Gathered around St Chad
On Saturday 23rd September we were delighted to be the goal of the 19-mile St Chad’s Pilgrimage, as an ecumenical group of nearly 150 pilgrims walked from St. Chad’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Birmingham in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It was a privilege for us to welcome a group which included Church leaders from different denominations, among them our own Bishop Michael.
As the pilgrims arrived in the Cathedral after Evensong, the lively conversations and remarkably high level of energy testified to the experience of the walk. Canon Peter Holliday, himself one of the pilgrims, welcomed everyone to the Cathedral, and all were invited to gather around the site of the original burial place of St. Chad for a short act of worship. In a deeply moving act of ecumenical generosity, a relic of St Chad had been carried from St Chad’s Cathedral and rested for a brief period at the shrine here; almost certainly for the first time since the Reformation. Standing together as members of our different Christian traditions, in that place where prayer has been offered for so many centuries, served as a sign that the story of our shared past goes back further than the story of what divides us. It also reminds us of how the story of St Chad, with his gentle spirit and fierce love for the Gospel, is a very current source of inspiration for our mission and ministry in this place today.