Today we celebrate this Eucharist to bring to conclusion a year of commemoration of Father Francis Jordan. During this year we specifically marked the 160th anniversary of Father Jordan’s birth, the 130th year of his ordination and the 90th anniversary of his death.

We Salvatorians are very much looking forward to his Beatification. The last fifteen years have seen a great upsurge of interest in Father Jordan: conferences and seminars have been held, new histories and biographies have been published, fresh editions of his Spiritual Diary have been brought out, many publications have been translated into other languages.

All these are concrete signs of a renewed interest in Father Jordan and what he achieved.

The simple fact of founding a religious order and obtaining the full approbation for it by the Church is certainly something worth recognition. Establishing a new way of life within the Church which attracts numerous people over many years to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to God is not achieved easily and undoubtedly deserves the appropriate acknowledgement.

The depth of spirituality and personal holiness that Father Jordan’s many contemporaries recorded as well as his extraordinary depth of apostolic zeal and fidelity to the Church are also strong signs that the Church does not ignore.

And little by little Father Jordan’s Cause for Beatification has become more advanced and there is now the likelihood that it could become a reality within the next ten years or so.

One crucial step was taken when in 1999 the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, visited our Motherhouse and prayed at the tomb of Father Jordan. Other important steps include the completion of all the documents necessary for the cause and the recent tribunal in the Diocese of Savannah, Georgia which investigated a likely miracle attributed to Father Jordan’s intercession.

On this very day another important acknowledgement that Father Jordan’s Beatification is coming closer has been made. This morning in our Motherhouse the Jordan Year was drawn to a close by Archbishop Angelo Amato the newly appointed Prefect for the Congregation of the Causes of Saints. Such a thing simply does not happen if there is any doubt in the Vatican that the candidate in question is not entirely worthy of being raised to the altars.

At the more local level during this Jordan Year we, the members of the British Province, attended a retreat given by Father Peter van Meijl, the former postulator of Father Jordan’s Cause, who took us through the visit made by Father Jordan to London in the year 1901 intending to found a house of our Order here in Britain.

This journey to London led ultimately to the foundation of this parish of Wealdstone, dedicated to St Joseph. Father Jordan kept a diary and wrote many letters and notes and from these we were able to piece together a day-by-day account of his visit to London.

Father Jordan was a German and although, because of anti-Catholic legislation he was unable to make foundations in Germany he quite naturally did so wherever he could in the territories surrounding Germany.

He especially focussed on Vienna because it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he knew that from there his members could reach out to other parts of that Empire; as indeed they did and a strong community of Sisters was soon established in Budapest and the Fathers and Brothers quickly established themselves in Romania, Poland, Moravia and other parts of Austria.

It was for a similar reason that London was important to Jordan. It too was the capital of a great empire and Father Jordan wanted to get the Society firmly established here so that in time his members could reach out to the British Colonies and so achieve his worldwide mission. So you can imagine that London was very much part of Jordan’s plans and he had great hopes for Wealdstone and its daughter houses.

Unfortunately, as so often with great plans, history intervened and the First World War brought many of his plans to a halt.

But these examples give you an idea of how Jordan was certainly a man of vision. Especially when you take into account that by the time he came to England he already had made foundations in India as well as North and South America.

If we are to look to our own day and ask ourselves what we have to do; if we are to sit down and say to ourselves what is the main task for us Salvatorians today, then what would it be?

My answer to this question is that our main task is to catch up!

Catch up with Jordan! Catch up with this man who died over ninety years ago!

We need to catch up first and foremost with his holiness. In this we all know that he has set us a very high standard. From his very childhood Jordan committed himself to achieve personal holiness in the most wholehearted way possible. We are all far less than perfect and while we might be full of good intentions we do not always manage to achieve what we desire.

The novice master of another order used to take his novices to visit St Peter’s. He always went there at an hour at which he knew Jordan could be found praying in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and told them, “If you want to see a saint, then look at him!”

We have chosen to follow Christ in imitation of Father Jordan and so holiness ought to be top of our agenda just as it was top of his agenda. Neither should we hesitate to renew again and again this vital dedication to personal holiness.

