Alfred Hope Patten and the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham by Michael Yelton
The Sacristy Press, 313 pages, $34.95
A Review by Peter Eaton
According to the tradition, in 1061 the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared three times to the noblewoman Richeldis, instructing her to build an exact replica of her house in Nazareth in which she had received the news from the archangel Gabriel that she was to be the Mother of God. The tradition further tells us that the Holy House, as it came to be known, was constructed in a single night while Richeldis kept a vigil of prayer. So the first miracle of Walsingham was revealed.
While it is likely that the traditional date is a little too early to be accurate, there is no dispute about the importance that the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham came to have by the 15th century, when it attracted pilgrims from across Europe. The priory that Richeldis’s son, Geoffrey, founded grew into one of the wealthiest monastic houses in Britain, and was plundered for its riches and dissolved by Henry VIII and his dreadfully destructive administrative machine in 1538. The land of the priory and the shrine were delivered into secular hands, and the site fell into ruin. And so it would remain for almost four centuries.
Nothing comes from nowhere, and the re-founding of the shrine at Walsingham and Alfred Hope Patten’s single-minded determination must be seen in the context of that larger Catholic movement in the Church of England that had begun with John Keble’s Assize Sermon a century earlier in 1833, and which continued until the liturgical reform of the second half of the 20th century. During this time the essentially Catholic nature of the Church and sacramental system was re-established in Anglican theology and practice.
In 1896 a Roman Catholic laywoman, Charlotte Boyd, was able to acquire the small 14th-century church that we now know as the Slipper Chapel, which has become the center of the restored Roman Catholic shrine. Roman Catholic pilgrimages began a year later, but Boyd’s endeavors were not without challenges from the Roman Catholic leadership of the day.
Hope Patten’s two predecessors as vicars of Walsingham were convinced Anglo-Catholics, and so some ground had been tilled. When Fr. Edgar Lee Reeves, who had been Vicar of Walsingham from 1904, and who had set up a modest statue of Our Lady and a small shrine in the parish church, decided to retire in 1921, there was some trouble in finding a successor who would be sympathetic. The vicar of one of London’s Catholic shrine churches, Holy Cross, St. Pancras, had the answer, and recommended his former curate.
Hope Patten would stay at Walsingham for almost 40 years until his enviable death after officiating at Solemn Evensong and Benediction in the shrine church. And a second miracle, no less wondrous than the one by which the original shrine was founded, began to unfold.
No more unlikely a character to re-establish one of Europe’s greatest holy places could there have been than Alfred Hope Patten. Barely conventionally educated, whom the prospect of examinations could put to bed with a nervous condition for weeks, shy and awkward, complicated and difficult, autocratic and rigid, naïve and tireless, the epitome of one who could be both as cunning as a serpent and as innocent as a dove, Hope Patten was often so ill and unable to function as an adult that he had to repair to the continent for months at a time, not infrequently imperiling the work in which he and others were so faithfully engaged.
Yet Hope Patton could be immensely kind and generous, and he had a profound effect on so many during his long life. Though highly disciplined in celebrating the Mass, saying the Daily Office, and leading the devotions that he developed at the shrine, oddly Hope Patten had no obvious interior life. He was never seen to spend time in private prayer in church. Both his extraordinary genius and his crippling shortcomings were evident for all to see almost every day. He was the sort of priest, described by a former Archbishop of Canterbury as sui generis, and once so common in our Anglican tradition, who could never be ordained today.
Michael Yelton, to whom we are indebted for several invaluable volumes of the history and personalities of the Catholic movement in Anglicanism, now gives us in this revised and greatly expanded version of his earlier study of Hope Patten, an important insight into this remarkable man who left not only Walsingham, but also Anglicanism, changed. While Yelton is characteristically modest, especially in reference to Fr. Colin Stephenson’s study of Hope Patten, Walsingham Way, he has given us a fine book, based on documents not available to Stephenson. He helps us see the whole picture of the development of the shrine and its ministry, which went well beyond simply building a replica of the medieval Holy House and setting up the iconic image of Our Lady of Walsingham. While those who are interested in knowing more about Walsingham will want to read Stephenson’s books, they will need to read Yelton’s.
