Burns Night and Haggis

Since publishing on 2009 anniversaries earlier this month, I keep coming across more. Today, for example, is not only the Conversion of St Paul but Burns Night - and, indeed, the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth. To mark this we had some delicious haggis at Sunday lunch in the presbytery.

Eating haggis reminded me of the small part it played in the conversion of our first parish priest here at Kingsland, Fr William Lockhart (a disciple of Newman and Rosmini) while he was a student at Exeter College, Oxford. In the early 1840s he attended the annual Scotch dinner for St Andrew’s Day, held in the Union rooms. It was a happy evening of whisky, Jacobite songs, toasts to Archbishop Laud and ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, and a menu of oyster soup, haggis and ‘cockie-leeky.’ Afterwards, Lockhart walked round the Parks with a friend to sober up and declared: ‘I am in a state now in which I might be drawn into any wickedness.’ The following morning he went to see Dr Sewell at Exeter and asked to confess the previous night’s excesses. Sewell refused and offered him a dose of Epsom salts instead of absolution, Lockhart later commenting ‘I came away from that ass at once. I asked my father for bread, and he gave me a stone. I asked for fish, - he gave me a scorpion.' Not long afterwards he joined Newman at Littlemore and soon converted to Rome, one of the main issues being the forgiveness of post-baptismal sins.

To celebrate today's anniversary, here is what I consider to be one of the finest sights and sounds in these fair isles:

The 'Second Spring' in Leicestershire

I visited a priest friend in the East Midlands today. His parish couldn't be more different from a London one - a large geographical area, a charming little church in one of his 18 villages, a close-knit congregation where most people know each other by name and (most strikingly) a presbytery where the phone and doorbell rarely sounds!

We had a most enjoyable drive around some of the local Catholic sites, especially in the Charnwood area which owes many of its foundations to the vision of a nineteenth century convert, Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle. He was a friend of Pugin and a great patron of the Trappists and the Rosminians. His home was Grace Dieu Manor, built in the 1830s, enlarged by Pugin and now a school run by the Rosminians. The grounds were most impressive and are used by the diocese of Nottingham for an annual Rosary Rally:

Grace Dieu served as the centre of Catholicism in the area and the great Rosminian missioner, Fr Luigi Gentili, lived here for a time, as he toured the surrounding villages and established missions. One of these was erected at nearby Shepshed and Gentili's chapel can still be seen (though it is now a private house):

In the grounds of Grace Dieu are the ruins of a medieval priory of Augustinian Canonesses, founded 1235-41 and referred to as 'the church of the Holy Trinity of the Grace of God [Grace Dieu] at Belton dedicated to God and St Mary.'
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The ruins inspired Wordsworth to write:

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,
Rugged and high, of Charnwood’s forest ground,
Stand yet, but, Stranger, hidden from thy view
The ivied ruins of forlorn Grace Dieu,
Erst a religious House, which day and night
With hymns resounded and the chanted rite

Grace Dieu Priory is supposedly haunted by a 'White Lady,' one of the nuns, but she seems to have been otherwise occupied for we only saw a group of friendly cyclists.

Ratcliffe was the next stop - built by Pugin as a novitiate and school for the Rosminians. It is still in the hands of the Institute of Charity and a successful independent school (old boys include one of our auxiliaries, Bishop John Arnold):

The key attraction for me was the little cemetery:


Here, in the corner, are the tombs of Fr William Lockhart and his mother Martha, respectively the first parish priest and benefactor of my current parish. I'm putting together a short life of Fr Lockhart and will be travelling to the Rosminian Archive in Stresa at the end of the month:
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