Homily at the Vestition Two New Novices

Silverstream Priory
8 December 2025
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

Note: On 8 December, 2025, two new men were clothed in the Holy Habit of Saint Benedict for the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration at our monastery. Here follows the homily for that occasion.

Dear Brothers,

Today the light of a new beginning dawns on the world. Mankind has languished for thousands of years under the consequences of Adam’s sin, waiting for the promise of Redemption, of the coming of God’s Kingdom. Despite the promises of the Prophets, it must have seemed, in the latter decades of the 1st century BC, that God was still far off and the world was going from bad to worse. In the midst of this—unperceived by anyone but one elderly couple in Judea, and by the Angels of God—in the womb of Saint Anne is conceived today the hope of the world, the New Eve who has been predestined eternally to give the world its Saviour, to cooperate actively in the work of Redemption which He alone, as the Incarnate Son of God, will be able to accomplish in His own right.

To be worthy to carry out this task, she is endowed with a unique holiness surpassing every creature. She knows well that all this is grace, an utterly gratuitous gift on God’s part. Like her cooperation in the work of Redemption, so also this unique holiness is based entirely on the work that her Son will accomplish on the Cross—and in virtue of those foreseen merits, God preserves her from all the effects of Adam’s sin on us.

Thus it is that in what could have seemed the darkest hour for God’s people, a new light dawned—one that was at first almost imperceptible to mortal eyes, but whose rays would in time fill all the world with glory, reflected from the Face of Christ.

It would be presumptuous for any of us to put ourselves on the same plane as the Mother of God in the plan of salvation. Yet God’s infinitely wise and loving plan, of which she is at the heart, also embraces each one of us, and embraces both of you. As we celebrate today her Immaculate Conception, we see in a faint analogy a similar grace being given to you and through you.

Both of you, dear brothers, have waited a long time for the fulfillment of God’s promises in your lives. You have, like all of us in the Church and the world, have lived through the dark times of recent years, as things often seemed to be going from bad to worse. And now, for you today, as for mankind in the womb of Saint Anne, a new hope is conceived. You are given today the grace to begin cooperating in your own small way in the work of Redemption.

In order to carry out this task, Our Lord holds out to you the grace of a unique form of holiness, that of the monastic state. For you, as for Mary, this holiness represents a free gift of God, being as it is a further flowering of the completely unmerited grace of justification given you in Baptism, as well as of the graces of conversion to an authentic Christian life that both of you have experienced in different ways over the years.

And so, after waiting through dark hours in the world and in your own lives, a new light dawns today—like the newly conceived Mary, imperceptible to the world, but one whose rays can in time fill the world with the glory reflected from the Face of Christ, a glory that He wants to shine in your lives and in the Church.

In Baptism the white garment marked you as men freed from sin and clothed in Christ as sons of God. Today this grace is given a further development, as you will be marked out by the monastic habit as sons of our Holy Father Benedict. Blessed Ildephonse Schuster comments that your habit is black, ‘because for the ancients the black garb was precisely the penitential garment.’ (He notes characteristically that ‘Still today, among the Ambrosians, during the entirety of Lent the colour of the chasuble is black.’) Alas, we know that we have not preserved our Baptismal innocence, yet we are given the opportunity for a second Baptism through the monastic life of penance—of reparation.

For as sons of Mother Mectilde, both of you already know well that the grace of your monastic life, into which you take an initial but crucially important step today as you begin your novitiate, is at its heart a grace of reparation. Called to return to God by the labour of obedience, you are to repair the damage wrought by the sloth of disobedience.

You know also from Mother Mectilde that this task of reparation is something we can never take on ourselves by our own strength. It is Jesus alone Who can repair the debt of our offenses to the Father; it is He alone Who can first repair the wounds of sin in us, and so allow us to join Him in His work of reparation.

And in this the grace of your monastic life is, once again, modeled on the grace of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. She was the first recipient of the repairing action of Her Son’s Death, which repaired the effects of Adam’s sin before they could even reach her newly created soul. Being the first fruits of His Reparation of humanity, she could then join Him, by His free gift, in His work of Reparation through joining in His redemptive offering on Calvary, and now by distributing all the graces which He has won for us.

The monastic habit you receive today represents all of this. Blessed Schuster comments again on today’s Chapter that ‘These monastic habits represent a sort of sacramental, and should be put on constantly in a spirit of penance and of dedication to God.’ We might add, in a spirit of reparation and of dedication to Our Lady. She, our model in reparation, comes to you today as a Mother to clothe you in grace, the grace with which she was filled full by her Son from the first moment of her existence, that through her maternal hands you too, and all of us, might be filled with all the fulness of God.

And now, before receiving the holy habit, I ask you to consider carefully the life which you are embracing.

(Here followed the traditional allocution from the Rituale Monasticum, pp. 347-350)
(After pause)

And so, my dear sons, I ask you now to come forward and to declare if, despising the world and its vanities, you still desire to embrace the Rule of our holy Father Benedict…