Benedictine nuns hold first Mass in new abbey church

SISTERS OF Stanbrook Abbey in Wass attended the first Mass in their new church last weekend.

The Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook moved from their previous home in Worcestershire to North Yorkshire in 2009 and the building of the church and the east wing of the monastery started last February.

The main celebrant on Sunday was the Abbot of Ampleforth, Cuthbert Madden.

The abbey church is to be formally consecrated on 6 September by the Bishop of Middlesbrough, Terence Drainey, at a ceremony to be attended by Cardinal Vincent Nichols. Until then the stone altar of the new church will not be used.

Cardinal Nichols had been the local ordinary of the Stanbrook nuns when they were based at Callow End just south of the city of Worcester and he was Archbishop of Birmingham.

The Stanbrook community dates back to the seventeenth century in Flanders, Belgium, when it was founded by nine English women in exile. Imprisoned during the French Revolution, they returned to England in 1795, settling at their Worcestershire abbey in 1838. Their new, ecologically sustainable monastery, built amid the rolling North Yorkshire Moors just a few miles from Ampleforth, is equipped with a woodchip boiler and solar panels.