Thenne longen folk to go on pilgrimage...

Not Aprille, as in Chaucer's Tales, though the weather was showery and springlike when the Ordinariate went home to Walsingham for our summer Pilgrimage. From the Bournemouth Mission we were more than thirty, including a number of Catholics from local parishes and an Anglican or two. Emphasising our ecumenical (not to say evangelistic) role, we were mostly lodged at the Anglican shrine. It looks very romantic by moonlight, hence the first picture in today's blog. We had travelled the 200 plus miles by coach on Saturday, so we were ready for anything on Saturday morning. The interior of the Catholic church of Reconciliation is lit by very orange lamps, so I gave up on trying to photograph it either before or during Mass. We celebrated SS John Fisher and Thomas More, two of the first and greatest Catholic martyrs of the Reformation era.

Over a picnic lunch we began the serious business of the Pilgrimage, catching up with old friends.

Sister Jane Louise searched the grounds for familiar faces - it was so good to see both her and Sister Wendy Renata helping to organise the event. Now that they are back in Walsingham they have re-established their old friendship with the Anglican Sisters at the shrine. I also called on Mother and found her immensely welcoming. She took part in the healing service at the Holy House on Sunday evening, which many of our Catholic pilgrims found a moving and helpful event. Bishop Lindsay made us all most welcome, and provided me with a place where I could hear the confessions of our Catholic participants (where I was still toiling away well after 10pm).

But this is to  run ahead.

Once we had devoured our picnics and caught up with a great deal of gossip, we started to get marshalled for the Procession.

 

It took  a little time - here is Fr Woolnough in town-crier mode, with Sr Wendy standing by with a loud-hailer.

The roses and other wildflowers along the route were a lovely accompaniment to our walk.

Through the village, and on to the Anglican Shrine, where our priests assisted at Sprinkling with water from the Holy Well.

Our party was fortunate in being able to stay on until Monday. We joined the Catholic Parish at Mass on Sunday morning, and on Monday assisted at the Noon Mass (St John Baptist's Day) at the Catholic Shrine, before making our final prayers in the slipper chapel.  Our driver remarked on how fortunate we were in getting a clear route home; expected back around 8.30pm, in fact we were dropped off at Our Lady Queen of Peace half an hour before that.

 

The organisation throughout had been wonderful, and we are all most grateful to Madeleine from our congregation who made all the arrangements.

 

Madeleine (L) expounding in the Refectory

 

Hardened Pilgrimage-goers were heard to say they had never been on such a well-ordered or happy event.

Crucifix in the Anglican Shrine

It was, we thought, especially good that we were staying in the Anglican shrine, meeting new friends there, enabling some of our diocesan catholic friends who'd accompanied us begin to understand the tradition from which many of us came - part of our Patrimony, if you will.

As we departed from outside the slipper chapel many were already planning how to come again next year - and hoping that our Ordinary might soon announce the date for the next National Ordinariate Pilgrimage.

Soho

Tomorrow Walsingham, today Soho Square. Priests and ordinands of the Ordinariate joined in a plenary session at St Patrick's for instruction and (perhaps more importantly) fellowship. Good to catch up with Fr Bennie from our most northerly reaches. Here are a few of the usual suspects.

First a duo from the East (well, Wickford and Colchester anyway)

 

Fr Paul from Oxfordshire found Fr Keith (Salisbury Group) in enigmatic vein (maybe it was the orange juice).

 

We began, of course, with notices, from the p-p of St Patrick's, Fr Alexander Sherbrooke [here in Air Hostess mode, showing us the nearest exits].  Mgr Keith was in good form, pressing us to be more serious about raising money - there is a great need for us to support the stipendiary clergy more generously, and to get to grips with the difficult matter of money for pensions.

 

 

We also had Fr Stephen Wang's final appearance before he goes to his new post as Chaplain to London University (and overseer for all the University Chaplaincies across London). Here he is deep in conversation with Mgr Keith: later we were able to thank him for all he has done for us - prolonged applause, and a little cash donation - our Ordinary suggested he might be buying a new Saxophone with it!

