On the Camino we are all strangers yet no one is a stranger. I think of that adage: ‘a stranger is a friend you haven’t met.’ As we walk, we share. It is quite wonderful and a privilege to listen to so many stories. Many are in transition. Others are looking for something, for themselves, for God.
The Season of Creation and the making of a crucifix in the spirit of Laudato Si’
Spiritual maturity is the key theme of forthcoming General Meeting
New Abbot at Douai
Douai Abbey, Berkshire
The monks of Douai Abbey in Berkshire have celebrated the blessing of Father Paul Gunter OSB as their new abbot.
@douaiabbey
Abbot Paul received the abbatial blessing from Bishop Egan of Portsmouth, accompanied by 12 bishops and archbishops, together with the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation and 13 abbots, on Thursday September 8. The Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the Royal County of Berkshire attended and ecumenical guests included the Anglican Bishop of Reading.
In his homily, Bishop Marcus Stock of Leeds highlighted the Rule of Saint Benedict as the immediate "spiritual foundation" for guiding the brethren; the ring as a sign of constancy in loving kindness; and the pastoral staff for the sacrificial love required of any shepherd of a Christian flock. In a similar vein, the new abbot has taken as his motto convertat ut benignitas, 'may he convert by kindness'.
In his words at the end of Mass, Abbot Paul spoke of the rich array of saints named in the Litany sung before the blessing. They were, he said "outward-facing ministers of the Gospel, of every time and state of life." Included in the Litany were the martyrs of China and Ukraine. They give us courage "to be missionary; that is, effective witnesses in our time to the person and saving work of Jesus Christ."
Abbot Paul Gunter, 56, is a native of Wolverhampton and entered Douai Abbey in 1985. After serving for some years on some of the monastery's parishes he was sent to Rome in 2002 for higher studies in liturgy at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute (PIL), where he was awarded a doctorate in 2006. He served ten years on the faculty of the PIL before returning to become parish priest of Alcester in Warwickshire.
In 2012 he was appointed Secretary to the Department of Christian Life and Worship of the English and Welsh bishops' conference, in which role he continues to serve. He was elected the eleventh abbot of Douai on 11 May 2022, succeeding Abbot Geoffrey Scott who retired after 24 years as abbot.
Douai Abbey, whose patron is Saint Edmund, King and Martyr, was founded in Paris in 1615. Dispersed by the French Revolution the community of English Benedictines was re-housed in Douai, northern France in 1818 before returning to England in 1903, settling at Woolhampton in Berkshire. Douai School, which also moved from Douai to Woolhampton, closed in 1999. The constant work of the monks of the community has been service on the mission in England and Wales, though its monks have served as far afield as Mauritius and Australia. Today the community has 21 monks, some of whom serve in parishes in the dioceses of Portsmouth, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Menevia.
Poor Servants reflect on 150 years of ministry
Religious at the Lambeth 2022 Conference
We had worthwhile contacts with bishops who had never encountered a Religious Community before. We also had important conversations with some of the conference stewards, young adults from around the world, many of whom were on a vocational journey, and in some cases had not previously had an opportunity to consider Religious Life.
Climate, Covid and Conflict: Can Catholic Social Teaching show the way through the storm?
Building Hope for People & Planet : JPIC September meeting
Building hope for people and planet
Listening to the voice of creation
Led by Ellen Teague
Saturday 24th September 2022
10.00 am – 4.00 pm
Concluding with a Eucharist at 4.00pm
This will be a hybrid conference, on zoom and in person: at FCJ Spirituality Centre, Saint Aloysius Convent, 32 Phoenix Rd, London NW1 1TA
Ellen Teague is a London-based freelance Catholic journalist who writes and campaigns on Justice, Peace and Ecology issues. She has been a member of the JPIC team of the Columban Missionary Society in Britain for three decades and edits their newsletter, Vocation for Justice.
She also writes regularly for The Tablet, Messenger of St. Anthony International Edition and Redemptorist Publications, collaborating closely with organisations involved in the National Justice and Peace Network of England and Wales (NJPN). She is a member of the NJPN Environment Working Group and regularly speaks at diocesan days in England on Laudato Si’.
