Salve Sancta Parens!

 From Fr Colin Stephenson's Merrily on High, about the [now deconsecrated]Church of S Paul's, Walton Street, in Oxford; which was originally a daughter church of my own only parochial charge, S Thomas's.

"Having heard about St. Paul's ... I made my way there to find out what it was like. To open the great doors under the classical portico was to be transported into a church in the middle of Paris, for it was French Catholicism which [Fr] Roger Wodehouse, the vicar, loved above all things. The great towering image of Our Lady of Victories (which Roger always said the P.C.C. had chosen from an illustrated catalogue) wearing a silver crown at a jaunty angle, the great baroque tabernacle which revolved and turned itself into a throne for Benediction and which had been brought from a bombed church in Belgium, the altar of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, all these things seemed more authentic than anything I had seen this side of the Channel ...

"Roger had a very aristocratic background ... yet he was a fervent socialist, although his background often came out in surprising ways as when he said to one of his curates who had overslept: 'You should have more and better servants.' ... As an undergraduate he had seen this classical church which looked Parisian outside, and  thought it should be the same inside ...

" ... just before he was appointed ... there had been a great fuss ... about a stained glass window which depicted a crusifix. Within twelve months of Roger's incumbency they were having Benediction  with a monstrance and not making a murmur ...

"Religion was such fun at St. Paul's with very dressed-up processions in May and October carrying a Black Madonna, and the Host enthroned upon an outside altar under the classical portico at Corpus Christi. Everything was lightened by Roger's sense of fun ... A favourite [story] was that during a procession  of the Virgin, Roger was enjoying it so much that he said 'Round the church once again' and an ethereal female voice from the region of the image said: 'Damn!' loudly and clearly. This was claimed as the one authentic miracle of St.Paul's."