Following the closure of St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, in July 2021, Arundel Cathedral has been fortunate in receiving a number of items, including a substantial collection of relics of saints, from the Seminary. And there is particular cause for us to welcome the gift, as Bishop John Butt, the founder of Wonersh, had previously served as chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk, and was the first parish priest for what is now Arundel Cathedral (see pages 2 and 3).
The Wonersh relics include those of a large number and variety of saints, ranging from the well-known to the obscure. The ornate reliquary on the cover is for St Philomena, a thirteen year-old Greek girl martyred in Rome in 304 AD. Her remains had been discovered in 1802, leading to widespread veneration, and canonisation in 1937. Among the miracles associated with her was the multiplication of the bone dust of the saint, which provided for hundreds of reliquaries without reducing the original amount. Some of the other Wonersh relics are featured in the following pages, but the collection as a whole is enormous, and would require an army of curators to sort and catalogue.
In addition to the relics the Cathedral has received a number of other items, including a magnificent painting, originally presented to Wonersh by Cardinal Vaughan, showing Our Lady with saints and the eagle of St John. Treated with a degree of disdain during its time at the Seminary, as of course was much Victorian art, it has been splendidly restored and now hangs in the Chapter Room at Cathedral House.
In what could be seen as a further gift from Wonersh we welcome the new Cathedral Dean, Fr Stephen Dingley, who was for many years associated with the Seminary. We wish him every success in a challenging, but we hope rewarding, role.
Oliver Hawkins Editor
BISHOP JOHN BUTT
John Baptist Butt was born in Richmond, Surrey, in 1826, and was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop, later Cardinal, Wiseman in July 1849. His ministry therefore coincided precisely with the period following the relaxation of the penal laws and re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy, when the Catholic Church in England enjoyed a dramatic resurgence in scale and confidence.
As a young priest John Butt served as a military chaplain in the Crimea, and then in 1858 was appointed assistant chaplain to Henry Granville, XIV Duke of Norfolk. In contrast to his predecessor, the scholarly antiquarian Mark Aloysius Tierney, who ‘opposed all that he deemed innovation’, Butt extended his remit to the service of the Catholic population of the town and its surrounds, establishing the Arundel Mission, arranging for schooling for the children, and effectively acting as a parish priest without a parish church. By 1873, with the opening of the great church built by Henry XV Duke, Butt had built up a substantial congregation, and he became the first Rector of the Church of Our Lady and St Philip Neri. He served in Arundel until 1885, when he was appointed Bishopof the Diocese of Southwark, and it was during time that he was responsible for the foundation of St John’s Seminary.
A site was purchased in 1889 in a hamlet outside the village of Wonershnear Guildford. Butt’s aim was to establish a college along Continental lines, in distinction to the more Jesuit-inspired tradition of English seminaries of the time. He employed as his first rector the young priestFrancis Bourne, later to become Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, who had studied at the great seminary of St Sulpice in Paris. It was the ‘Sulpician’ model - reverence for the Word of God, daily meditation, simplicity of life, and the importance of carefully prepared preaching – that defined the seminary for the next 130 years.
Bishop Butt died in 1899 in Arundel, and was buried at Wonersh. There is a bronze plaque dedicated to him in the Cathedral, and the Stations of the Cross relief sculptures in the North and South aisles were erected in 1906 in his memory. In July 2022 Bishop Butt’s remains were transferred from the cemetery at Wonersh for re-interment in St George’s Cathedral, the mother-church of the Diocese of Southwark. In an eloquent homily at the service Fr Sean Finnegan suggested that Bishop Butt’s happiest years were probably those spent in Arundel - ‘Those were great and fruitful years, and so it is not surprising that in later years, when ill health forced his retirement as bishop—not a common thing in those days at all—, it was to his beloved Arundel that he returned to die’.
RELICS OF ST FRANCIS AND ST CATHERINE
The veneration of relics is a long-established tradition in the Church, although it has often been felt necessary to stress that the objects themselves have no magic properties. St Thomas Aquinas observed tha t it was natural that people should treasure what is associated with the dead, much like the personal effects of a beloved relative. Three hundred years later the Council of Trent defended invoking the prayers of the saints and venerating their relics and burial places. “The sacred bodies of the holy martyrs and of the other saints living with Christ, which have been living members of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit and which are destined to be raised and glorified by Him unto life eternal, should also be venerated by the faithful. Through them, many benefits are granted to men by God.”
Since that time, the Church has taken stringent measures to ensure the proper preservation and veneration of relics. Canon Law absolutely forbids the selling of sacred relics and they cannot be ‘validly alienated or perpetually transferred’ without permission of the Holy See. This has not prevented the widespread sale of relics online - ‘dust from the tomb of St Francis of Assisi; only four left; 10% off’ – but we can be confident that the coll ection from Wonersh, including St Francis of Assisi and St Catherine of Siena, above, will have impeccable provenance.
