Letters to the Editor

The Mass returns to Saffron Walden

I was inspired by the Chairman’s autumn Message in the last Mass of Ages : the Catholic Church continues, against all the odds, “to bury her undertakers”. It is a statement that a small market town in Essex can vividly illustrate. Saffron Walden is nestled in a picturesque valley at the very tip of the county. It is adorned with a stunning medieval church that Eamon Duffy, in his Stripping of the Altars, makes note to mention. Even with the recent onslaught of housing development and commuter cacophony, Saffron Walden remains a quaint, bucolic English town.

It remains so only because bolted onto the western end, lie the grounds and house of Audley End. On here no planner can lay his new road and no builder his concrete. The house is protected by English Heritage. Audley End received its name from Sir Thomas Audley, who received his land from King Henry VIII. As Speaker of Parliament from 1529 to 1535, he can certainly be categorised as a Catholic Church “undertaker”. It was his persistent questioning that finally forced his predecessor, S t Thomas More, to reveal his mind at his trial in Westminster H all. Not only did he ensure the previous Speaker’s end, but he steered through the Acts for the Suppression of the Monasteries through Parliament. His remuneration was the Benedictine Abbey of Walden.

True to his legislative programme, he flattened the monastery, but, if you look closely at the ground floor of the inner court at the rear of the house, a faint print of the cloister arches remains. Along with a one-way road in town called Abbey Lane, this is all that remains of Saffron Walden’s monastic heritage.

With the protestant intellectual powerhouse of Cambridge University less than fifteen miles north, this provincial satellite town had little chance. The old faith was wiped out. Over a hundred years later, during the Civil War, General Fairfax made the town the headquarters of the New Model Army. Quakers subsequently emerged and older residents today still proudly refer to this our “Quaker town.”

Against this backdrop, it may come as surprise then, that on the feast day of Pope St Pius V in 2018, the sacristy bell was rung and out came a Catholic priest wearing a biretta. After a pause of forty-nine years the Mass, as codified by this saint, was celebrated once a gain by a Parish Priest in Saffron Walden.

When Psalm forty-two was intoned for the first time at the turn of the twentieth century, the preceding pause of 350 years was somewhat longer. But the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was resumed. Not in its stunning original set ting of St Mary’s, but in a converted old wooden barn, in the shadow of the ancient church. Every pause impoverishes the Church. Vestments, altar cards and even buildings are lost, but the Mass re-appears. A wooden altar, wooden re-redos and decorative Spanish oak altar rails that enriched the barn, were lost with the latest pause.

Over the centuries every tactic has been used to suppress the Mass. Everything has been thrown at it. Institutions, such as Parliament, banned it and the Vatican’s current memory lapse of the usus antiquitor continues. But yet it still quietly emerges, even in the most unsuspecting places, like Saffron Walden.

Lech Handzel-Bonavia Via email

Letters should be addressed to: The Editor, Mass of Ages, 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH email editor@lms.org.uk Letters may be edited for reasons of space