Patrick Comerford
When Cyril Wood and I stopped in Houghton St Giles on our way to Walsingham last week to visit the Slipper Chapel, we also visited the modern Chapel of Reconciliation, which is part of the Catholic National Shrine of Our Lady.
We were on our way to Walsingham, where I was speaking at the Ecumenical Pilgrimage at the Anglican Shrine. During the week, I visited a dozen or more churches and chapels in Walsingham, including the Shrine Church and the chapels at the Anglican Shrine, and Saint Mary and All Saints’ Church, the Church of England parish church in the small Norfolk village.
The Chapel of Reconciliation is a mile outside Walsingham in Houghton St Giles in Norfolk. Seen from a distance, the high-roofed church appears to be a great barn, with only the car park beside it and the huddled campus of shrine buildings, suggesting that there is something a little out of the ordinary there.
The roof of the chapel comes down to within a few metres of the ground, and we entered the building through narrow doors at the end. Inside, steel and wooden beams lift above the open space, deadening the sound.
Most of the shrine Masses and services take place in the large Chapel of Reconciliation, which was built in 1980-1982. The chapel has a capacity of about 500, and when numbers exceed this it can be opened to the shrine grounds, so that several thousand people can attend Mass together.
The building of the large Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation began in September 1980. It replaced an open-sided outdoor chapel built in 1973 to cater for large assemblies of pilgrims. This new chapel is noted for its resemblance to a Norfolk hipped-roofed barn and was blessed by Cardinal Basil Hume on 6 September 1981, and consecrated by Bishop Alan Clark of East Anglia on 22 May 1982.
The site dates back to the mid-14th century when a small wayside chapel, now known as the Slipper Chapel, was built at Houghton Saint Giles for pilgrims on their way to the shrine at Walsingham. The Slipper Chapel was bought in 1896 by Charlotte Boyd, who commissioned the architect Thomas Garner to restore the building. The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, which had been erected at King’s Lynn in 1897, was moved to the Slipper Chapel at Houghton In 1934 and became the National Shrine of Our Lady for Roman Catholics in England. After the World War II, with increasing numbers of pilgrims to the shrine, Mass was often said in the open air, using an open-sided pavilion as a canopy for the sanctuary. In the late 1960s, the Diocese of Northampton began to improve the facilities for pilgrimages on a large-scale.
A range of service buildings was completed in 1972 and work began on a large new open-sided structure on a concrete dais, with a granite altar and a timber roof, providing a more permanent covered outdoor sanctuary Over the next decade, a brief was developed for building a proper chapel over the dais, seating 350 people and with a sanctuary that could be opened out in summertime for large congregations on the meadow in front. The architects were Michael Wingate and Henry Rolph of Purcell Miller Tritton, Norwich. Building work began in September 1980 and the completed building was consecrated by Bishop Alan Clark on 22 May 1982.
The plans for redeveloping the site include replacing the Chapel of Reconciliation with a large mediaeval-style building with a cloister in front.
The chapel is a large and striking building that looks like a Norfolk barn. It has low side walls of flint with red brick dressings and a steeply pitched roof, hipped with gablets at both ends and covered in red clay pantiles.
On the long east side is a slight projection marking the sanctuary, with fully glazed walls that can be opened out to connect the building with an outside congregation. Otherwise the walls are punctuated by narrow slit windows glazed with hand-blown glass, made locally at Langham and set in lead.
The interior is a single undivided space, with walls of fair-faced brick. The roof structure is carried on steel portals giving a clear span across the space. The rafters and softwood ceiling boards are stained a warm colour.
The floor is covered with carpet tiles, with timber benches made by Rob Corbett, a local cabinet maker, arranged in a fan-shape around the sanctuary.
The altar is made of Aberdeen granite. Alongside it is the tabernacle, made for the chapel at Craig Lockhart College, Edinburgh (1948) and acquired in 1986.
The pipe organ was built by Stephen Schumacher of Belgium. It is supplemented by an electronic organ.
Pope John Paul II did not visit Walsingham when he visited Britain in 1982. Instead, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken to Wembley Stadium in London, where he insisted that it remain on the altar during Mass.
In the shrine gardens behind the church, a Way of the Cross was formed from the 1948 student crosses and leads to the 14th century Slipper Chapel and the mid-20th century Chapel of the Holy Spirit. Beside them are the cloisters of the 1980s, containing offices, a shop, a café and other facilities.
In the centre of the cloisters is a fountain surmounted by the font from the redundant mediaeval church of Forncett Saint Mary. Today, hundreds of pilgrims use it to fill their bottles with holy water to take back to their parishes and homes.
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