A FRAGMENT OF THE TRUE CROSS
The legend of the True Cross began with the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, who travelled to the Holy Land in 326–28AD, founding churches and establishing relief agencies for the poor. Historians Gelasius of Caesarea and Rufinus (although not Eusebius) claimed that she discovered the hiding place of three crosses that were believed to be used at the crucifixion of Jesus and of the two thieves.
In due course fragments of the Cross were broken up, and the pieces were widely distributed, becoming highly sought-after throughout the Christian world. The multiplicity of fragments led to John Calvin’s jibe that taken together the pieces could form a whole shipload - ‘there is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen’ – a claim thoroughly disproven by later, more thorough calculations.
There can be a degree of ambivalence concerning the scientific verification of relics. Just as Duke Henry was happy to include in the windows of his Arundel church certain saints for whom no historic records exist, so too we can sometimes be content to respect a tradition of veneration for its own worth.
ASSORTED BONES
Relics are divided into three classifications. A first-class relic, most cherished in past times, is a body part of a saint, such as bone, blood, or flesh. Second-class relics are possessions that a saint owned, such as garments, and third-class relics are objects that have been in some kind of contact with the saint, or simply touched a first or second class relic.
From earliest times the enthusiasm for relics has led to unscrupulous wheeling and dealing, as famously depicted in the character of the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, - ‘and in a glas he hadde pigges bones’.
The collection of bones, above, held in a fine crystal casket, include those of St Fortunata, martyred in Caesarea with her three brothers in 303 AD; St Modesta, founder of the monastery of Oeren in Germany in the seventh century; and St Clare, curiously labelled as a martyr, when both St Clare of Assisi and the slightly later St Clare of Montefalco died of natural causes. A fragment of the latter’s veil is among the miscellaneous items pictured on the inside front cover. Other items include clay from the shrine at Knock, dust from the grotto of St Emidio in Ascona, and what appears to be flour, associated with the mystic St Mary Magdalene de Pazzi.
ST THOMAS MORE
In contrast to the ‘firstclass’ relics, opposite, the simple leaf from the garden of St Thomas More is a touching reminder that even saints live ordinary lives, and can take pleasure from the fruit trees in their gardens.
The relic, if it can technically be so called, is clearly from before the canonisation of St Thomas More by Pope Pious XI in 1935. It was reported that the canonization ceremony was greeted with a ‘minimal and hostile’ treatment by the British press, and officially boycotted by parliament and universities. How times change – in 1980 despite their staunch opposition to the English Reformation Thomas More and John Fisher were added as martyrs of the reformation to the Church of England’s calendar of ‘Saints and Heroes of the Christian Church’.
ST PHILIP NERI
This small relic of St Philip Neri is shown with its certificate of authentication, as sent to Henry XV Duke of Norfolk, at Arundel Castle. The Cathedral already has a tiny fragrant of the Saint’s cloak, in a fine reliquary, probably acquired around the time of the church’s building. The choice of St Philip Neri to be named with Our Lady as patron saints of the church was doubtless made in recognition of Philip Neri’s having founded the Oratorian order, in which Duke Henry’s great friend and mentor John Henry Newman was a priest.
Duke Henry will have been aware of Philip Neri’s reputation as an engaging, approachable individual, famous for his sense of humour, traits not immediately evident in the Cathedral’s rather severe statue of the saint. It is not clear at what point the relic, above, was given to Wonersh, but Duke Henry would have been a close friend of the seminary’s founder, John Butt, from his years as parish priest in Arundel, and very likely to have made gifts to his establishment.
ST PIOUS X
One of a pair of slippers belonging to St Pious X, Giuseppe Sarto. Pious X is perhaps best known for his vigorous opposition to what was termed ‘modernism’, the idea that beliefs of the church have evolved throughout history, and continue to evolve, but he was also responsible for significant liturgical changes. He encouraged more frequent communion, becoming known as ‘the Pope of the Blessed Sacrament’, and developed the principle of ‘participatio actuosa’, the active participation of the faithful. Duke Henry, as a kind of unofficial ambassador to the Holy See, would have had numerous meetings with Pope Pious, who died in 1914, the year in which formal diplomatic relations with the UK were established.
There is a degree of irony in having his ornate slippers as objects of veneration, as he lived extremely frugally and tried where possible to reduce papal ceremonial. Aides often needed to remind him not to wipe his pen on his white cassock, as he had previously done on his black one. The famously scruffy Duke Henry would have approved! But the slippers appear unblemished.
