Showing posts with label Reformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reformation. Show all posts

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Churches I Like


I haven't celebrated Mass there for years but I love the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk. I believe the place has deep sanctity.

The Shrine was a great center of pilgrimmage during the Middle Ages until its destruction at the Reformation. The 16th Century Arundel Ballad laments the loss:

Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes
Lately wear songe,
Toades and serpents hold their dennes
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep O Walsingam,
Whose dayes are nightes,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deedes to dispites.

Sinne is where our Ladye sate,
Heaven turned is to helle;
Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye,
Walsingam, oh, farewell!

But the tragedy of Walsingam's despoilation was reversed when Fr. Hope-Patten refounded the Shrine in the 1920s-30s and it continues as a popular place of pilgrimmage and devotion today.

Go there if you can and take time out to enjoy the pubs, if they haven't been banned, but be warned - conversation waxes theological.

God bless & Good Shooting,

LSP

PS. For an interesting take on the Reformation, and the new breed of millionaire it produced, check out Mr. Belloc's "What was the Reformation?"