Queries: Margaret Healy: margarethealyssl@gmail.com
All are welcome – Please bring family and friends
(Voluntary contribution of £10 (payable at the door)
For those on zoom a donation would be welcome
Tea and coffee provided (please bring your own lunch)
Carrying the torch: Presentation Sisters celebrate decades of service
Sr Susan Richert PBVM reflects on her congregation’s first Assembly since the pandemic:
Recalling the lantern of Foundress, Nano Nagle
As we gathered for our opening ritual, at our Assembly in June, we were invited to “Remember Our Call”. To listen again to the call to us in the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and to get in touch with what was stirring in our hearts as we gathered together as Province for the first time since 2019. These stirrings we shared with those at the table we had gathered with. We then prayed as we looked forward to thinking about our life with Christ, our commitment to life, dedication to ministry and supporting each other. We called each other to enter into ourselves, our experiences, our dreams and questions so that together we shape our future walking our journey and reminding each other that God asks us to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with God.
Jubilarians renewed their vows
Morning Prayer was led by different communities and gave us the opportunity to delve deeper and listen more acutely to what God is calling us to…
We celebrated Jubilarians, who renewed their vows at a joyful Mass celebrated by Fr Chris Thomas.
We took time to remember our sisters, family and friends who had died during the past 3 years – we had been unable to gather together to celebrate their lives. We were joined via zoom with those of our Sisters who were unable to be present with us.
Our prayer was one of blessing – for those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.
As part of our ritual, we were given large paper oak leaves and invited to write the names of anyone we wished to remember on the back. These were placed around the oak sapling and we picked up forget me not seeds for future planting.
We ended with lines from John O’Donoghue
They will never be forgotten
While there is one of us left to remember
And when there is no one left to remember
We will all be together.
Recalling the skill of a Benedictine sculptor
An annual service of devotion to ‘Our Lady of Pew’ took place at Westminster Abbey in July. The Chapel of ‘Our Lady of Pew’ features a beautiful statue created by a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent.
The late Sister Concordia Scott OSB
(Copyright:Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
Sister Concordia Scott OSB sculpted the fine alabaster statue of the Virgin and Child in the niche of the Chapel. It took 14 months to complete and was placed there in May 1971.
The original statue that was there disappeared centuries ago. The design of the 20th-century piece was inspired by a 15th-century English alabaster Madonna at Westminster Cathedral.
Sister Concordia Scott (1924 – 2014) was Prioress of the Minster Abbey community from 1984-1999.
Her commissioned works included statues for Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, Coventry Cathedral and the National Shrine of Wales as well as numerous sculptures currently in Europe and the United States of America.
The Society of Our Lady of Pew venerates the Blessed Virgin Mary and regularly holds services and retreats in Westminster Abbey.
This small chapel hollowed out of the thickness of the wall between two chapels off the north ambulatory was originally a self-contained 14th-century rectangular recessed chapel, but it now forms part of the entrance to the Chapel of St John the Baptist. The term 'Pew' refers to a small enclosure or chapel.
Message from His Holiness Pope Francis for the World Day of Prayer for the Season of Creation, September 1st, 2022:
Key new role for FCJ Sister in Liverpool Archdiocese
A life lived to the full: Sr Pat Robb CJ
The following was taken from Sr Pat's personal memoirs by Sr Gemma Simmonds:
Pat was born in 1936 in Penang of a Scottish father and an English mother both of whom had served in World War I. Her father died in Malaya when Pat was only two, leaving her mother to move to a family farm in Somerset, where little Pat was soon in her element, riding horses and tractors and learning to love all things green and growing.
Her mother was called up for nursing service in WWII, so Pat was sent off to boarding school aged six. The end of war brought a further move to Cambridge, where an angry, sulking, rebellious young teenager (Pat's own description) was taken on in Paston House (now St Mary's School) by the then headmistress, Sr Christopher Angell, who is still alive and on mission in Zimbabwe aged 106. Sr Christopher saw Pat as a challenge, and she was not the only person to share this view of Pat in her lifetime! Paston House was Pat's eighth school, but she knew at once that a Mary Ward school was different from the 'survival of the fittest' culture she had met elsewhere.
