A striking feature about Douai Abbey, in the pleasant Berkshire countryside, is the way one encounters a grand modern facade which practically spills out into the world beyond the Monastery.
The community have a noble history, originating as an English community of Benedictines in 17th Century Paris, to escape the Protestant persecutions. Later, during the French revolution, they fled and settled in Douai, France. For centuries they trained future martyrs who died for their Faith, ministering to a recusant Catholic England, giving them the simple Tridentine Mass as sustenance.
In brief, following Catholic emancipation, the community of Douai returned to England in 1903 and settled in Woolhampton it's present location. Originally they used the old parish church (above) which YCA are using this weekend for most liturgy, but eventually they began building the neo-Gothic Abbey Church of Our Lady & St Edmund designed by Birmingham architect J. Arnold Crush.
The Abbey Church was not completed according to it's original design, and the nave was completed in an altogether different style.
It is an interesting contrast, and one which the Solemn High Mass today made stark, the first of it's kind at the free-standing altar, set at the building's architectural divide between secular and Divine.
The West Midlands based choir, ensemble 1685, sang a magnificent polyphonic Mass setting by Palestrina under the direction of Richard Jeffcoat. They will be singing again soon for the LMS Birmingham's annual Solemn Requiem on November 5th at West Heath.
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