My dear friends,
As I write this letter, we are gearing up for our fifth heat-wave since May. Summer 2026 is probably going to prove much hotter than the famous Summer of 1976. Everywhere is very dry and the countryside stands in great need of rain. I have started saying daily the prayer for rain in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:
O God, heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ has promised to all them that seek thy kingdom, and the righteousness thereof, all things necessary to their bodily sustenance: Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to thy honour; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
I wonder if you would like to join me in regularly saying this prayer.
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There have been a lot of stories and letters in the British press lately about the gratitude of some of the German prisoners of war who were sent to work in Britain during the Second World War. These brought back a memory from my time as a curate in Leicestershire in 1992-94.
We had a dear old lady in the parish, Mrs White, whose father had worked in agriculture in the 1940s: I think he may have been a farm foreman, or possibly even a very small independent farmer. Mrs White recalled that they were sent some Italian prisoners of war to help them on the farm. One of these was a very young man, barely out of school, who had been conscripted into Mussolini’s army and sent to North Africa, where had had been taken prisoner and eventually sent by ship to England.
Mrs White told me that each day the young Italian lad would come into the farmhouse for a break, sit down at the kitchen table and quietly weep. The family did not speak any Italian, but they got out of him that he wanted to go home and see his mother again. I remember Mrs White telling me that this happened every day. Today, we would probably understand that the poor lad had seen and experienced terrible things during the fighting in North Africa and been left traumatized by them.
Mrs White’s family had been warned to be careful of the Italian prisoners of war – no fraternization – but she said it would have taken a heart of stone not to be moved by this weeping, unhappy, poor young man. Life was tough for Britons working on the land during the war, and they did not have much to spare in the way of material things, but what this little farming family did have was kindness. They were devout, un-showy members of their local parish church. ‘He was no different to us’ Mrs White said, ‘and we thought of our own boys who were prisoners of war.’ The family rallied round, and did everything they could think of to keep the young lad going, until the war ended and he was repatriated back to Italy and his mother and family.
The kingdom of God is built, not with big rocks, but with lots of little pebbles, each reflecting myriad acts of love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, forbearance and mutual encouragement, undertaken out of love for Christ and our fellow man.
With my love and prayers,
Father Robert.
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Saints Margaret, Catherine and Frideswide
A talk given by Father Robert at Walsingham
Today we are going to look at three female saints from the first millennium. They all have one thing in common. I wonder if you can spot it?
St Margaret lived in the early fourth century AD at Antioch of Pisidia in modern day Turkey, and is also sometimes known as St Marina. Details about her life are sketchy. According to a 9th-century writer, she was the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius. Her mother having died soon after her birth, Margaret was nursed by a Christian woman who lived outside Antioch. Margaret became a Christian and consecrated her virginity to God. For taking this step, Margaret was disowned by her father, adopted by her nurse, and lived in the country keeping sheep with her foster mother.
In 303 AD the Roman Emperor Diocletian began a persecution of Christians. Churches were ordered to be demolished and Christian books burned. The clergy were imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed. In 304 the persecution was extended to the Christian laity. One of these was Margaret.
It is said that the local Roman governor, Olybrius, asked Margaret to renounce Christianity and marry him. She declined. Margaret was then tortured, during which various miraculous incidents are reported to have occurred, symbolized by the dragon. Eventually, when it was clear that nothing would induce Margaret to renounce the faith, she was decapitated.
I mentioned earlier that Margaret was also known as Marina. Some historians have speculated that there might have been another saint called Marina and details of the two women have somehow conflated down the centuries.
Devotion to St Margaret grew in the East from the 7th century and in the West from the 12th century. She is the patron saint of pregnant women, servant maids, kidney-sufferers, and people suffering demonic oppression.
Our next saint is St Katharine of Alexandria. According to the traditional narrative, Catherine was the daughter of Constus, the governor of Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Maximian. She appears to have been an intelligent and well-educated girl. Interestingly she is said to have experienced a vision of the Virgin and Child, which helped persuade her to embrace Christianity aged 14. Four years later the Emperor Maxentius renewed the persecution of Christians. Katharine, aged 18, is said to have rebuked the Emperor for his cruelty. Maxentius is said to have sent scholarly pagan men to persuade her to abandon her Christian faith, but their efforts were of no avail. A grumpy Emperor next ordered Katharine to be imprisoned. More than 200 people came to see her in prison, including Maxentius’ wife, Valeria Maximilla, and many of them later became Christians. Maxentius next tried to win Katharine over by proposing marriage. Katharine declined to marry Maxentius, declaring that her spouse was Jesus Christ, to whom she had consecrated her virginity. Hell hath no fury like an Emperor scorned, and Maxentius ordered Katharine’s death. Legend has it that she was tied to a wheel to break her spine, thus ensuring a most agonising death which would dissuade others from becoming Christians, but that the wheel shattered during her execution, such was her evident sanctity. Katharine’s executors then resorted to the more tried and trusted method of cutting off her head with a sword.
