High winds and holiness in a field in Norfolk

The bank holiday weekend at the end of May signals the start of our family pilgrimage to Walsingham. Together with around 60 other Catholic families we spend from Friday through Monday camping in a field, sharing food, conversation, support and prayer. It's a wonderful spiritual retreat complete with penances of high winds, cold nights and driven rain. Yet despite the privations (no showers for 4 days!) we always feel refreshed -- if physically tired -- after the pilgrimage. The daily Masses, the communal prayer (morning prayer, Rosary, night-time prayer), the talks and the fellowship all combine to provide a spiritual shot in the arm

This year we were particularly blessed to have Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke as our guest. His Eminence had kindly given his time to spend several days in a wet field in Norfolk with a small number of Catholic families: what a boost to our vocations that was. And what a gift to the Church ++Burke is. Please pray for this holy, humble and charitable prince of Holy Mother Church.

A Day with Mary in Margate - pure joy in prayer - Ave Maria!

It's a great pleasure to have something unmitigatedly positive to blog about in a world where negativity and cynicism often seem to have the upper hand. Most readers, I'm sure, will have already enjoyed Mulier Fortis' able description of the wonderful and, as our friend Bruvver Eccles would say, spiritually nourishing Day with Mary at the church of St Austin and St Gregory in Margate. I'm not even going to try to top my dear friend the mantilla'd cat lady's description (go and read it if you haven't already!) but simply share a few thoughts of my own.

I love A Day with Mary - it's something that our family has looked forward to each year since we first encountered this wonderful apostolate in 2011. It's a day jam-packed with prayer and devotion but even so, somehow the whole ends up being much greater than the parts.


My children are particularly enthusiastic - they love the processions and the singing as well as the beautiful medals and devotional items on which they can spend their pocket money. This year's haul included a lovely silver miraculous medal to (finally) replace the one my eldest daughter lost when we were burgled a couple of year ago (it's the first time she's found one that she liked enough), picture medals of Blessed Francisco & Jacinta for my younger daughter who has a special devotion to the little seers at Fatima, some large medals and a crucifix for my eldest son and a glow-in-the-dark standing crucifix for the youngest (6) who said "now I can see Jesus on the cross when I wake up at night."

 I love the bookstall -- I always come away from ADWM with a decent reading list for the next couple of months...

The weather was appropriately glorious for Margate's first ever Day with Mary and the town made a  picturesque backdrop for the devotional procession while the very bricks echoed back the strains of Ave Maria after each decade of the Joyful Mysteries.

One of the many lovely things about ADWM is the variety of people that you meet and the way that parishioners and pilgrims blend together and make friends. There is something wonderfully unifying about a church packed to the rafters with smiling, praying, people singing their hearts out to Our Blessed Lord and his Mother. There is something joyfully transcendent about such an experience: I think that it might be a tiny flicker through a glass darkly of what heaven might feel like.

Another great pleasure of the day was seeing the wonderful Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate whom we have been privileged to get to know over the past few years -- and even go camping with at Walsingham! (OK, they were sensible enough to stay in the pilgrim bureau while we roughed it in a muddy field ... but they did manage to survive the journey home in our van and prayed their office with us before letting the girls visit their convent). We're very fond of them and it was a delight to be treated to their wonderfully pure voices singing the propers to the Solemn Mass and other devotional music throughout the day.

What else can I tell you? You should come and experience it for yourself: words can't begin to describe the graces that flow from a day like this. For me the high point was the consecration of our parish to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We are so blessed at St Austin & St Gregory: not only do we have a beautiful church, a kind and holy parish priest, a diverse and welcoming congregation and a quiverful of saintly patrons (Gregory the Great, St Augustine, St Anne - patron of the other church in our parish) but now we also enjoy the protection of the Immaculate. It feels like having the best ever spiritual security system installed. Not only was the parish consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary but also every individual and family present consecrated themselves to her care.

After the stirring and thought provoking sermons, the hours of prayer, reflection and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the joyful singing, processions, confessions, and outpouring of caritas, I think that a spiritual Geiger counter would have  measured the parish of St Austin and St Gregory glowing for miles around with the positive outpouring of prayer.

The demons must have fled in terror.

Ave Maria!

