Fr Graeme Rowlands presents the Monstrance to Fr Alan Robinson,
for the National Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament at Corpus Christi

Our Centenary Year has ended with a presentation to the Catholic Church of Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, of a monstrance bearing the League’s emblem and objects. This is the last donation to a Church to promote the Catholic faith and the spiritual life through purchasing Eucharistic Vessels from the Tabernacle Treasury, a fund of the League's set up by Fr Fynes-Clinton, its main founder.

The Catholic League's Emblem engraved on the foot of the Monstrance

Corpus Christi was founded by Cardinal Manning as a place of reparation for the offences and injuries to the Eucharist, the priesthood and the unity of the Body of Christ in England in the past. He had intended for it be the National Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament, where reparation could be made not through recrimination against history and the Protestantism of the English nation and constitution, but through an ever more intensified pouring out of love and devotion, towards healing, salvation and reconciliation in the one Church of Christ. Fr Alan Robinson, the parish priest, an old friend of Fr Graeme Rowland’s and Fr Mark Woodruff's, has been charged with the restoration of the Church and its work as a National and International shrine to the Blessed Sacrament. It had no monstrance worthy of the task for daily Exposition, Adoration and Benediction, something around which all Christians can be united regardless of the lack of fullness of communion. So the League has presented one, thanks to Fr Rowlands’ efforts, towards the church's restored role. It dates from the late 19th century and matches the Gothic architecture of Corpus Christi.

Fr Robinson is to re-found the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, which will be an international fellowship of prayer for reparation, peace and reconciliation, sustained by the daily offering of mass and the Adoration that will be at the heart of the Church’s future work. Since these objectives are very close to the aims of the Catholic League, and directly reflect work that we have done on ecumenical reparation and reconciliation in the past, following Pope St John Paul II’s encouragement of “the healing of memories” between the separate Church histories that still divide us as potential rivals, and mindful of Pope Francis own description of how Christians are united by martyrdom and suffering in the past through an “ecumenism of blood”, I hope that members of the League, Anglicans and Catholics alike, will be keen to enrol in the Corpus Christi Guild of the Blessed Sacrament and actively involve themselves in its future new work of prayer and reconciliation.

The inscription on the case reads:

To mark the Centenary of the Catholic League 1913-2013

this Monstrance is entrusted to the Church of Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane,

and the restored Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament
Towards the Unity of all Christians

and Full Communion with the Apostolic See of Rome

In Thanksgiving and Hope