The international Catholic television channel Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) chose Walsingham Shrine as the location for its first live broadcast from England.
Viewers around the world joined in with midday Mass last Sunday for the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham. The broadcast also marked the opening of EWTN’s first studio in England in a converted house in the village.
In a letter of welcome, Cardinal Vincent Nichols thanked EWTN for creating the media centre and said that he welcomed “ the opportunity for the Shrine and EWTN to work together as servants of the new Evangelisation”. Walsingham had been a place of pilgrimage over the last 950 years, he added, and this is “a new chapter of its history.”
EWTN’s decision to target Walsingham highlights what it views as its role in supporting evangelisation. EWTN chairman and CEO, Michael P. Warsaw (pictured) called the opening of the studio “a particularly important” step for the network’s continued development in the UK. The new studio, he said, “will allow us to greatly expand our capacity to produce programming for our European channels as well as to more easily incorporate content from the UK into our other channels around the world”.
He added: “It is also appropriate that this new facility is located just steps from the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, which for centuries has been one of the most important centres of Catholicism in Britain. I’m very happy that EWTN now has a presence in this extraordinary place and can share what happens here with our audience around the globe.”
EWTN was launched in 1981. From humble beginnings in a television studio built in an American monastery by the late Mother Angelica and a group of nuns who knew little of technology and communications, it now consists of nine television and two radio networks, as well as websites and publishing services.
Mgr John Armitage, the rector of Walsingham, said he was “delighted” with the new studio. “The programmes made in Walsingham will reflect the experience of the Church on this side of the Atlantic, and in particular look to expand programming for young people, and this will be undertaken by a group of young adults from the UK.
“In using the latest technology and social media, this new project will look to give people an experience of their Catholic faith, ‘ever ancient – ever new’.”
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