Patrick Comerford
For many years, I maintained a website and Facebook page for a project I had called the Dead Anglican Theologians Society. The project has been moribund for the past five years, but should I ever have thoughts about breathing new life into it, some of the 20th century theologians I ought to include are Alfred Hope Patten (1885-1958), Bishop Mowbray Stephen O’Rorke (1869-1953) and Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), three key Anglican theologians I was reminded of when I was in Walsingham earlier this month, speaking at the Ecumenical Pilgrimage.
Father Alfred Hope Patten is the Anglo-Catholic priest who was singularly responsible for the restoration of the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and for the revival of Anglican pilgrimages to Walsingham in the early and mid-20th century.
Patten, known as ‘Pat’ to his friends, rarely spoke about his family or his early education. He was born on 17 November 1885 in Sidmouth, on the Devon coast in south-west England. He was the son of Alfred Patten (1862-1917) and Mary Sadler (1854-1943), a teacher’s daughter from Canterbury, who were married in Saint Bartholomew’s Church, Horley, Surrey, in 1885. Alfred Patten was born in Great Hormead, Hertfordshire, into a large farming family. At the time of his marriage he was a brewer in Sidmouth, and he later became a wine and spirit merchant in Richmond, before moving to Hove in Sussex.
From an early stage, Alfred Hope Patten disliked his first given name and later in life he invariably signed his name ‘A Hope Patten’. To some of his intimate friends he was known as ‘Pat’, not because of any known Irish connections but as an abbreviation of Patten.
An introspective only child, he became an Anglo-Catholic in Brighton while he was still a teenager. He became interested in the mediaeval church and the religious life, visiting the Anglican Benedictines at Painsthorpe in 1906, and he was influenced profoundly by the abbot, Aelred Carlyle (1874-1955).
In his biographical study, Michael Yelton charts Patten’s early years in the ‘Brighton and South Coast Religion’ of ‘incense-sodden churches’, ‘birettas and intrigue’. His Marian devotion seems to have begun in late childhood, but it intensified though travels on the Continent and through friendships with members of Society of SS Peter and Paul, established in 1911, the year he entered Lichfield Theological College.
He had great difficulty passing exams, almost certainly because he was dyslexic, and this left him feeling the need to be remote later in life when he was in the company of people who were more educated.
Patten was ordained deacon at the age of 28 on 21 December 1913 and priest on 20 December 1914 by Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram of London. He was a curate at Holy Cross Church, Cromer Street, St Pancras, from 1913 to 1915, when he was an assistant to the Revd Francis Edwin Baverstock.
He then had a number of short curacies, including Saint Alban’s, Teddington, Surrey (1915-1918), in the Diocese of Rochester, and Saint Mary’s, Buxted, Sussex (1919-1920), in the Diocese of Chichester. His short time, possibly as a locum at Saint Michael’s, Edinburgh, and as a curate on Saint Michael and All Angels, Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington (1919), and Saint Andrew’s Church, Carshalton, Surrey (1920-1921) are not recorded in Crockford’s, and may have been informal appointments.
While he was a curate in Teddington, his father Alfred Patten died there at the age of 55 on 15 May 1917.
Hope Patten became the Vicar of Great Walsingham and Little Walsingham with Houghton St Giles on 19 January 1921. His two predecessors in Walsingham were convinced Anglo-Catholics. Father Edgar Lee Reeves, who had been Vicar of Walsingham from 1904, had set up a small statue of Our Lady with a small shrine in the parish church. When he retired in 1921, there was some trouble in finding a sympathetic successor. The vicar of one of London’s Catholic shrine churches, Holy Cross, St Pancras, recommended his former curate.
Within months of his arrival in Walsingham, Patten had a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham made, modelled on the seal of the medieval priory, and placed it in Saint Mary’s Church, Little Walsingham, on 6 July 1922. It was soon adorned with flowers and devotional aids, and so began the revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage.
However, the then Bishop of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, opposed the statue and Patten agreed to move it out of the church. This provided him with the opportunity or excuse rebuild the Holy House in 1931, and the image was moved there.
The Holy House was rebuilt in 1938 to accommodate the increasing pilgrim numbers and became the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The extension to the Shrine Church was blessed by Bishop O’Rorke on 7 June 1938, with 3,000 pilgrims present.
Patten’s mother Mary Patten died on 8 December 1943 in Abingdon, Berkshire, at the age of 89.
