Patrick Comerford
During my three or four days in Walsingham, where I was speaking at the Ecumenical Pilgrimage last 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.
On the way, Cyril Wood and I stopped in Houghton Saint Giles, a mile outside Walsingham, to visit the Catholic National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady at Walsingham. The shrine and its grounds include the Slipper Chapel, built ca 1340, the Grade II listed presbytery built in 1904, the Chapel of the Holy Ghost, and the Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation built in 1982.
The Slipper Chapel, originally known as the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, was the last chapel on the pilgrim route to the Priory of Our Lady of Walsingham. The entire site was given to the status of a Minor Basilica by Pope Francis in 2015.
The Marian image of Our Lady of Walsingham was moved in 1934 from the Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation in King’s Lynn to the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria or the Slipper Chapel, which became the Catholic National Shrine and a focal point of Marian devotion that year. Pope Pius XII granted a canonical coronation to the image under the title of Our Lady of Walsingham on 15 August 1954.
The chapel was built in 1325 and dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the patron of pilgrims. Walsingham – ‘England’s Nazareth’ – was second only to Canterbury in importance as an English pilgrimage site, attracting pilgrims from across England and beyond. Every king of England, from Henry III in 1226 to Henry VIII in 1511, accompanied by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
The Slipper Chapel became the final and most important wayside chapel on the pilgrim route. There pilgrims stopped to go to Mass and confess their sins, then traditionally removed their shoes to walk barefoot and in a penitential spirit the last ‘holy mile’ to the Holt House at Walsingham Priory. And so it became known as the ‘Slipper Chapel. An alternative explanation suggests the name may come from slype, the Old English word for ‘between’, because the chapel stood between everyday life and the main shrine at Walsingham.
During the Tudor Reformation, the priory property was handed over to the King’s Commissioners in 1538, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken to London to be burnt, the Holy House and the original shrine were destroyed, and Walsingham ceased to be a place of pilgrimage. The Slipper Chapel survived but fell into disuse, disrepair and neglect, and over the centuries it was used as a poorhouse, a forge, a cowshed and a barn.
The restoration of the Slipper Chapel is due to the vision and commitment of Charlotte Pearson Boyd (1837-1906), who had been a devout Anglo-Catholic before she became a Roman Catholic in 1894. She was born in Macao in 1837, the daughter of a wealthy merchant Alexander Pearson Boyd and his wife Charlotte. At the age of six weeks she brought back by her parents to live in Brighton.
She opened an orphanage in Kilburn in 1866, and continued to run it into her old age. She founded the English Abbey Restoration Trust in 1875 ‘to provide funds for the purchase of ancient ecclesiastical buildings which had passed into secular hands, and their restoration for worship according to the rites of the Church of England’.
She made her first pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1893 and was so entranced with the place that she offered to buy everything – from the Slipper Chapel to the shrine ruins. Eventually, she bought the ruined former chapel from the farm owner in 1896.
Charlotte Boyd failed to find support from Bishop Riddell of Northampton, who saw the site more as a mission station. Instead, a modern shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham was established at King’s Lynn in 1897, when Pope Leo XIII gave permission to set up the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in the Lady Chapel of the Church of the Annunciation in King’s Lynn. At the time, it was the parish church for all Roman Catholics in that part of North Norfolk, and from there the first public pilgrimage since the Reformation visited Walsingham on 20 August 1897.
Charlotte Boyd then offered the chapel to the Benedictines of Downside Abbey, where she had become an oblate. She invited the architect Thomas Garner (1839-1906) to undertake the restoration work, which started in 1897 and was largely complete by 1904. He one of the leading English Gothic Revival architects of the Victorian era, and also built the Grade II listed presbytery beside the Slipper Chapel.
Garner had been articled to Sir Gilbert Scott at the age of 17, and one of his immediate predecessors at Scott’s was his future partner George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907). Their works can be seen throughout Oxford, but their partnership was dissolved when Garner became a Roman Catholic in 1898. Garner was also the architect to Downside Abbey, where he designed the choir in which he is buried.
