches in the last two months had yielded the following (including Gift Aid)

• £90,000 from the Dominican friars’ parent charity (funds made available by the closure of their house in Newcastle)
• £38,000 in lead gifts from individual parishioners who had been contacted
• £3,500 from grant-making trusts
• £34,000 from US donors (via the Knights of Columbus)

This generosity meant that the appeal was now in the final stretch, with around £20k to raise.

A Powerful Response

The Mass-goers responded very positively to the appeal: nearly £8,000 was raised at the weekend, via the card machines in church, by cash and cheque, by bank transfer, and via the website. This leaves around £12,000 still to raise.

Could you help us to reach our target?

> More information + how to donate

Please pray for Fr Dominic White OP who has been elected by the friars to lead the Dominican priory here in London for the next 3 years. We look forward to welcoming him back to St Dominic’s!

Fr Joseph Bailham OP, who has hitherto been an assistant priest in the parish, now assumes the responsibility of parish priest of St Dominic’s and rector of the Rosary Shrine.

Having faithfully fulfilled his tenure as prior and parish priest, Fr Lawrence Lew OP will move sometime after October to Blackfriars, Oxford. We wish him well and thank him for the solid foundations he has left for his successors.

Parish Priest ‘Surgery’ Meetings

On a trial basis, Fr Joseph will have ‘surgery’ sessions during the week in case you wish to speak to him about sacramental preparation, form signing, volunteering, or any other matter relating to parish life. Surgery times will be from 9am – Midday on weekdays (except Thursdays).

Appointments can be made through the parish secretary OR directly at www.tinyurl.com/meetwithparishpriest

Saturday 15 July was such a blessed day as we celebrated the 800th anniversary of the London Dominicans, walking some 15,000 steps to the City of London, and praying at the 4 locations where we’ve praised, blessed, and preached the Gospel since 1223. We began with Conventual Mass in St Dominic’s, and Fr Lawrence remarked in his sermon that this year also marks the 140th anniversary of its completion and the 100th year since it was consecrated.

Our expectations were exceeded in several ways: Over 120 people walked the 4-mile-journey with us, and around 200 joined us at the end for Vespers at the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield; thunderstorms had been forecast but a blast of rain after the morning Mass was dispelled as we prayed the Rosary in the church, and the rest of the day was windy but fine and sunny at times.

Thank you to all who joined us, prayed with us, and helped and supported us. Above all, we thank God and Our Lady and St Dominic for a wonderful day.

To view a PDF of the booklet which contained the prayers and hymns and history of the places we visited, and the people we prayed for, click this link: 800th walk.

Below is the text of the sermon preached during Vespers by Fr Richard Finn OP, Provincial Archivist and author of a new history of the English Dominicans.

How are we to know what the God of peace desires of us? To know his will for us in the circumstances of our changing world? And how, as the Letter to the Hebrews has it, do we become what is acceptable to Him? Such questions are pressing in every age. For them to be answered, the apostolic faith handed down from generation to generation must be preached afresh for each generation to hear, interrogate, and respond. St Augustine once imagined Jesus knocking loudly on the door of a contemplative’s cell and saying to the startled contemplative: “Open to me, preach to others. How shall I have access to people who have actually shut their door to me, if no one opens the door? How shall they listen to me, if no one preaches?” 

Eight hundred years ago members of the English royal court thought they had perhaps found the right preachers for their generation. They established a tentative alliance with a small band of Dominican friars who had newly arrived in England. King Henry III and his justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, quickly saw how these skilled expositors of Sacred Scripture could preach and minister to the king’s subjects in the rapidly growing towns and cities across the country. Though the friars opened their first house at Oxford in 1221, to attract recruits among the university’s students and teachers, Hubert was soon busy with preparations for a small Dominican house at London which had opened by 1224 outside the walls on the east side of Shoe Lane, Holborn. Other members of the king’s council saw what could be done at Winchester and elsewhere. 

In the decades that followed, demand for this new Order of Preachers grew, as people valued not only their sermons, but the friars’ ministry as confessors, the beauty of their chanted liturgies, and their willingness to address the moral questions thrown up in a more mercantile and urban society. The friars visited the sick, consoled the dying in their homes, and prayed for them after they had died. History should not blind us to the novelty of this extensive pastoral ministry soon shared with Franciscans, Carmelites, and other friars. With support from the nobility, civic dignitaries, and townsfolk, Dominican priories opened in towns and cities across the country; but that early alliance with the crown was also cemented as the king supported new and existing foundations, and chose close advisors and confessors from among the friars. At London, the first Dominican priory quickly proved too small for the many friars who taught or were being trained there, or who preached both there and in the surrounding district. What’s more, the church was too small for the throng of townsfolk who flocked to its services. King Edward I supported his Dominican archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, and his Dominican confessor, John of Darlington, in moving the friars after 1275 to a vast new monastic complex at Ludgate where the River Fleet joined the Thames. 

