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September 24, 2011   Saturday of the Twenty-Fifth Week in Ordinary Time   Reading 1 Zec 2:5-9, 14-15a I, Zechariah, raised my eyes and looked:there was a man with a measuring line in his hand.I asked, "Where are you going?"He answered, "To measure Jerusalem,to see how great is its width and how great its length." Then the angel who spoke with me advanced,and another angel came out to meet him and said to him,"Run, tell this to that young man:People will live in Jerusalem as though in open country,because of the multitude of men and beasts in her midst.But I...

The Wilton Diptych (The following from a pamphlet titled "Walsingham: The Shrine of Our Lady - Spiritual Guide," which I obtained on a trip to the shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham, England in September 2004). "On the Sunday after Corpus Christi 1381 in Westminster Abbey, King Richard II knelt amidst a great throng of his subjects to re-dedicate England to Mary, as her dowry. Westminster was the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor, traditionally held to have been the first to make this dedication and in whose reign Walsingham had been founded. Richard made at least two pilgrimages at...

AN EXALTED DORMITION Geoffrey Kirk preached at the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham on the Feast of the Assumption. WHEN MY EDWARDIAN predecessor erected in St Stephen’s Lewisham an elaborate tabernacle for the Blessed Sacrament he surrounded it, as you do, with Latin texts taken from the gospels. Below the door, in pride of place he wrote ‘Et verbum caro factum est. ' Words from the first chapter of St John: ‘And the word was made flesh’. My predecessor, no doubt, was wanting to make a point, still controversial in the Church of England in those days, about...

A Religious Pilgrimage to England During the first full week of September, I visited England. I flew over there the night of September 3, and I arrived at Heathrow Airport on the morning of the 4th. The purpose of my visit was twofold: to visit a good friend of mine who got married on August 20, and to visit go on pilgrimage to Walsingham, England. Walsingham was one of the major places of pilgrimage for Catholics in medieval times. Thousands of devout pilgrims traveled there after the Virgin Mary appeared there to a widow in 1061. A "Holy House," based...