The bright and sunny weather and the Tongues of Pentecost flame filled the Church of St Mary Immaculate with warmth and light, as the parish welcomed Archie Armstrong into full Communion with the Catholic Church.

Charles Fox was Archie’s sponsor at a joyful Mass of Pentecost attended by parishioners, visitors, family and friends.

As a local farmer, Archie has been attending Mass, and receiving catechesis from Fr David Phillips, in between working on the land, bringing in the harvest and, most recently, lambing. 
Archie is, in fact, from the exact category of young men for whom the Whittingham Mission was set up in the North Northumberland countryside 147 years ago!

Acknowledging in a letter of 1879 that ‘the district to be served is extensive, the population is scanty, and the Catholics few’, the Right Reverend James Chadwick, then Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, nevertheless cared deeply that there should be a church ‘to supply the spiritual wants’ of faithful Catholics in the area which had previously been served since the 12th century by the Mission at Callaly Castle. 

Today, St Mary’s mission to maintain the Catholic faith in some of the county’s more isolated villages still thrives; out of the locality’s few remaining places of Christian worship, only St Mary’s has a weekly Sunday celebration of the Eucharist - with Holy Mass on three weekdays in addition.

We pray for Archie and his family; for Fr David and his congregation of ‘twenty-two-or-three’ who gather in Christ’s name at St Mary Immaculate, Whittingham; and for all those who live, work, and spread the Gospel in our rural parishes.