Jerome Bertram, CO (RIP)

source: flickr.com/photos/josephshaw

It was great sadness yesterday that I learned of the passing of Fr. Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory. I beseech each of you, kind readers, to offer a prayer for the soul of this kind and Godly man who nurtured me greatly during my time at the University of Oxford.

There is a detailed obituary of Fr. Jerome available here, which contains much information I myself did not know about him. He was a very unassuming man, humble by nature but always, even in Oxford, one of the cleverest people in any room; he just rarely let anyone in on that secret.

Upon meeting him one encountered a slightly unkempt man, the barrel "French" cuffs of his shirt always a bit black and his hair never staying quite staying where his comb asked it to spend the day. He had a slightly gasping manner of speech, as though exhaling and winding downwards at the end of every sentence. He came across as very introverted until one made a comment to him and he became the most loquacious new acquaintance one could ask for.

According to his obituary, his parents were Anthony and Barbara Bertram. His father was a literary critic who ran a intelligence network for the French Resistance during the Second World Way; his mother, Barbara Bertram née Randolph came from the same family which started the hotel a block south of the Oratory in Oxford.

While most of the Oxford Oratorians come from all over the Commonwealth—England, British Africa etc—Fr. Jerome was an Oxonian at heart. He could identify which statues on a building were original and had survived the Reformation, even which ones on Queens Lane retained their original paint. He had a special interest in brass plates and calligraphy. At Coughton Court, a Recusant Catholic manor home, he spent ten minutes staring down a Sarum Missal and asking himself whether it belonged to the 16th century given its bold type face.

Despite being an older man when I knew him during the 2010-2011 academic year, he attracted a significant number of young people to his counsel. He had a calming manner in the Confessional and always gave inquiring minds his full time and attention, even if he did not want to. I distinctly remember his jealousy on Good Friday toward the Oratorians who were taking part in the liturgical service and not sitting in the Confessional for three hours.

A true son of Saint Philip Neri, he was a man of prayer and a Patristic outlook with a sharp wit. He never commented on the Schoolmen nor on the manualists, but in his conferences to the Brothers of the Oratory he always made use of the early Latin Fathers and his own mentor in the faith, John Henry Newman. He seemed intoxicated by prayer and drifted into irreproachable peace during the singing of the seasonal Marian antiphons. Not a legalistic fellow, he was quite happy to pray the Rosary or Office at rapid speed, consigning the actual words to "background noise" while directing his own soul to God.

As a son of Philip, he had a biting sense of humor, but that bore him some trouble at least once. For the uninitiated, Oxford in inundated with homeless. In June of 2011, Fr. Jerome kept coming across one particular drunk who would ask him for money and then scold him after not receiving an immediate yes. One evening Fr. Jerome ejected myself and another friend from the rectory after tea as he saw the miscreant charging the door. Father parted with, "Goodnight [Rad Trad]! And goodnight, Crazy Man!" A few days later, on Corpus Christi, Father stood outside the church greeting people after Mass only to be socked in the chest by "Crazy Man". Startled and shocked out of his equilibrium, Father Jerome thought to have his assailant stand on the sidewalk, and unable to claim church grounds as sanctuary, until the police arrived.

Although an Oratorian, and hence willing to serve any who entered the Oratory's doors, he was essentially a man of the old rite. He also referred to the old Mass as "the real thing", at least to me, and believed that at one point within the next generation it would become the de facto Sunday Mass of the Oratory.

It was he, and a fellow Oratorian, who taught me to serve the old low Mass and who happily brought me into their private chapel for Mass three or four days a week. It was there, in that narrow, red room, that I first learned to treat the old Mass as prayer. He always whispered the prayers at the foot of the altar, as if they were his personal supplication to God, which they are. He would bounce slightly and almost drift off in bliss at the Introit, particularly for the greater feasts (Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia!). When reading the Gospel his attention focused, especially on the words of Christ Himself, as if Our Lord spoke directly to him. He never did the Leonine prayers, but on Sundays would have me repeat the Prayer for the Queen within him until I knew it by heart.

It was also Fr. Jerome who taught me about the importance of understanding Latin to serving the old Mass. Although I had instruction in Latin and can read it well enough, his celebration of the Mass underscored that he understood everything he was doing as much as he understood breathing. In the above picture, Fr. Jerome, acting as deacon at the Trinity Term Mass for the Newman Society (with myself as one of the acolytes), his face opened with foreboding at the words "videbitis coelum apertum, et angelos Dei ascendentes, et descendentes supra Filium hominis."

Despite his love for the old Mass, he was not a "liturgical" person nor was he interested in liturgy wars. Perhaps due to his terrible singing voice, he never acted as the celebrant at high Mass in either the new or old rite, although he would act as deacon at either and sing his parts in recto tono. During the above Mass he forgot that clergy could genuflect on the top step other than at the beginning and end of Mass; he seemed about to keel over by the end of the Canon. At the end of Mass the organist played the elaborate melody of the dismissal from the Missa Regia. Father rolled his eyes, tuned out immediately, and gave the Ite, missa est from Mass XV (the flat one) while we attempted to contain our laughter.

While he favored the old Mass and even asked for his funeral in the old rite, he never spoke ill of the new Mass in front of people who did not share his view and even happily related to me last year his joy that attendance at their Novus Ordo Mass had dipped due to other churches in the archdiocese of Birmingham imitating the Oratorian praxis.

He did briefly hold an interest in reviving the Sarum rite with then-fellow Oratorian Sean Finnegan and acquired the permission of the Archbishop to celebrate Candlemas in the Merton College Chapel. After two such celebrations, during which he gave the sermon, the whole thing fell apart when someone wrote to Rome about the "Saint Osmond Society," which Fr. Bertram always called the Donny Osmond Society, and lamented they had not called themselves a "Group" or anything that sounded less like the FSSPX.

He held custody over the physical care of the Oratory, both church and rectory, a position which made him think very little of the Jesuits. During a re-painting of the church he discovered that the walls were indeed stone and marble, and that the Jesuits who ran Saint Aloysius until the '80s had painted over it in plain white to give the appearance of sterility. When they moved the altar forward during Vatican II they took care to remove the foundations and floor buttressing where the altar had been, against the wall of the apse, so that it could not be moved again without great effort and cost. Worst of all, he lamented the great number of relics, donated to Saint Aloysius parish by Pius IX, were destroyed in a bonfire, including the entire body of a martyr named Saint Pacificus. He fondly remembers getting the remaining relics in the mail, piece by piece, from parishioners who wisely lifted them from the church in the middle of the night back in the day. Although everything somewhat worked out in the end, he always referred to the Jesuits as "the Taliban."

He instructed not a few friends of mine in the faith, always privately and with the Roman Catechism, and was always encouraging me to take up Orders. He had considerable gifts, but always gave them back to God. He never drew attention to himself despite things which would give him some degree of notoriety in the Catholic world, like being the altar boy in Archbishop Sheen's This is the Mass. He was an excellent priest, a strong mentor, and a true son of Saint Philip Neri. Do pray for him.

Fr. Jerome's funeral
source: oxfordoratory.org.uk