Bishop Challoner

One of my many joys, before my illness, was saying Mass from time to time in the private Recusant Chapel at Milton Manor; 'Gothick' but with genuine medieval glass collected from nearby parish churches before the C of E invented the dear old myth of its own 'continuity'.

Here, transcribed from an old Prayer Card, is a prayer for the Beatification of Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic, who dedicated the chapel on August 15, 1773. A friend of the squire, he was buried in the neighbouring Anglican parish church ... remaining there until the new Westmonasteriensian establishment ... like huntsmen and hounds maddened for a fox ... dug him out and transferred him to their shiny new pseudobyzantine crypt among the sidings of The Victoria Railway Station. 

I don't know the date of this prayer's composition, but it clearly predates the tejjus Ecumenical Correctitudes of the 1960s.

O God, who didst raise up thy servant Richard, a true and faithful pastor of thy little flock in England: raise him, we beseech thee, to the altars of thy Church; that we who have been taught by his word and example may invoke his help in heaven for the return of this land to the ancient faith and to the fold of the one true Shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Challoner was V A when the London mob sacked the Church of the Assumption and S Gregory, Warwick Street, now the central Church of our Ordinariate. How thoroughly satisfying now to have that historic church as part of our inheritance! 

 I wonder if anybody ever gives a thought to the Marquis of Pombal, a decisive man ...

Vivat Rex.