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GREAT BRIT/UK.
PURCHASE
OF
NON-CATHOLIC
CHURCH
BY
A
CATHOLIC
BISHOP.
Though England has been for four
centuries a missionary land, in which
the
Church
has
sought
to
regain
what
was
lost,
very
few of her
buildings antedate
the
Reformation
period, says
the London
"Tablet."
But even if the bricks of our churches
are newly bpJced, a Catholic church
can never lack those traditions and
associations which carry their pedigree
back to earlier generations. The
"curse of modernity" passes the lintels
of Westminster Cathedral and of
all the smaller progeny of stone. Hie
buildings consecrated to the
beauty
of holiness are, like that beauty
itself,
"ever
ancient"
when
"ever
new."
All the same,
ancient fanes
are, in fact, very welcome
to
us.
Great,
for instance,
was
the
joy
with which Fr. Lockhart,
of happy
memory, restored the
thirteenth-century
St. Etheldreda's, after generations
of alienation, to Catholic worship.
Lately the Anglicans of
the
North
have ceded
to
Catholics
a
fane, though this time
a
modern
one.
In
the
"Northern
Catholic
Calendar," side by side with the record
of the opening or consecration
of churches at Whitley Bay, Langley
Moor, Castle Eden, Benton, and Coxlodge,
we
note
the
purchase
also
during 1911 of a church
at
North
Gosforth by the Bishop of Hexham
and Newcastle.
This church, which
has since been opened, under its new
dedication to the Sacred Heart, for
the use of the Catholics
of
Seaton
Burn,
Hazelrigg,
Dinnington,
and
White Open
(four
growing
colliery
districts)
was
built
in the
'sixties
by Mr.
Eustace
Smith,
M.P.,
of
Gosforth Park—a spot which had its
Catholic associations
in penal days
supplied by the family of Brandling.
And,
as
it
happens,
two
of
Mr.
Smith' s daughters, by the way, have
had
an
answering
transformation—
they became Catholics—one of them'
that
devoted
social
advocate* and
worker, Mrs. V. M. Crawford.
The
church, which cost £17,000 to build?
has been acquired by the Bishop
at
the bargain price of £8000.
Hie
solid oak seating b»r», strange to
8av, the St. Cuthbert Cross, the
saint who is the patron of the diocese.
$