It is hard now, almost three generations after the triumph of the Catholic tradition in Anglicanism that is represented, most obviously for Episcopalians, in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), to understand the effect of Hope Patten and the shrine in their day. So much that was once strange, exotic, and frightening to so many Anglicans is now so ordinary as to be unremarkable, like candles on altars, surplices on choristers, and chasubles on priests.
And even if the occasional Protestant protestor still shows up at the national pilgrimage, the shrine at Walsingham is no longer regarded as an exotic manifestation of an aberrant expression of Anglicanism or creeping popery. Every Archbishop of Canterbury preaches there at least once during his primacy, and the Bishop of Norwich, who is the local ordinary, is now always present. Walsingham achieved the height of establishment recognition in 2019 when Westminster Abbey hosted a festival of the shrine, and, in an irony not lost on many, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was processed into the same church where the king who had destroyed her shrine had been crowned.
The stories about Walsingham and those involved in the mission of the shrine down the decades are legion. One of my favorites concerns Fr. Colin Stephenson, who was Hope Patten’s immediate and greatest successor, and was told to me by the late Canon Michael McLean, who was, at the time of the incident, Stephenson’s assistant administrator and an eyewitness. Those were the heady days when the liturgical practice at Walsingham set the standard for the more advanced Anglo-papalist congregations of the Church of England, especially those in Brighton, a great center of the Anglo-Catholic revival.
Now Fr. Stephenson had lost a leg in the Second World War, and for the rest of his life managed with a cumbersome wooden prosthesis, which was attached to his body with a complicated web of leather straps and buckles. Such devices required the kind of attention that Stephenson was disinclined to give. One Sunday, Fr. Stephenson was celebrating High Mass in the shrine church, with Fr. McLean as his deacon, kneeling behind him to lift his chasuble at the elevations during the Eucharistic Prayer. The leather straps, worn out by years of use and neglect, snapped, and, right after he replaced the chalice on the altar after elevating it for the devotion of the faithful, Fr. Stephenson crumpled to the floor in a pile of lace and brocade, disconcerting his deacon no end.
But Stephenson, not to be undone on his part by the undoing of his wooden leg, with characteristic aplomb and presence of mind, whispered to his deacon, “Don’t worry, dear. They will be doing this all up and down the south coast by next Sunday!”
While it is true, as Yelton reminds us, that Walsingham has been a critical factor in making normal the place of the Mother of God in mainstream Anglicanism, and even among some Protestants (the best book on the rosary remains one written by a British Methodist), in one important sense Hope Patten’s dream remains unfulfilled. He wanted Walsingham to be the center of Marian devotion and pilgrimage for the Church of England and the Anglican world, and this vision is yet to be realized. The second half of the twentieth century saw developments that have been the cause of a number of unhappy divisions, some of which stand in an uneasy tension with the gains that places like Walsingham have wrought for Anglicanism. The Shrine is clear that only male priests ordained by male bishops may be associates, which means that only some Anglicans are able to participate fully in the Society of Our Lady of Walsingham or in the sacramental life of the shrine.
There is no doubt that Hope Patten himself would not have approved of some of the developments in Anglicanism that he did not live to see; but it remains that Walsingham has yet to live into its true vocation to be a place where all Anglicans may come and share equally in the celebration of the Mother of God and her central place in the history of salvation.
When Bishop Philip North preached at the Walsingham festival at Westminster Abbey in 2019, he declared that Mary had been placed that day once again at the nation’s heart. It was indeed an extraordinary moment of which Hope Patten could not have dreamt. Now the Mother of God waits once more, for the time when she may be placed again at the heart of the whole Church, when Walsingham may be opened to all.
On that day Walsingham will see its third great miracle. Jesu mercy, Mary pray.
