Catholic and Loving it!

There's been a lot of ink/bytes spilled recently over the English bishops and their decision to move various holy days of obligation to the nearest Sunday. Joanna Bogle has been encouraging people to go to weekday masses on the days formerly known as holy days.

Today is not a holy day of obligation but a holy day it is, to my mind at least. The feast of St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher is of great importance to any English Catholic. What I find particularly heroic about these saints is not so much that they died for what they believed was right (which is heroic enough) but that they did so alone. St. John Fisher was the only English Bishop to say no to King Henry's claim to be head of the Church in England. It is one thing to die for the truth when you are one of many who are fighting for it, but to be the only one. To have all the bishops in the land try to convince you to just let this one pass. With their oh so reasonable explanations that if you want to make the world a better place then you have to get on with people and not upset them with silly criticisms. It's just the pope for goodness sake, nobody is denying Christ, just sign the document and then we'll have a banquet and discuss some kind of pastoral plan.

So, today I took the day off work to go to mass and visit any local points of interest regarding the saints. We began with 12:10 mass at St. Charles. As Churches go, St. Charles is pretty special:

Mass was short and sweet (as weekday masses are wont to be) and Fr. Stephen Maugham sang what sung parts of the mass he sang really well, I'd love to hear him sing a whole mass sometime. I wonder if he knows Fr. Massie has Gregorian Chant practice on Wednesday evenings with a view to a sung mass someday. At the end of Mass Fr. Stephen reminded us of the importance of the day and recalled all those areas of Catholic life in the UK that people died for.

I took a look around St. Charles, something I have done many times before. I located St. Thomas more behind the altar on the left:

Sadly, I couldn't find St. John Fisher anywhere. To have such an important English saint born within 10 miles and not to have a statue of him seems bizarre but perhaps I missed him.

We met up with Richard Marsden and Phil Cunnah and hopped (clambered) in to Richards car for the voyage to Beverley (on the way to Beverley we popped in to have Leona weighed, she is now 10lbs 14ounces). In Beverley we had a pub lunch in the Rose and Crown.

Now, you have to be careful in Beverley not to get confused. Beverley has two saints, both Bishops, both Johns. Saint John of Beverley was bishop of Hexam before St. Wilfrid in the 700's. Saint John Fisher was bishop of Rochester. For the purposes of todays expedition we were looking for St. John Fisher (who while a John of Beverley is not John of Beverley)

Richard and Phil were very helpful with the pram:

We soon made it to St. Mary's Beverley. This beautiful pre-reformation Church is where St. John Fisher's father is buried.

It is suggested that St. John Fisher may have been baptised here but there is no record of it. It's a beautiful Church, just my kind of thing. Lots of stone and darkness interspersed and stained glass and light. We couldn't find a bullet hole anywhere (don't ask) and we didn't expect to find much about Fisher here (it being one of their Churches now) but we were pleased to see his image:

If you ever come to Beverley on a St. John Fisher pilgrimage that's as good as it gets in terms of physical things to see.

You might have thought the Catholic Church in Beverley would be named after St. John Fisher but it isn't. It's named after St. John of Beverley which is a little dissapointing as there is already a Church named after St. John of Beverley and he is buried there - Beverley Minster (update - turns out the Minster is dedicated to John the Baptist). Given that St. John of Beverley has an entire minster it might have been nice to let St. John Fisher have a parish Church. More disappointing still, the Catholic Church in Beverley has no statue of St. John Fisher that I could see (update - turns out there is a small one somewhere).

Still, it's really good to walk the streets he walked and see some of the buildings he would have seen. We ended with a visit to Beverley Minster. St. John Fisher studied at the Minster School so he would certainly have been inside the minster itself. High points of the Minster - The carving of the Choir stalls is beautiful and high up the walls have an intricate pattern of dark and light marble. Down sides - the hideous modern circular altar and the hideous modern arty statues made of cast iron. There are plenty of hideous modern churches to house that kind of thing thankyouverymuch.

Richard drove us all to Phil's house and Phil took us home. A great time having been had by all. Maybe next year we should get the train to London and do some more English Saint pilgrimaging.