Pilgrim Ways

thus went night and cometh day Salutis; The well springeth out of thee Virtutis.

Lady, flower of all things, Rosa sine spina.

Thou bore Jesus, Heavenly King, Gratia Divina, of all thou bearest as the prize, Lady, Queen of Paradise, Electa; Maid mild, Mother sweet, Effecta!

Fernyhalgh‟s sufferings were still not over. In 1745, as Prince Charles and his Highlanders pushed south to Manchester, during the second Jacobite Rising, a hostile mob attacked the Lady Well chapel, sacked and burned it. Another priest, also by the name of Tuttell, rebuilt the chapel and as numbers increased they began work on a new church, which was opened in 1794. Built to escape notice from the outside, the cruciform shape and interior design leave today‟s pilgrim in no doubt that this church, built thirty five years before Emancipation and fourteen years after the Gordon Riots, represented a statement of enduring faith. It has continued since then to draw pilgrims who continue to give thanks from being spared the shipwrecks which threaten every life.

Even in our own times, on the feast of the birthday of the Virgin Mary, on September 8th 2000, the shrine was desecrated. An effigy of Blessed Padre Pio, which had been brought from Rome by a Liverpool family, was ripped from its base and a chapel was daubed with blue paint. A priest at the shrine, Father Benedict Rucsilo, described the attack as “sickening.” The attack came after five churches in the same part of Lancashire had been torched by an arsonist.

Endurance is summed up by one other aspect of Fernyhalgh. Here, too, is the tombstone of the last of the English Carthusians of the old traditions: “Sacred to the memory of the Reverend James Finch, the last of the English Carthusian Monks. He died March 3rd, 1621, aged 72. Good Christian, on this Stone, shed not a tear for virtue lies entombed, enshrouded here. Religion, resignation both combine over these remains to raise a heavenly Shrine.

R.I.P.” Mary is venerated at Fernyhalgh as Our Lady Queen of Martyrs. The statue depicting the Virgin holding her son was brought to Fernyhalgh from Bolzano by the sisters of the Holy Child of Jesus after the restoration of the English and Welsh Hierarchy. Beside the shrine is a prayer room called Stella Maris, built in 1996 in the shape of a ship. Nearby is the Martyrs Chapel, a modern building, beautifully simple, housing statues of Saints Thomas More and John Fisher. Around the walls are the names of more than three hundred Catholics from these islands who gave their lives for their faith.

Some of those martyrs lived very near to Fernyhalgh (see Chapter Sixteen, Lancashire).

George Haydock came from Cottam, near Preston (martyred, 1584, Tyburn); William Marsden came from nearby Goosnargh (martyred, 1586, Isle of Wight); George Beesly was also from Goosnargh (martyred, Fleet Street, 1591). Richard Herst was from Broughton