Cardinal Vincent Nichols said that “the task of looking for things that are in heaven” is “to see them and signal them and make them real here on earth”, in his Easter morning homily at Westminster Cathedral.
“We’re committed to search for respect and dignity for every person as a creation of God,” he said, “people never reduced the numbers, never simply seen as problems.”
At the vigil Mass the previous night, the cardinal emphasised that faith “is not a straitjacket, imprisoning our freedom, removing spontaneity, demanding uniformity”.
Citing the restoration of natural watercourses in the Lake District, where the removal of an artificial riverbed had revived aquatic life, he said: “The meandering of our lives, our struggles to get things right, may well be precisely the environment in which the waters of the Holy Spirit can flow most creatively.”
In Wales, the Archbishop of Cardiff, Mark O’Toole, and the Anglican Archbishop of Wales, Andrew John, issued a joint message that acknowledged widespread hardship where there were “no glib answers…certainly no straightforward religious ones”.
Echoing their Christmas message, they invited people to worship in their churches at Easter: “We do not offer easy solutions to complex problems, but we share the One whose risen life will make a difference to you and your communities.”
The primates of the Church of England both addressed contemporary subjects in their Easter sermons.
Speaking in Canterbury Cathedral on Easter morning, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said that “the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is among the most certain facts of history”.
He defended the Church Commissioners’ decision to invest £100 million in a fund to address the historic effects of slavery, saying it was “not post-colonial guilt, ambivalent wokery”, but “the living presence of Christ”.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his sermon in York Minster to consider the responses of individuals affected by the child benefit cap and of asylum seekers subject to the Rwanda deportation scheme, among others, to Jesus’ question in John’s gospel (20:15): “Why are you weeping?”
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