Downside did not actively promote the chapel, apparently because of opposition from the local bishop. Amid much disappointment and misunderstanding, the Slipper Chapel remained virtually unused for 40 years, and the presbytery designed by Garner was leased to a tenant until 1933, when the Benedictines transferred the site to the diocese.
But over the years, pilgrims and pilgrimages to the Slipper Chapel became more frequent. Meanwhile, in 1922, a new Anglican vicar, Father Alfred Hope Patten, set up a shrine in Saint Mary and All Saints Church in Little Walsingham, and this was eventually transferred to the new Anglican Shrine in 1931.
Prompted by the growth in popularity of the Anglo-Catholic shrine at Walsingham, Cardinal Francis Bourne of Westminster ordered moving the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham from King’s Lynn to the Slipper Chapel.
James and Lilian Dagless made the altar and reredos for the Slipper Chapel in 1934, and after some further minor repairs, Bishop Laurence Youens of Northampton celebrated Mass in the Slipper Chapel on 15 August 1934. It twas he first public Mass in the Slipper Chapel in 400 years. On 19 August, Cardinal Francis Bourne, accompanied by most of the bishops of England and Wales, led a National Pilgrimage of 12,000 people to the shrine, where Cardinal Bourne declared the Slipper Chapel the National Shrine of Our Lady for Roman Catholics in England.
The chapel was consecrated in September 1938, and was made the centre of a new, independent episcopal parish, with Bishop Youens of Northampton as the first rector and the priest-custodian Monsignor Bruno Scott-James as the first administrator.
The Canadian artist Marcel Barbeau designed a new statue for the Slipper Chapel that was made by WF Knight of Wellingborough. The statue was solemnly crowned on 15 August 1954 by Archbishop Gerald O’Hara on behalf of Pope Pius XII.
The East Window in the Slipper Chapel, designed by Geoffrey Webb, was completed in 1953. Its theme is the Assumption of Our Lady, and the lower panels include the arms of Pope Pius XII, who defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, and Bishop Leo Parker, the then Bishop of Northampton.
To commemorate the centenary of the restoration of pilgrimage to Walsingham, Alfred Fisher designed a new West Window illustrating the Annunciation that was installed in 1997.
From 1968 to 2014, the shrine was administered by the Marists Fathers, assisted by the Marist Sisters. Since 2015, the National Shrine of Our Lady has been run under statutes of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, who appoint the shrine rector. A community of Augustinian friars from Nigeria came to assist the Rector, the Revd Dr Robert Billing, in 2024.
The Holy Ghost Chapel is a flat-roofed chapel attached to the Slipper Chapel and is reached through a short cloister link. It was designed by Monsignor Bruno Scott-James, the first priest-custodian of the shrine, and was built in 1938.
The chapel has a stone altar with a gilt reredos, a significant collection of relics acquired over the years, including relics of the True Cross, Our Lady’s Veil, the Twelve Apostles and other saints, staues of Erasmus and Thomas More, and a copy of the bearskin said to have been seen by Erasmus in Walsingham.
The chapel also has a copy of the Wilton Diptych (1395), showing Richard II dedicating England as the Dowry of Mary at Westminster Abbey in 1381 and a large mosaic by Anna Wyner (1988) depicting Our Lady and the Apostles at Pentecost.
Pope Francis made the shrine a minor basilica on 27 December 2015, and its proper title today is the Basilica of Our Lady, Walsingham.
The then Rector of the Catholic National Shrine and the then Priest Administrator of the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham signed an Ecumenical Covenant in 2018, striving to work together as ‘shared custodians of the Holy Land of Walsingham’ in ‘common witness to the unique vocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ and to pray for the unity which is ‘Christ’s will for his Church’.
Today, the grounds around the Slipper Chapel includes the Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation, completed in 1982, which accommodates up to 400 people for services and can open towards the pilgrimage area for larger ceremonies. The site also has open-air Stations of the Cross around the grounds, a picnic area, a gift shop, a café and an exhibition area.
• Each year on the Sunday closest to 8 September, the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham is carried in a procession from the Slipper Chapel. The chapel welcomes over 250,000 pilgrims and visitors throughout the year, and the main pilgrimage season is from May to the end of September. Although times may vary, there is usually a Pilgrim Mass at 12 noon each day.
Tomorrow: the Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation.
