June 2017 England Pilgrimage

For information regarding our June 2017 Pilgrimage to England: In the Footsteps of Saint Thomas More and Blessed John Henry Newman, please read below. 

Please call 202-536-4555 or email [email protected] to have us hold a place for you. Only 15 pilgrims will travel!

An Invitation from Leonie Caldecott:

Dear Friends,

I would like to extend a warm invitation to you, to join me and Inside the Vatican Pilgrimages for a special pilgrimage to my home country, England: “In the Footsteps of Saint Thomas More & Blessed John Henry Newman”. These two great men, separated by three tumultuous centuries, are examples of the finest hearts, minds and souls that England has produced.

We have worked hard to create a unique and special eight days, including the Feast of St Thomas More on June 22 when we will visit the cell in the Tower of London where he spent his last days. In fact, we have been granted by the Warden of the Tower the very rare privilege of attending a private Mass said for us in this very cell!

We’ll also discuss the “Second Spring” of English Catholicism and visit the Oratory where John Henry Newman was received into the Catholic Church.

Not to be forgotten is the virtuoso of the English language, Shakespeare, who lived and wrote in the era of the “recusants” who refused to abandon their Catholic faith for the newly established Church of England. (Some even say he was one of them.) We will see, and discuss, his celebrated Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, an exact replica of the historic Globe Theater where Shakespeare himself saw his own plays performed.

I hope you will enjoy every aspect of your time with us, from places of great spiritual and historical resonance, to the people we shall meet, all of whom have a special expertise in the fascinating history of English Catholicism and especially the holy men who embody it so well.

But most of all I hope you will take away from your pilgrimage a sense of the culture of the mother country which played such an important role in making the United States of America what she is today. Dr. Robert Moynihan, the editor and founder of Inside the Vatican magazine, and I look forward to traveling with you!

— Leonie Caldecott

Leonie Caldecott is the wife of the late Stratford Caldecott, with whom, in the 1990s, she founded the Second Spring Centre for Faith and Culture and its journal, Second Spring. Leonie and her eldest daughter Teresa now work together, editing the UK/Eire edition of Magnifict and running courses and events on Catholic culture in the UK. Leonie is also the UK editor of the online journal Humanum, published by the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC. Leonie will travel with us on the entire pilgrimage.

Seminar Topic: English Catholicism: the “Second Spring” Down the Centuries.

Katherine Turley is the Lecturer in Literature at Newman College, an excellent new academic institution in Ireland, where she also teaches Gregorian Chant. A direct descendant of St. Thomas More, she obtained her MA in English Literature from Oxford University.

Seminar Topic: The Life and Sanctity of St. Thomas More.

Dr. Gerard Kilroy is the author of Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate 2015). He read Classics and English at Oxford and obtained his doctorate from Lancaster University. He has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and St Catherine’s College Oxford, and a visiting professorship at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He is a consultant to a group at Tischner and Jagiellonian Universities, Krakow, working on “Subversive publication in Early Modern England and Poland.” He is a frequent contributor to Recusant History, a journal of research into post-reformation history in the British Isles. He is also an Honorary Visiting Fellow at University College London.

Seminar Topic: The Crisis of the Reformation and Recusant Themes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We will be seeing this very play at the Globe Theatre in London, reconstructed exactly as it was in Shakespeare’s time..

Father Jerome Bertram from the Oxford Oratory will accompany us to Littlemore and speak about Newman’s journey of faith. He will also celebrate Mass for us in the chapel there where Newman was received into the Catholic Church. As well as being an Oratorian and the librarian at the Oxford Oratory, Father Bertram is a prolific author, contributor to Magnificat UK, as well as writing on Newman, prayer, Scripture and the priestly life.