Page 10 - The Portal magazine - February 2025
P. 10
THE P RTAL February 2025 Page 10
The Fourteenth
Anniversary of the
Personal Ordinariate of
Our Lady of Walsingham
Jackie Ottaway and Ronald Crane visit
St Margaret Mary, New Moston, Manchester
E WELL remember that day. It was 15th January, 2011 in Westminster Cathedral that it was announced
Wthat the new Ordinariate was to be called The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. A
gasp of joy came from the large congregation. We had come home and Our Lady of Walsingham was to be
our patron, our title.
On 19th January 2025 the Ordinariate Mission at St need the world. He doesn’t need the universe.
Margaret Mary, New Moston in Manchester celebrated Yet he chooses to have an earthly home. God is
the fourteenth anniversary of this momentous event. everywhere. There is that wonderful passage in
We decided to join them. Genesis which forms the first sentence of our
mass today, “This is the House of God and the
At mass Fr Andrew Starkie, the Parish Priest gave a gate of heaven”.
homily suitable for the occasion:
Jacob hadn’t realised that. He just thought he
If you go to the shrine of Our Lady of would lie down for the night. Then he had this
Guadalupe in Mexico, what you’re going to is vision of angels ascending and descending. It’s
an image, a miraculous image. If you go to the something that Francis Thompson, the Victorian
shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes you are going poet, wrote about. He said:
to a spring. In the Middle Ages pilgrims to ‘The angels keep their ancient places—
Walsingham weren’t going to a statue, although Turn but a stone and start a wing!
there was a statue; they were not going to a ‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
spring, although there was a spring. They were That miss the many splendored thing.’
going to a house; the house where the mother
of the church could gather her children. It was The whole creation is full of God’s glory, but
also the house of God; the house in which God we are just too busy to see it. Sometimes I think
himself dwelt among us. Now we know that God that’s why Our Lady wanted to build a house, so
cannot be contained. He is bigger than the whole that if we could be so dull that we miss the glory
universe. He doesn’t need a house. He doesn’t of God in all creation, at least there will be a Ø