Father Jordan was a man of great energy and zeal and he exhausted himself in fulfilling the mission God had given him to found the Society. We can only imagine the setbacks and hurdles he faced in getting the Society off the ground and in spreading it throughout the world. In his own lifetime he established houses in more than twelve countries on four continents, something no successor of his has ever been able to achieve.

This work of Jordan was not for his own aggrandisement but for the building up of the Kingdom. We too need to place our whole energies behind this same task doing everything we can to spread the faith and bring people to the knowledge and love of the Saviour.

It is not only a question of work. Father Jordan had a great imagination and an extraordinary wide-ranging vision. As a young man he had travelled through the industrial heartlands of Germany and knew the situation of the mass of the people. He knew the problems they faced and realised that behind all their physical needs there was a deep spiritual yearning that had to be met.

He set about this task by all kinds of different means. He set up groups of lay people who could tackle the serious lack of religious instruction. He printed magazines for these collaborators to encourage them and to build up their knowledge and expertise. He backed this up by establishing a group within his Society for intellectuals who could support those working at parish level.

And when it came to his new foundations he kept up an incredible level of correspondence both personally and through Father Bonaventura Lüthen with the priests and brothers he had sent out. He found himself advising priests working in the midst of an anti-clerical revolution in Ecuador one minute and the survivors of an earthquake in India the next minute.

One letter went to Father Felix Bucher a missionary with the indigenous people of Oregon, another to Father Odo Distel who was building a church in Wealdstone, another to Father Gregory Gasser who was establishing a ground-breaking social apostolate in Vienna, one more to Father Konrad Hansknecht who had established a pioneering educational institute for troublesome boys and yet another to Father Philibert Schubert who was opening a new secondary school in Campos in Brazil.

To be the focal point of all these new developments in a time before airmail, telephones and email required a far-reaching vision and imagination.

If we could only have a small share of his vision then think what we might achieve. If we could have a tiny glimpse inside his mind and appreciate the extraordinary breadth of his vision we would realise that this could only have its origin in God. Let us pray that we are as open as Jordan was to the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

We need to catch up with his perseverance and dependence on Divine Providence. Two constant themes in Jordan’s Spiritual Diary are perseverance and his dependence on Divine Providence. It is hard to imagine how someone like Jordan could achieve so much with so little resources. If one reads the early pamphlets describing the Society or the earliest rules and constitutions we see how from the very beginning its aims were extraordinarily wide. And yet Jordan had no resources with which to carry out these extraordinary aspirations.

But somehow or other what was needed came to him. His great trust that God would provide what was needed lacked all prudence. The acceptance of great numbers of students for the priesthood without the means to support them or even pay their university fees was something that would normally be considered foolhardy. And indeed the Apostolic Visitator expressed these very views. But generous benefactors, many of them anonymous, seemed to step forward in the nick of time to pay long overdue bills.

Responsibilities and burdens that would crush many other people certainly took their toll on Father Jordan’s health and as a result he suffered greatly from what were termed “his nerves”. But he was committed to the task God had given him and he remained faithful to the end.

If we too lived out our vocation with the same tenacity in the face of difficulty and impossible odds then the work that could be done would be immeasurable.

Let me draw these words to a conclusion by referring you to our first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy and suggesting that the prophets God said he would raise up are not confined to Old Testament times.

No! God continues to raise up prophets among his people. In every age and in every generation he raises up men and women who speak to us afresh of the things of God. He singles out men and women who are able to express the Gospel in fresh language, people who can instigate reform in the Church, pioneers who can show us new ways to express our faith, extraordinary prophets who help us to see the world with new eyes and respond in imaginative ways to the particular challenges of our own day.

Francis Jordan was certainly one of these and can surely be termed a modern-day prophet. God was working through him to bring a new religious society into being, one with a new purpose and with a new energy.

So today let us thank God for the life of Father Jordan, let us ask him to speed along official recognition of the Church by means of his Beatification. But most of all let us his present day followers be inspired by his examples and become each in our own way prophets for the world of today.