Some Holiday Snaps

I'm back from ten days of touring the Italian Lakes and spending time with my parents (where there isn't very good internet access). Last week I was enjoying the area around Lago Maggiore and staying at the Rosminian houses at Stresa and Domodossola. It was perfect holiday - plenty of this:


Good solid 'autentico' Italian fare, to help us recover from all the church-crawling:

This is the friary of Madonna del Sasso above Lucarno, Switzerland. Lake Maggiore has shores in both Italy and Switzerland, so it was possible to cross the border and briefly leave the E.U. (without any customs or passport checks). Stresa, our main base, has a charming Victorian air about it (there's even a statue of Queen Victoria in the grounds of a hotel that she used). It is the resting place of the once-controversial and now newly-beatified Antonio Rosmini, the friend of several popes, prolific philosopher and founder of the Institute of Charity and Sisters of Providence. Here is his monument at Collegio Rosmini:


His tomb is in the crypt below - looks rather like the proposed monument to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. One Rosminian I met speculated that both Rosmini and Newman will be Doctors of the Church within 20 years - and both, of course, had their orthodoxy questioned in the nineteenth century:


This is the house where the beatus died in 1855. It is now a centre for Rosminian studies:

His bust can also be found by the lakeside:

The final ingredient of the holiday - lots of outstanding natural beauty to refresh the city-wearied soul:

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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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Ely Place

Yesterday I led a small pilgrimage of parishioners to St Etheldreda's, Ely Place. As I've probably mentioned several times before, this church was founded by the Rosminian Fathers who formerly served Kingsland (my current parish). Though it was taken over by the Fathers of Charity in 1874, its Catholic history goes back much further. The church was built as a chapel for the Bishops of Ely in the late thirteenth century, making it the oldest church building used for Catholic worship in this country. After the Reformation it was also used for a time by the Spanish Ambassador and several martyrs are associated with the parish (including the monks of the nearby Charterhouse).

I celebrated a Requiem Mass for Fr Lockhart and the other priests who have served our parish, after which the legendary Fr Kit Cunningham (Rector of Ely Place) gave us an informative tour. It was also a chance to celebrate the beatification of Antonio Rosmini. If you don't know this church, situated near Holborn, then it's well worth a visit.

Blessed Antonio Rosmini

The Church has a new beatus today, Antonio Rosmini, who is greatly venerated in Italy not only as a holy man but as an influential political thinker. Indeed, his role in preparing the way for Italian Unification means that many towns and villages have a 'Via Rosmini'. Of course, he is also a controversial figure who had forty propositions condemned posthumously in 1887. Rosmini was certainly progressive for his times and his interest in democratic movements seemed particularly worrying to his contemporaries. He also attacked a close relationship between Church and State, and criticised the lack of true involvement in the liturgy (though he was not, as some claim, a pioneer of vernacular liturgy).

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However he was greatly admired by Gregory XVI and Blessed Pius IX. Pope Benedict is in the unusual position of having removed, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the 'reasons for concern' surrounding Rosmini's works (2001) and now, as Pontiff, approving his beatification. As others have commented, Rosmini's beatification is in itself a miracle!

In England and Wales, we remember Rosmini as the founder of the Institute of Charity (1830). He had a great interest in the conversion of England and sent many of his finest men to the English Mission, such as Luigi Gentili (who, I hope, will one day be beatified) and Giambattista Pagani (a noted spiritual writer). Indeed, the Rosminians claimed to be the first priests in England to wear the Roman collar and preach Missions. Soon after the Institute's foundation, the Fathers of Charity were sent to Prior Park, near Bath, to help Bishop Baines in his ambitious plans for the Western District. However, they fell out and were invited by Ambrose de Lisle to Leicestershire, where they did many works of evangelisation. An impressive College was founded at Ratcliffe and important missions were set up in Newport, Cardiff and London - including my parish of Kingsland, which was cared for by the Rosminians between 1854 and 1874. Shortly before Fr William Lockhart moved to Kingsland, he visited the ailing Rosmini at Stresa and received his blessing for the English Mission. The holy man even hinted that he would like to visit if the opportunity arose. Lockhart was one of the first to translate the works of Rosmini into English and thus popularise his books beyond Italy.

Blessed Antonio Rosmini, pray for us!

A Victorian Curate

This is one of my predeccessors, Fr William Lewthwaite - a Cambridge graduate and former Anglican clergyman - who was curate at my parish between 1856 and 1874. I love his top hat and gloves!

Three Nights in Stresa

I'm just back from a brief stay at the Collegio Rosmini in Stresa (an hour in the train from Milan), where I ploughed through 150 letters written by our first parish priest, Fr Lockhart (a Rosminian).

If the parish had been founded by diocesan clergy, hardly any letters would have survived - indeed, they wouldn't have been written in the first place since most of the Lockhart letters are to the Father General or Provincial. This makes Kingsland one of the most well-documented parishes of mid-Victorian London. Although I did quite a bit of work, the view from the archives window was somewhat distracting:

It shows part of Lago Maggiore (Italy's second largest lake), which stretches to Switzerland. The islands that you can see are the Borromean Islands (Isole Borromee), which still belong to the family of St Charles Borromeo.

On Tuesday afternoon the Rosminian archivist (an English brother - and a distinguished World War One historian to boot) drove me to the Institute's novitiate at Domodossala:

The Fathers here also care for the Sacro Monte Calvario, one of the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy, which are UNESCO World Heritage sites. At Domodossola there is a Via Crucis made up of a series of stunning chapels, with frescoes and life-size statues.

But, I managed to defeat the temptation to do excessive sight-seeing and, for most of the time, only left the College archive in the evenings for a meal in a local trattoria.

Where I'll Be Spending the Bank Holiday

Our parish was founded by the Rosminians in 1854. I'm currently working on two projects: a history of our parish school (est. 1855 and still going strong) and a life of our first parish priest, Fr William Lockhart (the first of Newman's disciples to be received into the Church). Unfortunately (!), the Rosminian archives are centralised at their house in Stresa, on the southern shore of Lago Maggiore and not far from the Swiss border. So I pulled the short straw and the school is funding my short trip to the Italian Lakes to look at the Kingsland file! Before coming to this parish, I didn't know much about Rosmini (a sometimes controversial figure, whose works were formerly placed on the Index) and his Institute of Charity, so it will be a fascinating few days.