Homily for Remembrance Sunday

How do we survive in a world as ugly as that of 1914? From where do we find our hope? Only in the Cross, and the Risen Christ. Preached at the Church of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in Urbe, Venerable English College, Rome, Sunday 9th November 2025.

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When I was in school, and sitting my GCSE’s – back when GCSE grades were still letters rather than the bizarre and confusing number system you have now, the English Literature GCSE I did used the AQA anthology of poems. When you look at these poetry anthologies, and poetry curriculums, you’ll see something quite odd – all the poems are divided up by a single year: poems are all either pre-1914 or post-1914. We’ve been speaking modern English more or less since the 1500s, when Shakespeare first began writing and the martyrs of this college were going across the channel as missionaries to England. Why did we divide some five hundred years of poetry so unevenly – 400 years on one side, 100 years on the other? What’s so special about 1914?

Those of you who know your history, and know what day it is today, will know the answer to that already – 1914 was the year the Great War, the war we now call the First World War, began. The year they began to dig the trenches, and shell one another into oblivion, and flood the fields of France and Flanders with mustard gas, and send millions of young men from every country on earth to die under machine gun fire. The Great War was not like any other war before or since – in scale and sheer horror it was unlike anything we had ever known. That horror deformed and destroyed western culture in ways we’re still not fully recovered from – the world that once seemed so full of life and possibility, the world that seemed so beautiful, was revealed to be an ugly place full of ugly people who did very ugly things to one another on an industrial scale.

And the ugliness rebounded and began to infect everything – artists stopped trying to make things that were beautiful, instead their goal was to shock. Architects stopped building grand and beautiful constructions but soulless functional concrete boxes that resemble great standing coffins, and our poetry became something altogether quite dark. Poets before had painted a vivid picture of that world alive with possibility – but the poets of 1914 had seen the ugliness. One poet, who I am sure many of you will know and have studied, stands out above all the rest – Wilfred Owen, a young Lieutenant from Shropshire who would die (aged just 25) a few weeks before the war ended.

Owen wrote several famous poems, but there’s one which stands out to me as the finest of his works – because it takes the images of the Requiem Mass, of the funeral, the bells, the mourners, the pall (the shroud used to cover the bodies of the dead), the music, and turns them on their head. It’s called Anthem for Doomed Youth, it’s only short, and I’d like to read it to you now:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

There’s a raw hopelessness, and an anger, in that poem – just listen again what he’s saying about the funerals men had before the war “No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells” – in the face of all this awful killing, all this evil, the funerals, the prayers, the bells all seem like a mockery.

It expresses a very human emotion, that same anger and despair, that we find in the scriptures today: in the book of Lamentations, the prophet Jeremiah says this - My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say ‘my endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord’ and the psalmist cries out to the Lord ‘from the depths.’

On the Cross, as our Lord Jesus Christ endured the agony of death, he also cried out ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lema sabachthani?’ – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a beautifully human moment. Christ, God incarnate, the Living God in a human body, seems to despair. Saint Ambrose of Milan, says of this moment “He speaks on the Cross, bearing with Him our terrors” and the great Saint Augustine, Ambrose’s student says “he took on the speech of our infirmity” – Christ, the living God, desired to feel all the pain and suffering and evil of our human condition, to have every last bit of it inflicted on His own body as he suffered on the Cross. But suffering is not the end, and death does not have the last word.

What is the last word? Seven of the most powerful words in the entire Gospel, spoken by an Angel from the very depths of the tomb itself: He is risen. He is not here.

The world is not so ugly as it seems, and in the midst of all this human ugliness, all our vileness, all our cruelty to one another in that Great War to end all Wars, and every war since, we find the suffering Christ on the Cross and we hear those wonderful words: He is risen. He is not here.

The mockery is not our prayers for the dead, it’s not the funeral choir, the mockery is death itself – which no longer has power over us. As St Paul writes, O Death where is your victory? O Death where is your sting? Death has been beaten and broken, death has been defeated, death has been destroyed by Christ.

And what remains? What remains but hope? Hope, that we will one day rise again in glory to see the world changed and made new, with all that ugliness purged away the dead will be raised imperishable, there will be no more death, no more evil, no more tears, no more sorrow. There will be only perfect and eternal life. In all the sufferings of this vale of tears in which we now live – we see the Cross, and we know it is the gateway to this blessed perfect life.

I began with a poem, I’ll end with one, from 1934, that became popular again when I was a young boy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were getting underway, and a soldier wrote it home to his parents. I’ll quote just its first and last couplets:

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there. I do not sleep. //

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there. I did not die.

In a world so full of ugliness, so full of hate, that is still so full of war more than a hundred years after that great and awful war ended, we cling to the hope, given to us by those seven powerful words. He is risen. He is not here.

Readings from Sacred Scripture:

First Reading: Lamentations 3:17-26

Gradual: Psalm 130(129) vv.1-2. 3-4. 5-6b. 8c-8. Response: vs.1

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:51-57

Gospel Acclamation: Revelation 1: 5a, 6b

Gospel: Mark 15:33-39, 16:1-6