Under Henry VIII, a long and fruitful alliance abruptly ended as every religious house in the kingdom was suppressed. The London Blackfriars was surrendered in November 1538. Its roofs were stripped of their lead, and the property was eventually sold off by a crown which did not want people to hear the Catholic Faith preached in its full integrity. Friars who challenged the asserted royal supremacy over the English Church got short shrift. Under Edward VI, ‘reformers’ recast a national church along increasingly Protestant lines. The tide turned briefly for five short years, from 1553 to 1558, when Mary Tudor and Cardi

nal Pole sought to re-establish Catholicism, and entrusted this former Augustinian church to a small group of English, Spanish, and Dutch Dominican

s led by a theologian and former exile William Perrin. A prominent preacher at St Paul’s cross, Perrin’s Spiritual Exercises and Ghostly Meditations would be popular reading among Catholics when they could no longer worship openly in Elizabethan England. 

After Elizabeth’s eviction of the friars in 1559 it would be three centuries before the Dominicans once again had a priory in London. In penal times, a few would minister from Embassy chapels, or at one of the royal palaces when there was a Catholic king or queen. One of the finest, Fr Thomas Middleton, managed to minister widely while still technically a prisoner in the Clink. Another, the elderly Fr David Kemeys, arrested in the hysteria whipped up by Titus Oates over the supposed Popish Plot, was so weak he couldn’t stand up in the dock at his trial, and died in Newgate prison before he could be convicted. These men witness to a mission faithfully served in difficult times, and a readiness to adapt in changed circumstances.  

Only in 1861 did the Dominican friars return to a new Priory in the city at Haverstock Hill. In place of their former royal and civic support, they now relied on the generosity of benefactors like Miss Helen Tasker who gave some £9,000 (then a huge sum) towards the building of St Dominic’s. By 1890 the community comprised some eleven priests and seven lay brothers. While some clergy served the local parish, others took advantage of the new railways to serve as mission preachers up and down the land. They might hear up to a thousand confessions in the course of each mission. 

Where does this leave us now? Grateful, certainly, for past support, and for the fidelity shown by our predecessors in preaching the Gospel. Inspired, hopefully, to be as resourceful and adaptive as our predecessors in facing new challenges.  And may the God of peace make us ready in this generation to do his will in all kinds of good action, above all in collaborating to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, attentive to the needs, fears, questions, and desires of our fellow men and women, now and in future generations.

There will be a special Mass celebrated by Bishop Hudson on Fri 7 July at 1pm as we commemorate and give thanks for the past 161 years of St Dominic’s Catholic Primary School. All are welcome to the Mass in church. 

The first Dominican priory in London, at Holborn, was established in 1223. To mark this milestone we have planned three special events:

• Consecration of the Parish to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: On Friday 16 June, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart there will be a Rosary for the sanctification of priests prayed at 4:30pm as part of the ‘World Priest’ Global Rosary Relay. Then at 5pm there will be Adoration and Confessions as usual, followed by Mass at 6pm. At the conclusion of the Mass, Fr Lawrence will consecrate the parish to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Following this, there will be a talk and testimoniesfrom Fr Edouard Maro & Alicia Beauvisage on the power of consecration to the Sacred Heart. The evening concludes at 8pm with a livestreamed Rosary with the pastoral team of Dominican friars who serve the parish and Rosary Shrine. 

• On Saturday 15 July, join us for a special pilgrimage walk to Blackfriars! We begin with 10am Mass in our church, followed by a walk to Blackfriars in central London. We will have a lunch and drink break in Blackfriars pub, followed by prayer around the  vicinity of Apothecaries’ Hall (site of the 2nd Dominican priory in London). We will then go to St Bartholomew the Great (Smithfield) for a tour, a short talk by the Provincial Archivist, Fr Richard Finn OP, and then we will sing Vespers at 4pm in St Bartholomew the Great, which was the 3rd Dominican priory in London.

• We conclude our 800th anniversary celebrations with a Solemn Mass at 10am with the Dominican Family on Saturday 7 October, the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. After Mass there will be a reception in the Priory, and that weekend there will be a special exhibition in the church of the historic vestments and banners from the convent of the Dominican Sisters of Stone, Staffordshire.

New Lunch Club Launched at St Dominic’s

A new initiative began this week in our parish hall at St Dominic’s that aims to help locals with the cost of living and provide an opportunity for socialising.

The first Community Lunch Club took place on Thursday in association with Highgate Newtown Community Partners and will take place on most Thursday lunchtimes. Anyone from the local community is welcome to join us.

Andrew Sanalitro of HNPC reports:

“What an excellent start for the first week of the new lunch club!  It was great to see 32 local people who live in the neighbourhood join us on a very cold day for our first session.

A homemade Shepherd’s Pie was the main course (meat and veg options), and we started with Tracy’s super fresh veg soup.

People can often be lonely and coming out to lunch may be the only opportunity they have for contact with other people, and to go out for a lunch they can afford (just £1.50 for three courses!)

I’m sure that the new lunch club will become a second home to many, a place where they can feel safe and meet new people.

It was also a way to make people aware of the beautiful building in their community that is Our Lady and St Dominic’s church: several people today said that they have never been inside and would like to take a look.”

St Dominic’s Parish is delighted to see such a strong start to this community initiative. We welcome any new people who would like to join us, and if any of you would like to support with donations, then this would help us to introduce a new club for under-5s and possibly a second weekly community lunch.

• Details of community lunches
• Make a donation