Wakefield Diocese. Kate Taylor

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Holy Cross, Airedale

The Union of Benefices

      Rationalizing by uniting benefices has occurred since the sixteenth century. While the spate of unions of benefices in the diocese did not come until the latter part of the twentieth century, some few unions actually took place or were explored much earlier. The union was normally preceded by a Commission of Inquiry and required an Order in Council to confirm it. In rural areas, benefices might be united where the population was too small to warrant the maintenance of separate parishes. In urban areas, already in the 1920s the clearance of housing from town centres might provide a case for uniting adjacent benefices. Under the Union of Benefices Act of 1921, St Mark’s, Huddersfield, was united in 1922 with the mother parish of St Peter, and St Luke’s, Norland, was united with Christ Church, Sowerby Bridge. In 1924, having been overseen by the Vicar of Penistone for at least fifty years, the benefices of Midhope and Penistone were united.

      Bishop Seaton promoted a Public Inquiry in the mid 1930s, during the building of the Lupset housing estate, into the advisability of uniting Christ Church, Thornes, with St James’s, Thornes, in Wakefield. The scheme was rejected at the time but Seaton warned that the removal of much of the population of Christ Church (through slum clearance) would mean that the possibility must be revisited.

The Two Religious Communities: the Community of St Peter, Horbury, and the Community of the Resurrection

      Although the Community of St Peter, Horbury, and the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield lie within the diocese, neither is a diocesan body. But their contribution to the work of the diocese warrants their place in this history.

      The Community of St Peter, the first religious community in the north of England since the Reformation, was founded in 1858 by the high-church incumbent of Horbury, John Sharp. He had been prompted by his cousin, Harriet Louisa Farrer, to bring together women ‘pledged to devote themselves to rescue and preventive work’, who could run a refuge for girls and young women. More will be said of this long-lasting venture later. As the Community grew, Sisters were sent, or daughter-houses founded, to oversee penitentiaries or rescue houses elsewhere, including Carlisle, Chester, Croydon, Freiston in Lincolnshire, Joppa (Edinburgh), Leeds, London, Rushholme (Manchester), Sheffield, and Wolverhampton. Some of their number also worked in more local parishes of high-church inclinations, visiting and teaching. They served in all three Horbury parishes, at Middlestown, and as far afield as South Elmsall, and All Saints, Leeds. At Horbury Bridge, as well as teaching in the Sunday School, they managed a night school for girls. In the early 1920s they also assisted with parish work at two London churches and at St Peter’s, Folkestone. From 1925, invited by the parochial church council, the cathedral staff included two of St Peter’s nuns. They lived in Wakefield at St Gabriel’s House, Rishworth Street, which was dedicated on Lady Day, 25 March. At the cathedral they cared for the altar vessels and the vestments, cleaned the silver, looked after the linen and arranged the flowers. But they also worked with young people in the Sunday Schools and undertook pastoral work in the parish. Between 1900 and 1908, when it ceased to hold women prisoners, nuns from St Peter’s served as visitors at Wakefield Prison. From 1922 they also visited Armley Gaol. In 1900–20, Sisters managed the County Home, Stafford, for discharged women prisoners. The Community of the Holy Paraclete at Sneaton Hall, Whitby, was founded from St Peter’s where a small school, later to be called St Hilda’s, had been started in 1875. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, the school was refounded at Whitby by some of the Sisters from Horbury who had taught there and who formed the nucleus of the new Order. During 1905–30 Sisters managed a High School and undertook missionary work at Nassau in the Bahamas.

      Retreats for clergy, for their own Associates, and for others, were provided at the Convent from 1865. In 1915, they began offering retreats to working women and girls. In the 1920s they provided a retreat house at Balhousie Castle, Perth.

      The nuns served the Church in two other ways. They had begun providing embroidered vestments, altar linen and banners (including some for Miners’ Unions) in 1868 and the work continued until well after the Second World War. They also baked communion bread which was sent to cathedrals and churches all over England and to at least one prison, as well as abroad.

      Problems developed in the last years of Bishop Eden’s episcopacy and in Bishop Seaton’s first years which led to a change at the convent. The management of the House of Mercy became unsatisfactory and the imposition of a harsher Rule for the Order led to the Community’s Manchester house forming a separate order of St Peter Chains. The Superior at Horbury, Mother Sarah, and a number of the Sisters, departed in 1932 to their London house in Eaton Square and, at Seaton’s request, Sisters from the Manchester Community moved to take charge at Horbury. The Wakefield Diocesan Gazette of November 1932 reported that the work of the House of Mercy was now in the hands of the Community of St Peter Chains. The departing Sisters formed a new Community at Laleham Abbey.

      In 1924, at the time of the revival, initiated by (Alfred) Hope Patten, of the shrine of Our Lady, three Sisters from Horbury went to Walsingham to assist with the new hospice for the anticipated pilgrims. During 1932–47 the work at Walsingham was continued by members of the Laleham community.

      The Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield

      The way of life and the achievements of the Community of the Resurrection at Battyeford, Mirfield, are told in the account written by Alan Wilkinson to mark its centenary, but the author focuses on its work outside the diocese, and especially in South Africa and the former Rhodesia, rather than on its significance more locally. He refers briefly to its ‘close connections’ with the Community at Horbury but without amplification. The Community of the Resurrection had been founded in 1892 at Pusey House, Oxford, by its principal, Charles Gore, and five other public-school and Oxford men intent on forming a group of celibate priests who would retain their individualism yet share a corporate life of fellowship and prayer and who would engage in pastoral, evangelistic, literary and educational work. In its early years the Community was unsettled, but the idea of having a House in a working-class parish had appealed since its inception. Walter Howard Frere, another founder member, urged the need to settle in a permanent home in the north of England. Although СКАЧАТЬ