August 2016 England Info Sheet
Dear Friend, Once again we set out on pilgrimage, this time to a land many of us will feel comfortable in: Merrie England. And there will be a certain “merriment” in this journey, for we will travel with joyful companions, our friends from England, Leonie and Tessa Caldecott (the widow and daughter of the late Stratford Caldecott, one of the great Catholic editors and writers of the past half century), in the footsteps of the great English saints: St. Thomas a Becket, St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher, St. Edmund Campion, Blessed John Henry Newman, and the writers known as the “Inklings,” J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and the incomparable G.K.Chesterton. With such companions, our days will be merry, and our mornings and evenings bathed in the gentle light of a British summertime. We will begin at Oxford, the ancient university which will be our home for several days. We will get to know the colleges of Oxford, its great library, its pathways and byways, its churches and, yes, its pubs, where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sometimes dined together. The days will include a steady diet of reflection, in the presentations of some of England’s most thoughtful Catholics of our time, as they instruct us on the history of the Church in England, the life and times of Thomas More and John Fisher, of William Shakespeare, and on down to more recent times. Day by day we will study, and learn, and come to understand what the faith has meant to the British, how it shaped their hearts and minds, how it passed through persecution and apostasy, and how it is being lived today in the very places where it was lived by these great saints and writers.
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