St Edmund, Bury

St Edmund RC, Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmunds was one of the cradles of Catholic Christianity in England, its shrine Abbey of St Edmund third only to Canterbury and Walsingham as a goal of pilgrimage. At the Reformation, the great Abbey was destroyed, and was not allowed to become a Cathedral. Otherwise, Bury could, today, be a Cathedral city like Norwich, Ely or Peterborough.

During the long, dark penal years, the Faith was sustained in Suffolk by Priests in the Bury area. These Priests, at considerable risk of a grisly public death, were generally sustained by recusant families in the area, either the Gages at Hengrave, or the Rookwoods at Stanningfield. Our Lady and St Joseph at Coldham Cottage, Lawshall, on the edge of the Stanningfield estate, survives as a Catholic parish church to this day.

In Bury itself, a group of brave Jesuits established a school in the Abbey grounds in the years after the Restoration, only to be put to flight by the 'Glorious' Protestant Revolution of 1689, when the Catholic James II was deposed in favour of the Dutch William of Orange.

Catholic Priests continued to be active in the Bury area throughout the 18th century, providing a ministry to the rest of Suffolk, still at no small risk until the Emancipation Act of 1780.

St Edmund's severe northern frontage, in the Greek revival style.

In 1791, a small Catholic chapel was built in the town. In the 1820s, Catholics were, at last, allowed free assembly, and it was not long before the church of St Edmund was built in 1837, the first new large Catholic church in East Anglia since the Reformation.

A pediment supporter from Rushbrooke Hall.

St Edmund's setting is wholly urban, as are the settings of all Bury's churches. The church is aligned north-south, with liturgical east at the south end.

It is built in the Grecian style, that most pure of Classical forms, and the architect was Charles Day. The rather severe frontage has recently been cleaned, and consists of two Ionic columns flanking the great west door.

You step inside to a substantial porch area, reminiscent of a great 1930s cinema; one almost expects to see a ticket booth.

The interior doorway is most curious, with two classical figures supporting a large marble pediment. Pevsner says that it is a former fireplace surround from the now-demolished Rushbrooke Hall. Other pieces from the Hall were worked into the structure of the sanctuary, but have now been removed.

The inside comes as a surprise, for this is Suffolk's only Catholic church with box pews. They are the original set from the 1830s, and are a delight, their mellow uneven facings breaking up the otherwise sombre Classicism of this great church.

The modern wooden font sits at the north end of the central gangway, but one's eyes are drawn irresistably towards the great sanctuary.

The altar is in the architecturally correct form of the Greek revival, but still looks like nothing so much as a bath tub.

Behind it, a gorgeous mosaic of the Ascension dates, I think, from an 1870s reordering.

In keping with the solemn grandeur, the Stations of the Cross are large and sombre. However, the beautiful art nouveau lamps rather relieve this.

A gallery at the north end contains the organ, and Delafosse's Martyrdom of St Edmund is hung in front of it.

A door in the north-west corner leads into the Blessed Sacrament chapel, a post-Vatican II inovation.

There is a Lady chapel in the north east corner, and a chapel to St Edmund in the south-west, where the King and Martyr endures, rather stoically, the traditional cross-fired arrows.

Through the box pews, the altar, in its gloriously Greek setting.

This church also possesses a relic of St Edmund, rescued from the Abbey at the time of the dissolution, and presented by a monastery in France.

From the pulpit: the mellow ranges of box pews, lit by a turn-of-the-century standard. In the far corner, the doorway to the Blessed Sacrament chapel.

The primary school sits to the east of the building, with the towering heights of the famous Greene King brewery beyond, makers of Abbot Ale. With a regular Sunday Mass attendance of nearly 800, St Edmund has the largest congregation of any church in Suffolk.

St Edmund, Bury St Edmunds, is located on Westgate Street, to the south of the town centre. I have never found it locked.