The monks of St Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai claim to have her body in their church, and it has been a site of pilgrimage and healing since around 800 A.D. The cult of St Katharine grew from the tenth century A.D. and was very popular in the early middle ages, especially in France, and she became one of the most venerated women saints in Europe after the Blessed Virgin Mary. St Katharine’s symbol is a spiked wheel, and she is the patron saint of young women, wheelwrights, barristers and students.
Lastly, we come to our third saint, St Frideswide. The legend of St Frideswide states that she was the daughter of Didanus an eighth-century Mercian prince. She was a devout Christian and pledged her virginity to the Lord. Didanus had other ideas: he wanted a dynastic marriage between his daughter and a neighbouring Anglo-Saxon princeling, King Algar. Frideswide, however, ran away from home, pursued by her enamoured suitor. Algar, poor man, was struck blind in answer to her prayers – nice girl! Upon abandoning his claim of marriage, the suitor’s sight was miraculously restored, and Frideswide went on to establish her religious community, probably at Binsey.
Following the translation of her relics in 1180, Frideswide’s tomb became a centre of pilgrimage and healing. During the Reformation, James Calfhill, a rather difficult Calvinistic Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, dug up Frideswide’s bones and mixed them with the bones of Mrs Catherine Vermigli, the dead wife of another reforming Canon, Peter Vermigli – what her husband thought is unrecorded – and the lot were buried in the north-east corner of the Cathdral. Frideswide’s shrine was reconstructed a few years ago, but it is empty. But perhaps under some flagstone in Christ Church, Oxford, unknown and unvisited, there survive a few fragments of this pious Anglo-Saxon princess turned nun. She remains the patron saint of the city and University of Oxford.
Well, I am sure you have spotted that the thing that Margaret, Katharine and Frideswide all had in common was that they did not want to marry and instead wished to lead lives of consecrated virginity to the Lord. We have to be careful not to read back contemporary views and attitudes into the lives of these three saints. They were not early versions of 21st century feminists. A millennia ago there was a view that the consecrated life was better than life in the world – and we must, likewise, avoid the error of reading that attitude back into the lives of women who lived many centuries earlier.
What I think we can say is that Margaret, Katharine and Frideswide were three young women who fell in love with God and more than anything else wished to serve Him. Their lives, words and examples had a big impact upon the people who knew them. At that time, saints were created by popular acclaim, and the Christians who had known Margaret, Katharine and Frideswide had no doubt of their sanctity and soon began mentioning them in the liturgy as holy women of God.
We find ourselves thinking about memory. The lives of Margaret, Katharine and Frideswide are unclear. They have attracted all sorts of myths and legends – kindly meant, perhaps symbolic of something important at the time, but not entirely true. If we strip away the layers, we find three young women who, more than anything else, wished to serve God with every fibre of their being. Two were martyred. One had to run away from home and hide, before being able to found a nunnery. And yet it is enough to know that they existed, that they were touched by the hand of God, that their lives affected the lives of other Christians for the good, and that after their deaths Christians honoured their memory and thanked God for their sanctity.
And what of us – of you and me? Unless we are someone like Queen Victoria, it will be the lot of the vast majority of human beings to be forgotten on planet earth. Most of our prized possessions will end up in a charity shop, an auction house, or possibly just a dustbin. The houses we have lived in, and the gardens we have created, will go to other people. Perhaps we will be a name on a headstone, possibly not even that. There may be some young people who knew us when we were old, and they will retain memories of us for, perhaps, half a century. And then, like the proverbial old soldiers, we shall slowly fade away.
It is nothing to be frightened of – for the very important reason that God will remember us. God remembers everything, and uses everything. No act of ours of faith and love is ever thrown away by Him. God is the source of our being and existence. In His time and plan, He will raise us up in a Resurrection like that of His Son Jesus Christ. Judge us, heal us, love us, and welcome us into His heavenly kingdom.
As Margaret, Katharine and Frideswide would have told us, what men and women remember of us is important, at least for for a bit – because God can use other people’s memories of us to help them. But what is more important still is what God knows and therefore remembers of us.
And the common denominator of all God’s saints, whatever their stories, is that they tried to love God and the men and women around them. When sins have been forgiven, and bad memories and frail bodies healed, our love will remain, remembered and cherished by God for eternity.