Renouncing her original ambition to become a stable girl to the racing trainer in Royston, she followed her mother and chose nursing at the Middlesex Hospital in London. Pat loved nursing and the independent life of London with its smoke-filled coffee bars, skiffle music and mixed hockey played with young doctors. There were tensions around her interest in Catholicism both with her staunch Anglican mother and with a young farmer boyfriend who asked her to choose between him or becoming a Catholic. But neither mother nor boyfriend persuaded her, and Pat was received into the Catholic Church, making her First Holy Communion in the Cambridge Convent Chapel with Mrs Hawke, mother of Sr Anna and Nonie Hawke, who taught Maths at St Mary's, as her godmother.
Pat became a staff nurse, but further adventures called, and she sold her Lambretta scooter and boarded a ship bound for Australia, where she found a job in the mountains of New South Wales, covering everything from children's ward, A & E, maternity and the operating theatre, treating horrific accidents among men digging roads and dams out of the side of the mountains. She went on to South Africa in 1960, at a time of appalling violence and racial segregation, often finding herself sitting with the black Africans in church being glared at by white people.
Deciding to do a midwifery training in order to work in a bush mission hospital, she boarded a ship home, where she was pestered by two Irish nuns to visit their convent to see 'what it's like to be a nun'. Pat shuddered at the thought and avoided them for the rest of the journey, but to get them off her back, and thinking that a teaching order was a greater sacrifice, she said she was entering the sisters from her old school. True to her upbringing, she then felt she had to keep her word. Mrs Robb was distraught when she broke the news, but the Cambridge community were so good to her that in later years she was to say that she hadn't lost a daughter but had gained several. As anyone who knew her would understand, Pat found novitiate life very constricting, so she was delighted when she was sent to St Mary's School in Shaftesbury after her vows, heading for the open country and the wildlife with alacrity. As Sr Camillus she spent 18 years there as school nurse, starting the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme, running the Scottish reels club with the help of its star dancer, now the abbess of a Benedictine monastery, and being chiefly remembered by the alumnae who have paid tribute to her on Facebook for riding their horses round the hockey pitch, roaring round in a tractor and teaching them to play rugger touch, despite the disapproval of many parents.
But her missionary vocation never left her, and she returned to midwifery in London, finally landing in Zimbabwe, in a hospital with over 200 beds, serving an enormous outlying rural area. Reverting to her baptismal name, Pat moved on to the municipal clinic in the desperate poverty of Amaveni township where her interests in justice and peace were roused by the torture and bullying she witnessed by Robert Mugabe's supporters. A call came from Mozambique, to Chimoio, on the border with Zimbabwe. Built for 25,000 people, Chimoio now held 250,000, mostly refugees from the civil war, squatting on the edge of the town without sewerage or shelter. She concentrated on Mother/Child health but was also dealing with high numbers of mutilated victims of violence and people dying of HIV/AIDS. In one of many stand-offs with authority in her life, she was deported from Mozambique after denouncing corruption within the local charity and government sectors but was asked to go to Angola with the charity CONCERN.
She flew there to find that the CONCERN office had been bombed during the night and all documents had been destroyed. Nothing daunted, she set up some feeding centres with Médecins sans Frontières. 100 people a week were dying of starvation and related diseases there under terrible living conditions and she was very busy, with shelling all night and drunk and drugged soldiers manning the many roadblocks as she and her companions drove through the mine fields. Asked if she would do similar work in the camps surrounding Rwanda, she became the camp administrator in Tanzania in 1993, moving on to Goma in the Congo and on into Rwanda and then Burundi to a camp which they had to evacuate five times in the six months she was there. Years later she and I went to see the film Hotel Rwanda. She was very silent on the way home, later weeping as she spoke of the horrors she had witnessed during the genocide.
Pat moved to yet another war zone in Sierra Leone, organising logistics to turn a disused university into homes for hundreds of people, helped by a Muslim cook called Alfred and a Christian guard called Mohammed. Her career in African war zones ended with brutal suddenness when a bout of cerebral malaria necessitated her repatriation to England. Here she found a volunteering role in the Cardinal Hume Homeless Centre, with one day a week in a legal aid firm involved with Human Rights for the Traveller community. It was the beginning of her life as a tireless campaigner for justice and peace that is acknowledged in Professor Anna Rowlands' recent book on Catholic Social Teaching which carries a dedication to Pat. It says: 'She represented the persistent widow, the virtuous and difficult woman who faithfully believes in a truth beyond mere power and witnesses to it until justice is rendered. She stands for a generation of women, written out of the magisterial pages of the tradition, but who have led and inspired social renewal.'
