Write, if you have any answers to the questions listed at the end of this section, or would like to add to the answers below.
Your answers
In several English cathedrals there used to be a shrine of a saint, containing a relic. Some have been rebuilt, copied, or left as a space for prayer. . . In each destroyed shrine, there remains material, even if only the flooring, that once touched the relics. Can this be justifiably regarded as a secondary relic? May we regard a reconstruction or replica as a true shrine, and hope for miracles?
Hereford Cathedral is one of a handful of English cathedrals where substantial parts of the saint’s shrine have survived, and, in recent years, these remains have, in several cases, been restored and developed. I can think of only two major shrines where the saint’s body remains — Westminster Abbey and Durham Cathedral — but others, such as Hereford, St Albans, and Chichester, do possess small relics that have been returned to their original resting place.
In “restoring” medieval shrines, we are not, I think, aiming to recreate a “pre-Reformation cult”. It is true that these shrines were powerful focuses of prayer and healing: in Hereford alone, at the shrine of St Thomas of Hereford, between 1287 and 1307, some 470 miracles are recorded (second only to Canterbury’s Thomas, where more than 660 are recorded). Many of these healing miracles were dramatic and immediate. But today, restored shrines are there, I think, to provide a focus for prayer, intercession, and healing in the broadest sense. We have certainly not restored them with the intention of “hoping for miracles”.
While some might regard such an interpretation of medieval practice as rather un-Anglican, there is little doubt that these shrines are places where the boundaries between heaven and earth are extremely thin. Visitors and pilgrims feel this powerfully, and our shrine’s intercession board is nearly always full of the most moving prayers — and, yes, the same people might well testify to healing that they have experienced at these places.
(The Very Revd) Michael Tavinor
Dean of Hereford
Your questions
My great-grandparents were married in a church in Bridgewater on 25 April 1882. The banns were called only once in my great-grandfather’s church, Holy Trinity, Barnstaple, on 9 April. Why might this be? C. W.
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