The Augustine Camino
James Bogle with a Canterbury tale of traditional pilgrims Photographs by Raja and Jeremiah Wolstenholme
When April with his showers sweet with fruit The drought of March has pierced unto the root… Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage… Of England they to Canterbury wend, The holy blessed martyr there to seek… (Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales) After April, May is the time for pilgrimage. April has fulfilled its role of piercing to the root the drought of March, all the wildflowers are freshly out - daisies, buttercups, bluebells, St Anne’s lace and the haw is white on the hawthorn bush – the orchard blossoms are in bloom and the fattening lambs gambol in the fields, bleating plaintively, an image of the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. More importantly, it is the month of Mary and we have not long since crowned her with blossoms as Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May. Thus, it is only fitting that we should celebrate her by going on pilgrimage, in time-honoured fashion, to the shrines of England, her ancient dowry. Anglia dos Mariae, dos tua Virgo pia haec est, "England the dowry of Mary, this is thy dowry, O Holy Virgin", as
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reads the famous altarpiece from the time of King Richard II and the Wilton Diptych of 1395. It was a devotion that helped sustain the recusant Catholics of England during the Penal times, when Catholics were so cruelly persecuted by a deeply hostile Protestant government. Even more importantly, it was the Feast of Whitsun, happily coinciding with Mary’s month of May this year, for it is at Whitsun that many traditional Catholics in Britain gather together to travel to France for the annual pilgrimage from Notre Dame de Paris to Notre Dame de Chartres, a trip that many of us have been doing since the middle 1990s. For this year and last year, on account of the Covid virus and the lockdown, we have been unable to attend the Paris to Chartres pilgrimage organised by our good friends and fellow pilgrims at
Notre Dame de Chretienté (Our Lady of Christendom), the French foundation which organises the Chartres pilgrimage. Last year, our leader of 20 or more years, Francis Carey, together with our leader on the day, Timothy O’Callaghan, organised a one-day pilgrimage from St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, to Canterbury. It was such a success that, this year, it was decided that we would be a little more ambitious and attempt a three-day imitation of the Chartres pilgrimage, on English soil, from St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, via Canterbury Cathedral and the shrine of St Thomas Becket, to the Friars, Aylesford, ancient home of the English Carmelite Friars. This friary is where St Simon Stock, our English Carmelite, was Prior, he who, in a vision, had received the Brown Scapular of our Lady of Mt Carmel, from the hands of our heavenly Mother herself. This meant, once again, following what they now call “the Augustine Camino”, named after St Augustine of Canterbury, the Apostle of the English, but using the name the Spanish give to their famous pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, the Camino de Santiago. This time we had some 80 pilgrims, all joining us at short notice since we were not sure until the last minute that the authorities would allow us to undertake the journey.
AUTUMN 2021
