Honouring our 'local' saints with pilgrimages
The Rev'd Steven Baggs is Assistant Archdeacon of Hereford and Vicar of the Frome Group of Parishes - and a fan of pilgrimage. Here he talks about the history of pilgrimage, the different types, and why it's a great way to celebrate our 1350th anniversary as a diocese.
You don’t have to be a maths genius to work out that if we are celebrating 1350 years since the founding of the Diocese of Hereford in a church that was only founded in 1534, then the English Church has its roots in something that predates the Church of England. Following St Augustine of Canterbury’s successful mission from the Pope to bring the Kingdoms in what we now call England into the Holy See of Rome in the early seventh century, the Diocese of Hereford was established in the Kingdom of Mercia in 676AD.
St Augustine didn’t have as much success with the Welsh Churches. At a synod meeting with the Welsh Bishops, they arrived having previously agreed that, if Augustine got up to greet them, they would accept his proposal; but if he didn’t, they would refuse. Apparently, he didn’t bother to get up, and the Welsh Bishops left the synod. The chair that St Augustine had got so comfy in can be found in one of my churches, at St James’, Stanford Bishop. The chair is a Holy Relic, despite the failed mission associated with it!
I don’t know for sure if the holy saints’ holy posterior resided in this chair in the seventh century, who knows? (The Victorians very helpfully screwed a brass plaque onto it declaring that it did, so I suppose it must be so.) But people do make pilgrimages to see it.
Visiting ancient places of worship and honouring the Saints through the places and things associated with them is becoming increasingly popular, maybe too popular. Last time I popped in to see St James in Santiago de Compostela, after a 1000km walk from Seville, the cathedral had removed the kneeler in front of his relics to stop people praying, as this was causing a backlog of people trying to get into the crypt!
Pilgrimage Celebration Days, are one of the ways the Diocese is celebrating 1350 years of its foundation (you can read about it here). These days offer us an opportunity to reconnect with some of our more local saints. It’s good to take time out to make a pilgrimage, and with three to choose from in our own Diocese, you won’t have far to travel.
Pilgrimages come in different forms; some involve a journey (which is the pilgrimage) and others involve spending time in a holy place.
I have made many pilgrimages that involved a lot of walking, different routes to Santiago de Compostela, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima and even a pilgrimage route across the interior of Gran Canaria. Those pilgrimages were mostly about the journey, time alone and discovering God in the people I met along the way. Once I arrived at my destination (particularly in Santiago), I found that I had become yesterday’s pilgrim.
Other places we go to on pilgrimage are all about the place, the destination. These are places where we go to seek God and spend time in his presence. The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk has become one of those places for me. The shrine was originally founded in 1061 by a Saxon noblewoman, the Lady Richeldis. She had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who told her to build a replica of the Holy House of Nazareth.
The Holy House of Walsingham became the main place of pilgrimage in England and was popular with Kings and Queens, including Henry VIII, who visited twice. Henry was said to have walked the Holy Mile from the Slipper Chapel barefoot in 1511 in thanks for the birth of his son, Prince Henry, who died soon after. (I stupidly did this one hot summer’s day and ended up with burnt and blistered feet. I don’t suppose they had hot tarmac road surfaces in those days.)
By Henry’s time, the almost 500-year-old little replica house was in its own chapel, a part of Walsingham Priory and one of many monastic houses dissolved during Henry’s reign at the English Reformation. Today, only the rather grand east window arch of the Priory remains standing.
101 years ago, pilgrimages to Walsingham were revived in the Church of England by the local parish priest and in 1938, a new Anglican shrine church was built in Walsingham, complete with a new Holy House of Nazareth. The Holy House has stones from many of the monastic houses destroyed by the reformers set into its walls, including one from our own Leominster Priory.
For me, as a Traditional Catholic within the Church of England, this sense of continuity with the past is important; it’s an essential part of my catholicity. A historic faith that I can trace back to the first Apostles and the church they helped establish is foundational to my ecclesiology, my understanding of the church and what it is.
Describing what the church is, rather than what it does, is not always easy, but the Nicene Creed manages it in just four words: it says that the church is; ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’.
Today, we are more used to describing our parish church, or our national church, as if they exist in isolation from each other and the wider church. The Nicene Creed reminds us that just as God is one, so too is the church supposed to be one.
The experience of reflecting on the history of our diocese and it’s foundation, the lives of the saints and our connection to them through the communion of saints, of visiting holy places and seeing the treasures they hold, of going on pilgrimage, all these things remind us of our connection to something bigger than ourselves, something all Christians are by definition a part of: the very body of Christ which is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
– ENDS –