Autumn Pilgrimages & Special Events

Special Events for the Autumn of 2021

Latin Mass Society Pilgrimage to Oxford
Saturday 21st October

IMG_2506
Last year's procession to the site of martyrdom at 100 Holywell Street, where we erect a gallows.

High Mass in the Dominican Rite in the Priory Church of the Holy Spirit, Blackfriars
St Giles, OX1 3LY, at 11am. Accompanied by polyphony from the Newman Consort.

This is followed, after a break for lunch, by a procession to one of the sites of Martyrdom in the city at 2pm. This is followed by Benediction at Blackfriars.

Oxford's beatified Catholic Martyrs:

The Martyrs of 1589
Bl George Nichols and Bl. Richard Yaxley were both secular priests, who had been trained at Rheims. Nichols had studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, and became famous as the priest who was smuggled in to Oxford Castle to reconcile a highwayman to the Church on the eve of the latter’s execution. Bl. Thomas Belson was a layman, a member of a Catholic land-owning family based in Ixhill, over the county border in Buckinghamshire; Bl Humphrey Prichard was a Welshman, an employee of the Catherine Wheel Inn, which was situated on the corner of Broad Street and Magdalen Street (where part of Balliol College now stands) opposite the church of St Mary Magdalene.
The four were captured in the Catherine Wheel, taken to London to be tortured, and tried and executed in Oxford. The place of execution was the Town Gallows, outside the corner of the town walls still preserved in New College, approximately where 100 Holywell Street now stands, which is marked by a plaque in their honour.

In 2008, during the LMS Pilgrimage,   Bishop William Kenney blessed a new plaque marking the site of the martyrdoms of 1589, on behalf of Archbishop Vincent Nichols.

The Martyrdom of 1610
Bl George Napier was born in Holywell Manor in Oxford in 1550; he attended Corpus Christi but as a Catholic could not take a degree. He was ordained at Douai and returned to minister to Catholics in the Oxford area in 1603. He was captured and executed in 1610.

More from the Catholic Encyclopedia here.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

11th November 2021
Pilgrimage to Bedford 
in honour of Our Lady of Guadalupe,
in reparation for abortion.

12 noon High Mass

St Joseph's, 2 Brereton Rd, Bedford MK40 1HU
(click for a link)

St Joseph's Church, Bedford, houses the National Shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, with an image which has been touched to the original in Mexico, and goes on tours around England.

Showing the Virgin Mary pregnant with our Lord, the image has become a symbol of the international Pro-Life movement.