When I was preparing to leave London for the south Welsh countryside early last year, a priest friend warned me not be complacent. “People lose their religion when they move to the country,” he said. I wouldn’t, after all, have been the first person to stop going to Mass on finding myself in a village over an hour away from the nearest church with anything resembling a parish priest or a congregation. The fact that I was moving to Wales was even more of a worry given that it is the least religious country in Britain, and increasingly so according to censuses published over the past 20 years.
But it turns out that by complete chance I had moved to a part of Wales with a significant and enduring Catholic tradition. I first realised that there must be something going on here when I came across the church of St David Lewis and St Francis Xavier in Usk, our nearest town. A small and beautiful church presided over by Father Bernard Sixtus, philosopher and former soldier, and a priest of the Ordinariate rite, it holds a morning and evening Mass, as well as a Mass dedicated to the Ordinariate every Sunday. It had the energy of any city parish, even during a pandemic.
Indeed, around the time I started attending Mass there, mid-Covid, plans were afoot to set up a food kitchen from the church hall in order to help low-income families, as well as the many isolated old, sick and disabled people in the area, who were under particular strain during the pandemic. Parishioners Gloria and Peter Dolan conceived the project and financed it themselves for the first month, praying that donations and volunteers would come forward, which they did in droves. While they initially provided ten meals twice a week, today the kitchen provides somewhere around 80, and they intend to continue even after life goes back to normal.
While Father Bernard suggests rightly that the dwindling numbers across Wales as a whole might have had something to do with “having to work in the mines six days a week, and being told about hell on a Sunday”, the story, not just in Usk, but across the whole of Monmouthshire, has always been different. Catholic roots were laid here a long time ago.
Before the Reformation, a Catholic, the Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert, presided over Raglan Castle, the imposing fortress-palace, now a popular ruin, which dominated the area. Herbert was the first Welshman to be elevated to the English peerage and his family’s very presence afforded Catholics protection, and allowed them to continue to practice their religion in turbulent times.
In 1492, Elizabeth, one of Herbert’s daughters (he had no son) inherited the property, married Sir Charles Somerset, and the Somersets acquired Raglan Castle. The family became Marquises of Worcester, and later Dukes of Beaufort through marriage. Again, they had administrative and legal authority which was valuable to the government in London, who in turn knew better than to ruffle their feathers. The family was known to pay the fines of poorer Catholics, who refused to attend Anglican services.
Obviously, due to its wealth and status, the extended family, which now populated much of the vicinity, was able to send its boys off to be educated at Oxford, where they might have read law or theology, or to the English College in Rome or seminaries in France. The newly trained priests would eventually return home where they were welcomed and supported, and so the Catholic tradition endured. Testament to this, other than a large number of beautiful and well-attended Catholic churches in the area, is the continued presence of the Herbert family, who are still significant landowners and employers in Monmouthshire today, and still Catholic.
Worshipping at St David Lewis and St Francis Xavier is a privilege not least because you truly are in the presence of history. St Francis Xavier, the church’s original dedicatee, was the great Jesuit missionary and founder of the order. There is also a Jesuit college, The Cwm, Llanrothal, dedicated to him over the border in Herefordshire, where the priests moved from Raglan on the gift of the Marquis of Worcester in the late 16th century. St David Lewis was a local martyr who, in 1679, became the last priest in Wales to be executed for the Catholic faith, around 300 yards from where the church has been since it was built in 1847. His grave can be found near the door of the Anglican church in Usk, a few yards further down the road.
Olenka Hamilton is the supplements editor of the Catholic Herald.
This article first appeared in the July 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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