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Tuesday 2 September 2014

Because I am homesick today....

http://www.stetheldreda.com/index.php/history-of-st-etheldredas/





Two snippets from the article..

...the Fatal Vespers of 1623 and we know that one of the bodies concerned was a priest, because he was buried facing the West.
It was on Sunday 26th October 1623, when a number of Catholics gathered in secret at the French Ambassador’s house in Blackfriars to hear a special sermon; but unfortunately, the floor of the room in which they gathered collapsed and over a hundred were killed and such was the anti-Catholic feeling that they were not allowed to be buried publicly but they had to be buried in secret; and eighteen of them were interred in the Crypt of St Etheldreda’s and they lie there to this day.

And...

During the First World War, because the Catholic Chapel of America’s West Point Military Academy was modelled on St Etheldreda’s, the latter found a special place in the hearts of American servicemen on their way to and from the battlefields of the Western Front.