York Minster hospitality testifies to Christian unity

My husband phoned from work.

“Can we go on the Latin Mass Society’s pilgrimage to York Minster?” he wheedled.

York Minster, rebuilt from 1080 to 1472, is in York, 258 kilometres away from Edinburgh.

“Do we have to walk?” I inquired suspiciously.

“We can take the train,” said Mark. “I’m looking for tickets on the Internet.”

So on the Feast of St. Margaret Clitherow, the Pearl of York, we got on a train and went on a pilgrimage in her honour. As an ecumenical gesture, it was immensely impressive, for the Church of England allowed hundreds of Roman Catholics to gather before the High Altar of its biggest cathedral to celebrate a woman who was martyred for rejecting the new religion and hiding Catholic priests. It was poignant that this Mass was said not only in the cathedral St. Margaret knew from birth but according to the form she and the priests she hid would have recognized.

It was a beautiful, blue-skied day, and the Minster — a huge grey Gothic edifice — loomed before us like a dream. It was something to think that this was the York that my native North York, and all Toronto, in fact, having once been called York, was named for.

The medieval part of the city is ringed by a wall begun by the Romans, and the 19th-century Roman Catholic church, St. Wilfred’s, looks tranquilly across the road towards the formerly Roman Catholic Minster.

We ducked into St. Wilfred’s to say a prayer, and then proceeded down a crowded Elizabethan street to the shrine of St. Margaret, in the saint’s own birthplace and childhood home. It is kept up by the Catholic Women’s League, whose patron saint she is in England.

Margaret Clitherow was an ordinary Englishwoman who married a wealthy butcher and had three children. Although she was a Protestant who married a Protestant, she converted to Catholicism during her marriage and brought up her children as Catholics. Clandestine Roman Catholic Masses were held in her home, and a hole was cut from her attic into the adjoining house so that priests could escape in the event of a raid.

Margaret was arrested in 1586 and brought before a judge on the charge of harbouring Roman Catholic priests.

She refused to plead, as a proper trial would have meant the torture of her children; torturing witnesses was then commonplace. And, as was also commonplace, she was sentenced to be “pressed” or crushed to death for refusing to plead. On Good Friday — March 25 that year — she was stripped naked, laid out on the Ouse Bridge with a sharp rock under her spine, and covered with a door. Heavy rocks were slowly heaped upon the door. It took 15 minutes for her to die, and her last known words were “Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, have mercy on me!”

She was buried in a dung-heap, and six weeks later a party of Catholic men dug out her body. They found it incorrupt, and after removing one of her hands, buried her outside the town. The hand was taken to the Bar Convent, where it is still preserved today.

This execution was so unpopular with the people of York that Elizabeth I wrote to them to say that she was horrified that a fellow woman was treated this way, and that as a woman Margaret ought not to have been executed. St. Margaret was canonized in 1970.

Mark and I went into the Minster half an hour before Mass, happy to be exempt from the £8 admission fee. We managed to get seats above the choir, right near the altar, which was lucky as the Eastern arm of the Minster filled quickly with Catholic pilgrims. That part of the cathedral is in the Perpendicular Gothic style, a wonderful cage of grey stone and glass. The organist played a prelude, and the Rudgate Singers prepared inwardly to sing a Mass setting and motets by the great English Catholic composer William Byrd, St. Margaret’s contemporary. Cathedral, liturgy, music, homily — we were immersed in beauty.

After Mass there was a rosary procession through the streets of York past St. Margaret’s house to English Catholic Martyrs’ Church for Benediction. Taking part in a rosary procession through a crowded tourist area in England was certainly a different and harrowing experience. Characteristically, Mark noticed those onlookers who made the Sign of the Cross, and I heard only those onlookers who joked and jeered. It was easy to remember how much Catholics in England suffered for the faith.

However, the fact that today Roman Catholics are invited to say Mass again in York Minster is a testament to advances in Christian unity. Atheists may spout their rubbish on the BBC and the streets, but the Anglicans of York Minster — at very least — are our friends.