The diocesan parish of Our Lady of Ransom with St Agnes and St Gregory held its AGM on Thursday 20 July. We presented a report of our activities for their information.

For the last eighteen months we have been using Divine Worship on a Monday evening at 7:30pm, at OLR. This is the Ordinariate Use Missal that draws on Anglican prayer, the Extraordinary Form and the Novus Ordo, all united in traditional language. It is beautiful to pray and has been fruitful in aiding prayer and worship.

Since Advent this liturgical year, we have also used Divine Worship at the Sunday afternoon Mass at St Agnes. This is a sung Mass. Some have found the transition difficult, while others have found it has deepened their experience of the Mass and have been drawn to it.

In February, we had a group retreat to Bournemouth, which was such a great success that we have booked up to go again. During this week we walked, prayed and ate together, and it was good to make contact with the Ordinariate group there too. We made one-day trip to the New Forest, where most of us ended up in a tea salon with teapots that poured from the bottom! For one day we were joined by Fr James Bradley, an Ordinariate priest currently based in Southampton. He recently completed a doctorate on Divine Worship, and was able to share some of his insights and give a wider perspective to its history and use.

We have had four young people confirmed this last year, with Mgr Keith presiding. A few months before this, Mac was also confirmed and took his First Holy Communion aged 91! We will be looking to begin another confirmation course later this year.

More recently, there has been our annual pilgrimage to England’s Nazareth in Walsingham. This year we began with sprinkling in the Priory grounds before our procession to the Shrine and Mass in the Ordinariate Use. The pilgrimage will take place on the same weekend next year (23–24 June) and is open to any who wish to reconnect with our own native shrine to Our Lady.

We continue to seek to encourage the use of Morning and Evening Prayer as a foundation for our prayer life. We have a sung Compline once a month at OLR on Sunday evenings at 8pm. We will aim to get this in the parish diary so that more people can experience its sheer beauty.

We are hoping in the near future to have training on singing plainchant, and something should be appearing in the newsletter about that. We will be able to forward details in due course.

The 4pm Mass community continues to work alongside the parish as cleaners, flower arrangers, extraordinary ministers, servers and readers at weekday masses. Our members also provide support with music on Sunday mornings and we have also worked together contributing to evening celebrations for major feasts and solemnities.

PDF version of this report