...for a country weekend. Spent much of Saturday sitting in the sunshine reading through the essays sent in by children (hundreds of them!) for the annual Schools RE Project run by the Association of Catholic Women. Birds sang, the freshly-cut lawn was cool and green, the view was glorious...in the evening, we all went to a gathering at the local Catholic parish where Patrick Reyntiens (artist: stained glass) was speaking - a delightful event, done in a sort of "Desert Island discs" style, a packed church, wine and snacks in the garden in sunshine. It was interesting to learn more about Reyntiens work: never really thought about how stained glass is done...his son has created the magnificent new window in Westminstare Hall for the Queens' Diamond Jubilee, which I was showing to a group of people just this past week.
Sunday Mass: again packed..., in this rural area, lots of Indian families...a changing Britain...
Pentecost. Figures published by the Latin Mass Society reveal how numbers of Catholic baptisms and marriages have dropped by a staggering amount over the past 50 years. to a fraction of what they once were. I have been studying these figures for a long while so no news there. Of interest is the groups that have gone against the trend: among priests ordained in recent years large numbers have come from the FAITH Movement and from other groups which no one noticed for a while, like the Neo-Catechuemnate. Some years back, a report announced that there would be no baptisms or ordinations by the year 2000, but things didn't work out that way.
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