Vandalising the Rosary

Photo credit: Vintagethisretrothat on Flickr

 

Apparently it wasn't just the Mass of Ages that the vandal Bugnini intended to demolish in the name of ecumenism and "noble simplicity" (a.k.a.Brutalism): the most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary was also in his crosshairs. A fascinating article on Venermur cernui (a new-to-me blog from Dallas, Tx., well worth a rummage through) describes what can only be called Bugnini's evil masterplan to destroy reform the Rosary including only allowing one "Our Father" per five decades and removing everything after the word "womb" in the Hail Mary. This is all detailed in Bugnini's Reform of the Liturgy which I haven't read but am now sorely tempted to - if only to raise my (usually too low) blood pressure! The whole article is worth a read, you can read it here.

 

My first thought after reading this was about the children at Fatima. As I remember, one of the very first actions of Our Lady in her apparitions was to teach the three children to say the Rosary properly: until then they had rushed through it, simply saying the first words of each prayer: "Our Father, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Glory Be..." etc..

...and if Our Blessed Mother thinks that saying the Rosary properly is both important and necessary, then who are we to argue?

That the Rosary is recognised as a particularly efficacious prayer against evil makes any attempted sidelining or attempted vandalism even more sinister. I'm thinking specifically of its use as a tool in prayer campaigns outside abortuaries against the slaughter of innocents and towards the conversion of the hearts of those involved in the grisly business of abortion.

Being a post Vatican II baby, I ran a reasonably high chance of never encountering the Rosary. It wasn't until I was an adult that met anybody who prayed it, apart from my grandparents; sadly I never saw them praying although I am positive that their prayers for me are in large part responsible for my return to the Faith in my late 20s. For that I remain ever-grateful.

As a child in the 1970s, I remember my grandmother had sending me Rosary beads. I asked my parents what they were for. "Oh it's a lot of Hail Mary's and you're supposed to think about other things as well" was the gist of the answer. The message was clear: it's long and boring and we're not going to do it. I loved my Rosary beads though and tried to make up what I thought the Rosary might be, although rather unsuccessfully.

About 10 years ago, having been back in the arms of Mother Church for some time, I decided I to find out more about the Rosary. At first I only said one decade, at night, usually as I nursed a baby to sleep in bed. At the time a decade -- a whole decade! -- seemed like a lot. Sometimes I would even fall asleep before I finished. It took some time for me to remember the different decades of the different mysteries, and I read various books, various approaches. In time, and as the children were a little older, I suggested to my husband that we pray a decade together as a family before bedtime at night. It was awkward and a bit clumsy the first few times, but we could feel the graces flowing and soon it was a habit that we wouldn't dream of breaking for any reason. Around the time of the Papal Visit we decided to graduate from our nightly decade a whole Rosary including the Creed and the prayers for the Pope and we built our family night prayers around this. My husband leads our prayers, but we each take turns to lead a decade of the Rosary, with parents helping the youngest children. This has been a great blessing for our family -- a time of calm contemplation before bed. When we have Catholic guests, we share our night prayers with other families. Reading through the description of Bugnini's proposed truncated version of the Rosary, I wonder whether, had his vandalism been accomplished, I would have had a chance to know Our Lady's Rosary, let alone witness the great graces that flow from it to my family, to all who pray it, and to the whole world. If you haven't tried praying a regular Rosary - do. It will, literally, change your life.

Our Lady of the Rosary, Ora pro nobis,

 

 

 

A Day With Mary at Our Lady of the Rosary

"A week's pilgrimage in one day" is how someone once described A Day With Mary to me, and I think that it was an apposite choice of words. We're home, tired but happy, after a day spent in the company of Our Lady and her Blessed Son. How can I describe the day? A sung Traditional Latin Mass, twenty decades of the Rosary, hours of Adoration, Benediction, two processions (just imagine - Our Lady's statue carried on a bower of blossoms through the winding suburban streets of South London...and if that's not wonderful enough, imagine that procession now led by the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament winding through the same streets a few hours later), a Divine Mercy chaplet, scores of people availing themselves of the sacrament of penance, beautiful hymns to Our Lady and in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, sermons that bring tears to your eyes and joy to your heart, a bookstall to feed your head and a seemingly endless supply of beautiful religious objects for sale... This gives you a small flavour of the itinerary but little idea of the graces that flow from a day like this.

Why not join us next year ...or find A Day with Mary near you...

Our Lady's crown

Crowning Our Lady's statue

Marian procession

Oh Fatima, farewell...