 

It is always uplifting to enter St Patrick's, and never more than today when we had the privilege of assisting at the 12.45 Mass.

 

Now I have to get packed for Walsingham; rain is promised, and I managed to leave my one really waterproof coat in the cloakroom at St Patrick's. Some of us from our Group are going by coach early tomorrow morning; others are already there. We are due to return on Monday. Meanwhile, Jane goes to London for the wedding on Saturday of our one nephew ... bad timing. Oh yes, there are some of our priests running catholic parishes (here are two of them) while trying to hold ordinariate groups together - not an easy task.

The next plenary for our priests is on September 19th; meanwhile these few photos will give a taste of who was there today.

Forgive this rather self-indulgent blog, but I was rebuked for not having posted much lately, and pictures say so much more, and so much better, than words. Maybe Walsingham will prove photogenic?

 



 

 

Our Lady of Sorrows

Mgr Keith Newton, our Ordinary, preached very movingly and simply on the Sorrows of Mary on the Ordinariate's pilgrimage day in Walsingham (r. the Slipper Chapel, part of the Catholic Shrine). For all that, the keynote seemed to be one of joy. Such a brilliant sunny day (compensation for last year's deluge); a great turnout of the faithful (some had to stand throughout the Mass for lack of room); some forty concelebrating ordinariate priests. We had a great deal to be thankful for.

Jane (rt) with Daloni and Michael Peel

So after our 450 mile two-day round trip, I thought I should post at least a few pictures for those of you unable to be present. It was only through the kindness of our old friends Dr Michael Peel and his wife Daloni (formerly i/c the College of St Barnabas) that we were able to break the journey with an overnight stop at their home in Suffolk.

Mgr Keith greeting members of the congregation after Mass.

Fr Aquilina from Sevenoaks with Mgr Broadhurst
Settling down for a picnic - some of our Bournemouth Group in the forefront

A merry post-prandial trio of priests

a South London seminar sur l'herbe.







and a pair of Ellises comparing notes

Bishop Lindsay Urwin welcomes us to the Anglican Shrine where he is the Administrator

Singing in the Rain (2)

"Come, ye thankful people, Come!" we sang this morning in St Anne's Brockenhurst. On hearing the tune I was a little perturbed. First, it is a very long hymn - but I need not have worried, this was a Catholic congregation so we only sang two verses (is long-winded hymn-singing part of the Anglican Patrimony?) Then, it is a harvest hymn and are there not yet two months and then the harvest? Certainly we saw them reaping some of the early barley in Norfolk on Friday, but all is not yet safely gathered in... I look forward to my figs and apples in a couple of weeks or months, even though the currants and berries are mostly in the freezer. But of course, it was tied to today's Gospel - "Wheat and tares together sown"; somehow "wheat and Darnel together sown" just not does not work, though I daresay Estell M White would have thought it scanned perfectly.

Enough of this. Sufficient to say we were in Norfolk on Friday and yesterday because of the Ordinariate pilgrimage to Walsingham. And though they could get the Combine Harvesters going on Friday, yesterday they certainly could not. Walsingham was wet, very wet; that did not daunt the three or four hundred of the Ordinariate who attended the Mass in the Catholic Shrine, or those who joined the prooession to the Village from the Slipper Chapel, as thousands upon thousands had done from the eleventh Century until the desecration of Holy Places under Henry VIII of unhappy memory in the mid sixteenth Century. Msgr Keith Newton, our Ordinary, had announced that he was to celebrate the Mass of Reconciliation in Walsingham this weekend, so we came together from all parts of his Ordinariate. I know there was a Yorkshire priest there, and so was a Devon priest with his nine progeny - a couple of them were leading the procession - in the photo at the top of this page.


If you want to know about the weather, you can read more about that in my other blog at the Anglo-Catholic. And if you want pictures of the Mass, then the place to go is the Sevenoaks Ordinariate site. Some of the participants turned up a little late; the pair on the left said they were stuck in traffic; I think behind a muck-spreader. No comment is necessary. Here I shall just add a few maundering thoughts, and some pictures from what was a most memorable and happy day.



