My Thoughts 17/08/2022

When I was a student Chaplain in London in the 90’s I joined a group of young students who took part in Student Cross.

We started at the beginning of Holy Week walking from London to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk. We arrived on Good Friday and celebrated Easter together with other groups that had walked from different parts of the UK.

In 1948, the first Student Cross Pilgrimage came to Walsingham at Easter and also the Cross Carrying Pilgrimage for Peace, Penance and Prayer set out on 3rd July and carried fourteen crosses to Walsingham from all parts of the country. These crosses were dedicated to the Way of the Cross on 16th July. You can still see these original crosses placed in the ground in front of the Reconciliation Chapel.

On a plaque, the nearby starting point of each cross is listed and the distance travelled by the walkers as they converged on Walsingham. It reads: “these stations of the cross were carried by 400 men in 14 groups in July 1948. This pilgrimage of prayer and penance was an earnest petition to Our Lady of Walsingham for peace in the homes of Britain and the world.

I have been to the shrine many times but it was only this year that I realised that one of the crosses (the second station) had been carried from Canterbury a distance of 205 miles. I wonder whether there is anyone still around to tell the tale of their journey to Walsingham carrying the cross. They would be well in their nineties.

I found a picture of one of the groups of the original walkers. We are not sure if it is the Westminster group or the Canterbury group.