Once upon a time, in a land not far away, there was a seminary where lucky young men and lucky young women came to train for the priesthood and open their lives to all that God was hoping for them.

It was a place that I knew but did not study in myself but a place that some of you may well have known and visited in its day.

Now this seminary was, like St Mary’s a bit of an international place. It was somewhere that people from all over the world would drop into for a couple of months of Sunday. It was like a liturgical finishing school for the world. It was good in those days (and still is a good thing I fear) for you to have had a bit of time in a British seminary if you were studying for the Anglican priesthood from furth of these shores and wanted to climb the slippery slope of clerical advancement.

And thus the seminary in question used to admit external students from time to time.

And one of these students arrived in this place. He came from a part of Anglicanism where Portuguese was the dominant language and though he had studied English, it was a hard work at first for him to communicate.

Well, he arrived and was shown to his room and the first time he met the student body was the next morning for breakfast.

As he stirred his porridge and gave thanks for his good fortune, he looked up at the other students and said, “Last night. Last night the Virgin Mary came to me [Read more…]