Patten collapsed after officiating at Solemn Evensong and Benediction in the Shrine Church on 11 August 1958 and died in the College, Little Walsingham. He was buried in the churchyard of Saint Mary’s and All Saints’ Church in Walsingham.
The bishops who were on pilgrimage to Walsingham at the time and who attended his funeral included: Gay Mandeville of Barbados, Gerald Brooks of British Honduras (Belize), Cecil Muschamp of Kalgoorlie, Leslie Stradling of South-West Tanganyika, William Scott Baker of Zanzibar, and Wilfrid John Hudson of Carpentaria. Requiem Masses for him were celebrated in many Anglo-Catholic churches, including Saint Magnus the Martyr, London and Saint Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge.
Walsingham Church was badly damaged by fire in 1961, and it was rebuilt in 1964 to designs by the architect Laurence King. The east window was designed by John Hayward depicting the story of Walsingham and as a memorial to Patten.
Patten’s life has been described as one of the important lives of a parish priest in the Church of England the 20th century. He spent four decades as a parish priest, a leader of international Anglo-Catholicism, an encourager of ecclesiastical architecture and art, an organiser of pilgrimages, and a primary encourager of the vowed religious life in the Church of England.
He was an Anglo-Papalist but did not know Latin, putting him at a disadvantage liturgically. Yet, the liturgical practices he shaped at Walsingham set the standard for the more advanced Anglo-Catholic congregations in the Church of England, especially in Brighton, once a centre of the Anglo-Catholic revival.
In his definitive biography of Patten, Alfred Hope Patten and the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham (2006), Michael Yelton discusses the life and legacy of this priest, and his revised and updated second edition in 2022 marked the centenary of the restoration of the Shrine in Saint Mary’s Church.
Patten emerges as an unlikely character to re-establish one of Europe’s great holy places. He was a complicated man who could retreat into himself so that some people saw him as cold and indifferent, though he tended to let that mask slip in the presence of young people. He was barely conventionally educated, shy and awkward, complicated and difficult, autocratic and rigid, naïve and tireless, and he was often so ill and unable to function as an adult that he had to repair to the continent for months at a time.
While some dismissed him as a humourless fanatic, others regarded him as an exemplar of priesthood. He was totally committed to his own vision of the Church of England. On that other hand, that exclusive focus meant he had no interest at all in the news, sport, or sex and not much interest in eating and drinking. Yet Hope Patton could be immensely kind and generous, and he had a profound effect on many throughout his life.
Yelton’s biography shows how the development of the shrine and its ministry went well beyond simply building a replica of the mediaeval Holy House and setting up the image of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The shrine at Walsingham has widened its scope and flourished since in the almost seven decades since Hope Patten died in 1958. Every Archbishop of Canterbury preaches there at least once while in office, and the Bishop of Norwich, who is the local diocesan bishop, is always present. The shrine is no longer seen as an exotic or as an aberrant expression of Anglicanism or creeping popery; instead, it has played a formative factor in making normal the place of the Virgin Mary in mainstream Anglicanism.
Sir Christopher Wren’s legacy is summarised in his epitaph in the crypt in Saint Paul’s Cathedral: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice (‘Reader, if you seek a monument, look around you’). Inspired by the this, the monument to Borneo Mission Association placed by USPG in Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, Kuching, says: ‘For its memorial look around you.’
Patten’s legacy is to be seen throughout Walsingham. His grave is at the north-west corner of the parish church tomb, but there is also a tomb like monument to him at the liturgical west end of the shrine church, his heraldic emblems are depicted above his name in the choir stalls, probably painted by Enid Chadwick, and he is the central figure in the exhibition in the Welcome centre telling the story of Walsingham and its pilgrimage.
However, there is one important detail in which Hope Patten’s dream remains unfulfilled. He wanted Walsingham to be the centre of Marian devotion and pilgrimage for the Church of England and the Anglican world.
The Shrine is clear that only male priests ordained by male bishops may be associates, which means that to this day only some Anglicans are able to take part fully in the Society of Our Lady of Walsingham or in the sacramental life of the shrine. Walsingham has yet to live into its true vocation to be a place where all Anglicans may come and share equally in the celebration of the Mother of God and her central place in the history of salvation.
It will be interesting to see when or whether Archbishop Sarah Mullally is welcomed to Walsingham, like all her predecessors as Archbishops of Canterbury.
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