London is a hostile city for the Mediterranean temperament. Grey, punctual, courteous to the point of coldness; it remains, at heart, the old metropolis of an empire that conquered half the world without bothering to evangelize it. Today it is inhabited by the descendants of those subjugated and never baptized peoples, so the capital has ended up taken by its own periphery. It has its beauty and its character, but to those arriving from the south it receives them with distance.
I leave the last meeting with my head loaded and my body asking for silence. I walk towards South Kensington. I push the door of the impressive Brompton Oratory while the priest, from the distant altar ad orientem, says Ite, missa est. I am late. Deo gratias, responds the church.
I stay.
I sit in one of the last pews and look up. The beauty of the place overwhelms me. It is an Italian baroque built in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it should seem like a late imitation, like so many churches of its time. Not here. Everything is in its place: the light descending from the dome, the marble that does not weigh, the side chapels that accompany without invading the harmony of the whole.
Then the Blessed Sacrament is exposed and a choir of boys from the Oratory school begins to sing. I did not expect it. Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui. Around me there are office workers with ties and briefcases or backpacks on the floor, a group of students, an Asian girl with a veil and several English gentlemen with a respectable appearance.
The battle has already been decided
While adoration lasts, an idea assaults me that I cannot shake off. We talk a lot about a battle between the beautiful and the ugly, between the reverent and the vulgar. Here, on my knees, I have the feeling that the concept of battle is not entirely precise. Order, goodness, truth and beauty have won. Ugliness has lost because it does not work and because no sincere heart can bear it for long.
Soulless temples, improvised liturgies, eucharistic ministers, communion in the hand and altars of vanities are the remains of a defeated side. They are still there, occupying space and perhaps positions of power, but they have nothing left to offer.
The battle has been won ontologically. Evil has no existence of its own, lies need truth to be able to distort it, and ugliness can only exist as a corruption of beauty. There are not two equivalent armies disputing an uncertain outcome. Victory has already taken place. The only thing left to decide is where we want to be. The battle we fight within ourselves does not consist in conquering a victory still pending, but in freely adhering to a victory that has already been consummated.
Notify your own
Notify those you love, your family, your friends, your compatriots: let them join in the celebration of that victory. It is a victory that happens in places exactly like this, while the Blessed Sacrament remains exposed after the evening mass and the Catholic office workers of London, before sinking into the mouth of the tube, carry their souls full of hope, like someone keeping an ember under their coat to cross the night.