There were happy meetings with old friends.


Here my wife and Fr Mark Elliott-Smith were catching up on the news. Forgive the sickly yellow cast; that is thanks to the sodium lighting in the Catholic Shrine Church. And here is part of our Hants and Dorest contingent waiting for Mass to begin (similarly jaundiced).



They look a little more healthy in the open air; this [below] is at the Anglican Shrine, where the pilgrimage ended with sprinkling from the holy well, and a joint blessing by Msgr Keith and the Shrine Administrator, Bishop Lindsay Urwin.



In all the Churches and Shrines there were flowers; it is the 950th anniversary of Richeldis' vision, and the 50th of the fire in the parish church. Here [below] is the seven sacraments font, duly enflamed with flowers.



So good, to get the Ordinariate together, in company with other Catholics. We must do this more often - but perhaps for Msgr Keith's sake not in the same week that he flies home from Texas.

Singing in the Rain

"Do you ever see the Dominican Sisters in Sway?" asked one of the Ordinariate nuns today. We were at a pre-ordination quiet day in Kensington, the Carmelite Church. "But of course! I was with them yesterday". So here are some pictures to prove it.



We have had two months without rain here in the deep south; and though London had heavy showers today, no rain reached Lymington. But yesterday, being a Bank Holiday, it rained. Not wholeheartedly, but drizzlingly, and enough to make life difficult at the Priory in Sway.



The Sisters coped splendidly, however, and the plant stall proved very tempting. There was bric-a-brac, and a very good tea. So a couple of pictures will reassure you and the former Walsingham Sisters that I was there, where the Sisters look forward to a visit from the Ordinariate Religious asap.



Jane had not seen the Chapel, so before we left I took her to see it - inspired, I am told, by the Chapel at Elmore - now, alas, no longer the home of the monks of one-time Nashdom, who have retreated to the former college Principal's House in Salisbury Cathedral Close. I find the chapel at Sway quite lovely - I hope you do.

The National at Walsingham

So many bishops, so few of them diocesans. In 1992 there were thirteen bishops, most of them diocesans, who voted against women's ordination. At Walsingham this year there were John Hind of Chichester, and Nicholas Reade of Blackburn - no other English diocesan - except, of course, for the Bishop of Norwich who was there in cope and mitre; but not as a concelebrant. There was a time when he was one of us - not any longer. There is a couple of others still in office who reckon to be Catholics; Europe and London, I suppose. But the 'honoured place' we were promised does NOT extend to appointing new Catholic Diocesan Bishops. So here are a few of the retireds, suffragans and such who still make it to Walsingham for the National; so far as I can discern them, Richborough, Ebbsfleet, Burnley, David Silk, Pontefract and Chichester with, on the throne, Whitby. On the other side of the altar was another handful, and here they are:


I may be wrong, but I seem to discern Blackburn, Burnley (again), Edmonton, Horsham, Beverley, Ladds and a certain colonial bishop.








Then there were other great and good figures around - you could not miss the Master General of SSC, and here he is with Bishop Martin Warner and the Principal of Pusey House, Fr Jonathan Baker.
In the Anglo-Catholic blog I said this might be the last such occasion many of us would attend. One of our American readers was upset at this; he seemed to think Walsingham would disappear. Not at all. I am sure we will still be going there; but as members of the Ordinariate we are not very likely, except perhaps as ecumenical guests, to be at the Anglican National Pilgrimage.

One of the Guardians, (not, I think, in this photo) gave the impression he would not be joining the Ordinariate. He did concede, though, that if he were to become Lord High Chancellor and wear a full-bottomed wig he might reconsider... so clearly we must try to arrange this for him.

Bishop Lindsay kept a very low profile, sitting with the ecumenical guests and the Guardians. I think the contender for the Chancellorship may indeed be in this last picture.

[I have amended the list of bishops after a helpful comment from a reader... thanks. +E]