Taking place on Saturday 12th July, Cardinal Vincent Nichols will be leading a Jubilee Year pilgrimage to St Edmund's College, Ware.
St Edmund’s College, the oldest Catholic College in England, is a continuation on English soil of the famous college that was founded Cardinal William Allen at Douay in Flanders in 1568. It is important to us because it was probably the strongest single agency by which Catholicism was kept from perishing in England. Originally intended as a seminary to prepare priests to work in England to keep the faith alive, it soon also became a Catholic boys’ school, debarred as they were by the laws of the land from having such institutions at home.
Many of its students, both priests and laymen, returned to England to be put to death under the anti-Catholic laws of the time, and the College has among its alumni 20 canonised and 133 beatified martyrs. The seminary part of the College moved to Allen Hall in Chelsea in 1975, but the school, now co-educational, continues to this day. Buried in its grounds are the bodies of some of the Vicars Apostolic who looked after the Church in the south of this country before the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850.
Outline Programme
11am - Pilgrims are invited to arrive and gather. Confessions will be available. There is ample parking
12noon - Solemn Mass for the Jubilee Year celebrated by H.E. Cardinal Nichols in the school grounds – please bring suitable clothing etc in the event of rain.
1.30pm - Picnic lunch (bring your own); tours of the College. Adoration and Confessions in the Chapel during this break.
2.45pm - Procession of the Blessed Sacrament; please gather outside the College Chapel for the procession to the school grounds where Mass was celebrated and where Benediction will now be given.
4pm - Departures.