September 24 Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham

 Amici,

Today is September 24, the feast day of Our Lady of Walsingham. If you don't know the story, here's a nice video from a couple of years ago that explains the history of this amazing Marian Shrine, founded a thousand years ago in Norfolk, England, before the Norman Conquest, and suppressed completely by that wretched Henry VIII, who died saying, "All is lost – Kingdom, soul, life. Monks. Monks. Monks!"

The Story of Walsingham - Full EWTN Documentary 

If you watch this documentary, you learn the story of how one young Anglican vicar, significantly ecclesiastically named "Hope Patten", beginning in 1921, began to revive the pilgrimage – which sort of started up again on it own when Patten had a replica of the original statue of Our Lady and the Christ Child made. (The original had been burned up, along with the original Holy House, but the general appearance remained on Medieval seals.) His Anglican Bishop made Patten take the replica out of the local Anglican parish, itself a medieval survivor the Protestant Church of England "appropriated", as no "Mary Worship" was allowed in an Anglican Church. So, the enterprising vicar, with the name of "Hope", began building a shrine for it nearby, and the rest is, lo and behold, history. 

But prior to that, and again, profoundly Providently, an English lady named Charlotte Boyd, interested in Medieval ruins, bought an old, tumble-down stone barn standing out in the fields. It turned out to be nothing less than the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Patroness of Pilgrims, otherwise known as the Slipper Chapel, part of the colossal Medieval Shrine Complex. (One huge arch of the Medieval Abbey still stands, which gives one a staggering idea of its gargantuan scale.) She began its restoration as a Church for Mass yet the local Catholic bishops wouldn't let it be used until the 1930s. You see, they told her, "But no Catholic families reside today anywhere near Walsingham." (Henry the VIII had been successful, though two hundred years after his demise, the great Protestant revivalist John Wesley preached that if "There had been a grain of virtue...in Henry VIII, these noble buildings need not have run ruin."

And you will learn to some extent the incredible modern-day popularity of the Catholic Shrine to people from around the world, such as the Charismatics, who are indeed mentioned. This being EWTN, though, Traditional Catholicism is played down or not mentioned (caveat: I suppose I could have missed it).

Whatever.

 

Walsingham had been one of the three greatest Medieval pilgrimages, and for about 400 years absolutely nothing went on there except the normal life of a very small English village. I've never been there, myself, or to Knock in Ireland, for that matter (the architecture there – just looking at photos of it – wallops me with something resembling an epileptic attack/tremens; it is so Modernist, it's Lovecraftian, I swear!). However, I did do the pilgrimage to Loch Derg, a.k.a. St. Patrick's Purgatory (though the cave of that is closed), and spent three nights barefoot in the rain. It was, to be sure, the most "Celtic" thing I've ever experienced.

So, may Our Lady of Walsingham succor for England – an abject, pitiful place ruled by Godless bureaucrats and overrun with Muslim hordes, but once known as "Our Lady's Dowry" – a return to its True Faith. Like her Son, she never gives up on us.

Amen.

AnP