Celebration Mass at Colwich Abbey
On Sunday 22 September Mother Abbess Anna, Dame Theresa Mary, Dame Benedict and Dame Davina attended a Mass at St Mary’s Abbey, Colwich to mark with thanksgiving the one hundred and eighty-six years the Benedictine community of Our Lady of Good Hope lived at Colwich. The Mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Right Revd Bernard Longley, an old friend of the Colwich community. Fr Anthony Wilcox and Fr Francis Nolan WF, nephews of former Abbess Frances Wilcox, concelebrated and many friends with longstanding Colwich associations swelled the packed congregation. The singing was hearty and the prayers heartfelt and full of gratitude both for the time the Colwich community spent in this sacred place and for the prospect of Benedictine life continuing under ‘new management’ as the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles from Missouri, USA, hope to purchase the property, some of whom were present for the celebration. Archbishop Bernard gathered the assembly together in a spirit of welcome and fraternity.
A brief history of the Colwich Community
The Colwich Benedictine community fused with the Benedictines of Stanbrook, Wass, in 2022, thus reuniting the two houses which trace their roots to the original English Benedictine Congregation’s monastery for nuns which began in Cambrai in the Spanish Netherlands in 1623.
In 1651 three nuns set out from Cambrai, whose numbers had outstripped its resources, to seek out benefactors for the new venture. A year later, joined by another nun from Cambrai and an EBC monk as Chaplain, they established Our Lady of Good Hope monastery in Paris, the community which in time would settle at Colwich. Our Lady of Good Hope was not a traditional foundation in that, unlike most foundations, it was financially independent from the beginning. But in terms of personnel and spirituality, ‘Paris’ was very much linked to ‘Cambrai’. The first Prioress was Dame Bridget More, descendant of St Thomas More and closely related to the three More nuns, Gertrude, Agnes and Anne of Cambrai.
At the French Revolution the nuns of Paris were imprisoned in their monastery and the Chateau of Vincennes. When released in 1795, they settled in England, first in Dorset and then at Cannington in Somerset where the community pioneered perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament which continued for 127 years.
The community moved to Colwich in 1836. A daughter house at Atherstone in Warwickshire continued as a separate community until 1967. Colwich returned to the English Benedictine Congregation in 1926, having left in 1657 at the insistence of the Archbishop of Paris. It became an abbey in 1928 and, as mentioned above, fused with the community of Our Lady of Consolation at Stanbrook in 2022: Cambrai and Paris re-united!