Fr Paul McCourt, an army chaplain and a priest of the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, reflects:
There’s something particularly special about the morning of the 11 November, the day we call Armistice Day. Here is the day when at the very hour of 11 o’clock, the nation pauses to do something unique and deeply poignant. We stop what we’re doing, we stand still, we fall silent, as did the guns of war when the clock struck eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
It’s impossible for us to imagine what the world had gone through in the four bitter years before then, with multiple nations at war with each other, and then the aftermath of rebuilding trust across the globe. What is of note was the immediate desire never to forget the terrible human cost of war on such scale.
The Cenotaph in Whitehall was erected in 1920 to be the main memorial for those who had given everything that we might have what we enjoy today in terms of democracy, freedom, and peace. It was replicated by many local memorials in every parish church, village, town, and city across the nation because there was barely a single corner of the country that had not lost someone from their community such was the scale and reach of loss.
With another world war only 20 years later and lasting for six years, followed by all the campaigns since in defence of world peace or national protection, the time of Remembrance has become the best way we can say a collective ‘thank you’ to so many who have protected and defended world order and our nation.
Therefore, what society does today and on Remembrance Sunday is an annual salute to that innate human instinct to protect peace and all who live by it, to protect life in all of its ages against threat, and to live by principles so hard won in times past.
For all this and more, we say thank you to them and to God.
Listen live at: Remembrance Reflection 2025 – Catholic Bishops’ Conference