Fr Abbot shared some thoughts on Fr Magnus, whose funeral took place yesterday in the Abbey Church. Our little community was delighted to be supported by brethren from Prinknash and Pluscarden, as well as Chilworth, Douai and Ealing abbeys, and diocesan clergy friends.

Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde: These words begin the confessions of St Augustine. You are great O Lord and worthy to be praised. ‘Magnus’ means great, a great man. ‘Man’ – the confessions continue – ‘is but a particle of God’s creation. God rouses us to delight in His praise; for God has raised us for himself and our hearts to not rest till they rest in Him.’

From the outside our Fr Magnus always seemed to be a very restless man – he could not keep still. He blamed this on events in his childhood. If chatting in the kitchen he would wipe the surfaces as he spoke. When the monks looked after the parish for a while, parishioners were so taken aback at his energy that he quickly picked up a series

of nicknames – the Flying Scotsman, Perpetual Motion, the Elgin Marvel! In the liturgy he could not keep still – there was always a twitch or a sudden look around. A visitor saw him twitching during Mass and said ‘that man has not long for this world’ -this was in 1965. A visiting deacon remarked that assisting Fr Magnus at the altar was like deaconing an unexploded bomb. In the refectory in the 1980’s we would have recorded music during lunch on Sundays. If Fr Magnus was the server that week you were in for a treat. Swan Lake would have him gliding down the lino, to the 1812 Overture he would crash down the stainless steel dishes with the cannon fire.

The interior was quite different. Solid as a rock. If your first principles were right – then everything else would fall into place. Fr Magnus was a lawyer. He had studied law at Oxford, before his conversion to Catholicism and transfer to theology. He helped write our Constitutions to bring them up to date wiht the new Code of Canon Law.  His Prinknash nickname was ‘Fr Crash Barriers’ -– the gospel is the road, he said, and you should be fine with the gospel – but leave the road and you need the crash barriers. When our community hit some canonical bumps on its road, Fr Magnus never doubted that we were right and things would end well, and he was right and things did end well. There were other certainties – the double entry system never let him down. He was particularly happy when –during the restoration work on the Abbey Church in 2000 –he proved the mighty computers of English Heritage to be wrong in their calculations. The computer was out by 18 pence – Fr Magnus’ double entry books were right.

As a monk he was one of the great figures of the province and our Congregation. He had been the first postulant of Pluscarden, the Novice Master of Prinknash , Prior of Farnborough, member of the Provincial Chapter from time immemorial, member of the Juridical Commission of the Subiaco Congregation. It was unthinkable for anything to happen without his being involved in it somehow. As a monk he was utterly reliable. Always at the Divine Office. He had a Padre-Pio sort of quality of always being back in choir when we all thought he was out at a meeting or some other duty.His singing was awful – he would listen very attentively to the pitch pipe at the start of the office and then sing a completely different note. He preferred the 6^th Gregorian mode – ‘three blind mice – in the sixth mode – no dreadful semitones.’