My Thoughts on 26/03/2021

We have now celebrated a year since the first lockdown. In this past year I have missed going up to London on my day off and visiting the Royal Academy or the Tate modern and the Tate Britain. They are at present all closed.

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that museums and libraries across England can reopen from 17 May as part of a four-step “roadmap” to lifting lockdown. This is of course if there is no resurgence in new infections. At the moment as a Tate member I have access to curator-led video tours. I have just watched one on Turners Modern World and and the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Just by chance I came across a new Jesuit exhibition to mark 50 years since the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs. Organised in collaboration with Stonyhurst College collection, it presents some of the priests and laypeople martyred for their Catholic faith in England and Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It is a wonderful insight in the some of the martyrs I haven heard of such as Thomas Percy, Edward Oldcorne, Blessed Thomas Thwing and Blessed Thomas Whitbread. These were all Jesuits. You are not only given a brief outline of their story but also you are shown some of the relics associated with these martyrs.

As we enter into Holy Week, viewing this exhibition online, will link us to the suffering and death of Jesus. These men were will to give their all for Christ.