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Many of our diocesan Jubilarians celebrated their jubilees of priestly ordination at Arundel Cathedral on 28 May with Mass presided over by Fr Raglan Hay-Will, followed by a celebratory lunch with brother priests.

Ad multos annos to Fr Liam O'Connor (60 years); Mgr Michael Jackson (50 years); Fr Raglan Hay-Will and Fr Ian Vane (40 years); Fr Carl Davies, Fr David Murphy, Canon Jonathan Martin, Fr Steven Purnell, Fr Richard Biggerstaff, Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith (30 years), and Fr Con Foley (25 years).

The homily was preached by Canon Jonathan Martin, Diocesan Administrator and Parish Priest of Lewes, who told those assembled:

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"In the words of the Preface of this Mass, which is our great act of thanksgiving, we are reminded that with a brother's kindness, God chooses men to become sharers in his sacred ministry through the laying on of hands. We recall the moment of ordination for you, our Jubilarians, and for ourselves. I'm sure as well that we give thanks for those who first awakened in us a sense of the call and those who have sustained us over the years. And we pray that others will give up their lives for Christ and for the service of their brothers and sisters in the sacrament of Holy Orders.

"What we celebrate above all today is a feast of our Lord Jesus Christ, honouring him as the eternal High Priest. Indeed, the only priesthood is that of Jesus Christ. With those we serve, we are adorned with a royal priesthood. Through the hands of the one who ordained us, Christ has entrusted a specific share in this one priesthood into our hands, making us ministers and stewards of his mysteries. Christ, therefore, is the one to whom we must be constantly looking, raising our eyes to him so that we might see for ourselves in him how we are to be priests and teachers and shepherds so that everything that we do might truly manifest his one priesthood.

"After many years of priesthood, you Jubilarians know better than anyone that the priestly life is not built on a succession of grand moments. It is built on the daily yes, the hidden fidelity, the quiet obedience, the offering of oneself again and again. Over the years, the gift of priesthood purifies us. At the beginning of our priestly life, we perhaps imagine that we're giving God our strengths to use in the most dramatic of ways. But over time, with experience and eventually, we discover as a grace in itself that God also asks for our weakness, our limitations, our wounds, our 'unfinishedness'. And somehow through all of that, Christ continues to love his people through us over many years.

"This year in God's providence, this feast day falls on the anniversary of the foundation of our diocese. She is 61 today. And it seems to me that when all is said and done, a diocese endures and flourishes because generation after generation of priests, religious and lay faithful, keep saying 'Yes' to God.

"Long after particular difficulties fade, long after buildings rise and fall, what remains is holiness. The accumulated fidelity of the disciples of Jesus. How many masses have been offered in this diocese since its foundation? How many confessions heard? How many children and adults baptised, couples married, dying comforted, homilies preached, people blessed? Much of it unseen by the world, but none of it unseen by God. The history of a diocese is, in the end, the history of grace working through human fidelity. So perhaps that history and the celebration of today's jubilees teach us something especially important in our own time. They remind us that perseverance is itself a form of witness. To remain faithful to Christ and his Church over decades, through change and difficulty and disappointment and hope, is itself a proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

"My brothers, dear Jubilarians, today we give thanks for your 'Yes' to God and for this diocesan family in which that 'Yes' has unfolded. And as we honour your years of faithful service, we ask Christ, the eternal high priest, to renew in all of us the grace first given at ordination, the grace to say yes with sincerity and peace so that the words that we have spoken by way of a response to the word of God may not merely be uttered by our lips, but truly lived.

"Behold, I have come Lord to do your will."