Conventional community life was not for Pat after her long years under fire and in May 1999 she moved to a flat in Cambridge, working first at Whitemoor High Security Prison and then in chaplaincy at the Oakington Immigration Detention Centre until its closure in 2010. Well into advanced old age she involved herself with Justice and Peace work through CAFOD and other NGOs, campaigning on behalf of refugees, several of whom became part of her extended family, as well as keeping up the care of her beloved allotment.
At the end of her memoirs Pat writes, "God has been VERY good to me". She, in her turn, fought the good fight on behalf of so many in need of a doughty champion. We can imagine her welcome in Heaven, "Well done, good and faithful servant - there are horses, motorbikes and gardens galore, just waiting for you to enjoy them…" May she rest in peace at last after her extraordinary life and rise in glory.
Tributes paid to Bruce Kent
Second webinar on dementia : June 9th
Following a very well attended webinar on dementia earlier in the year, organised by the Health & Care group, a second zoom session with expert speakers has been organised for June 9th, 1.30pm to 3pm.
Speakers:
Sharon Johnston:
Specialist Admiral Nurse
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust
Sarah Hodges:
Specialist Dementia Occupational Therapist
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust
Lis Burgess Jones:
Previously Director of Nursing at Camden & NW London Mental Health Trust
Now Chair of North London Hospice - https://northlondonhospice.org/about-us/meet-the-team/
To get the zoom link, email: communications@corew.org
Together along the digital highway
Well known retreat giver, Fr Tom Shufflebotham SJ, has died
Fr Tom Shufflebotham SJ passed away on May 4th. He was 87.
Tom was born on 14th July 1934 in Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside and was educated at St Francis Xavier College in Liverpool and then at Mount St Mary’s. He joined the novitiate at Harlaxton in 1952 at the age of 18, and after taking First Vows and making a two-year juniorate in Roehampton, studied for a licentiate in philosophy in Heythrop, Oxfordshire. Between 1958 and 1961 he read for a Master’s degree in modern history at Campion Hall in Oxford, followed by a three-year regency at St George’s College in Salisbury, Rhodesia, teaching history and Latin. A licentiate in theology at Heythrop followed, during which he was ordained in 1967. After a fourth year of theology post-ordination he made his tertianship at St Beuno’s under Paul Kennedy. Between 1969 and 1980 Tom taught history, first at St Ignatius College, Enfield and then, from 1973, at Stonyhurst.
In 1980 he moved to Loyola Hall as a member of the retreat house team and Superior of the community. In 1985 he was appointed as Rector of the Jesuit community in Wimbledon, combining this with the job of vocations’ promoter the following year. After a brief sabbatical, he joined the team at St Beuno’s in 1993, staying there for the next two decades and becoming Superior in 2003. His final move was to St Wilfrid’s Preston in 2014, where he continued to direct the Spiritual Exercises until his final illness.
His Requiem Mass will take place on Wednesday 1st June at 12.15pm at St Wilfrid’s church in Preston.
An invitation from Cardinal Michael Fitzgerald M.Afr
Ears to Listen: Response of Religious to synodal consultation
By Sr Margaret Donovan HC
The three webinars on Communion, Participation and Mission were well attended (between 200-300 each time).
Each started with a time of prayer and a reflection, given by a speaker on the theme. Then there were break out groups to discuss the following:
a) The reflections and thoughts of Religious with respect to their experience of Communion/Participation/Mission in the life of the church in England and Wales.
b) Things Religious identify as the church needing to let go of in England and Wales to allow new or deeper experiences of Communion/Participation/Mission to come.
c) Things Religious identify as the church needing to develop or learn to do in England and Wales, to allow new or deeper experiences of Communion/Participation/Mission to come.
After the session there was an opportunity for Religious to submit further reflections on each of the questions. Overall there was an enormous response, for which we are very grateful. The feedback has been submitted to CICLSAL.
Thank you to everyone who took contributed in any way to the Religious Synodal process. We hope for a positive outcome.