Tyburn Convent stands yards from the site of the former Tyburn Tree, the three-sided London gallows upon which 105 Catholics, including 20 canonised saints, were executed during the Protestant Reformation.

The convent’s very existence fulfils the prophecy made in 1585 by Fr Gregory Gunne when, during his own trial, he rebuked an Elizabethan court for having sentenced St Edmund Campion to death at Tyburn.

“You have slain the greatest man in England,” he said. “I will add that one day there, where you have put him to death, a religious house will arise, thanks to an important offering.”

Ever since March 4 1903, when the order’s French foundress, Mother Marie Adele Garnier, opened the convent, the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre OSB – also known as the Tyburn Nuns – have prayed at Tyburn in perpetual adoration of the Eucharist.

The order is now growing and is spreading rapidly around the world. In the last 15 years alone it has opened a succession of monasteries at the invitation of local bishops, most recently Blessed Pope John Paul II,who, in the 2005 Year of the Eucharist, invited the Tyburn Nuns to establish a house in Rome.

Yesterday, the Tyburn Nuns released the DVD Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo, a 90-minute film by Michael Luke Davies, a former West End fashion and beauty photographer, which offers a unique and fascinating window into life in their order’s nine monasteries.

London

Here, the viewer is introduced to the Tyburn Nuns and their foundress, Marie Adele Garnier, a French woman devoted to both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and adoration of the Eucharist.

She founded the order in Montmartre, Paris, in 1898 but fled to London three years later to evade anti-clerical laws. She re-established the order on England’s own “hill of martyrs” in 1903. The convent’s Crypt of the Martyrs has grown to become a centre of international pilgrimage.

Archbishop George Stack of Cardiff is filmed saying: “Whenever I think of Tyburn Convent I think of those beautiful words and that wonderful image of the English poet T S Eliot. He spoke about a still point in a turning world and that seems to me to sum up what Tyburn is. Tyburn Convent is situated at the very centre of the busiest city of our country, London, and it is situated at possibly the busiest junction, Marble Arch. But there is an invitation here from every walk of life, people in any need whatsoever, to participate in that wonderful world of heart speaking to heart in the silence of the heart.”

Ireland

The Tyburn Nuns are resident in St Benedict’s Priory, Cobh, a monastery in the colonial-style former Admiralty buildings of the Royal Navy, overlooking Cork Harbour, one of the most beautiful harbours in the world.

Here, the film examines the nuns’ life of prayer and work, under the Benedictine rule ora et labora. Devoted lay people are seen joining the nuns for Mass in the monastery church before nuns are filmed at work in the library, kitchen and garden.

Filming also takes place in the monastery’s Oratory of St Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland and the last of the Tyburn martyrs.

It includes footage of the Bible garden and of Veronica Brennan, who tragically lost her son, David, speaking in the Leanbh garden, which was specially constructed as a place of peace and reflection for the bereaved parents of deceased children.

Australia

Michael Luke Davies captures the extraordinary moment when 26-year-old Sister Mary Justin of the Divine Child, who grew up in Bordertown, South Australia, sings her solemn vows during her profession as a nun, having entered the convent at the age of 17, and receiving a ring from the Mother General with the solemn proclamation that she “is now forever espoused to Christ”.

“It was the first time I have ever attended one of those ceremonies and to be so close was very involving, and she had a beautiful voice,” said Davies. “Because of her voice, because of the light at the windows, the whole ceremony was just fantastic and very moving.”

The monastery at Riverstone in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, is one of the order’s oldest houses, dating back to 1956. Cardinal Norman Gilroy invited the nuns to New South Wales. As is typical of Tyburn Nuns’ houses, it enjoys the active support of local Catholics, some of whom not only attend early morning Mass but also join the nuns to help them with their work in their gardens, simply because they “want to be where the nuns are and close to God”.

Peru

The Monastery of the Sacred Heart in the fishing town of Sechura, Peru, was the first foundation of the Tyburn Nuns in a developing country. The nuns went there in 1976 at the invitation of the Archbishop of Piura who asked them specifically to pray for priests and seminarians. The nuns built a convent on the highest sand dune of one of the most isolated regions of the country. It opened in July 1981 and the following year the nuns found themselves at the heart of a humanitarian effort to help the victims of floods caused by the Corriente Niño.

The filming in Peru demonstrates once again just how very close the nuns are to the communities in which they flourish. In Sechura, they have opened both a hospital and a museum. They and the priests who serve them are assisted in their works of mercy by lay oblates.

Every morning, before dawn, the chapel is crammed with fishermen who go to pray there before starting work, asking God’s protection before they set out on the Pacific Ocean in their boats.

Scotland

The filming at the Benedictine Monastery in Largs on the west coast of Scotland caught the nuns as they sang, played musical instruments and meditated in the quiet seclusion of their walled garden. It observes the “silent succession of Sisters replacing one another in the monastery church for periods of silent Eucharistic Adoration”, which is at the heart of the life of the order.

The film tells how the Bishop of Galloway formally petitioned the Tyburn Nuns to open a monastery in Scotland in the 1980s and how they amalgamated with the Benedictine convent at Dumfries, inheriting its rich musical tradition, museum of hand-embroidered vestments as well as valuable oak church furniture.

New Zealand

The Tyburn Nuns came to New Zealand just 15 years ago at the invitation of Bishop Patrick Dunn and they now have a thriving monastery supported by the active enthusiasm of local people, including a 92-year-old man who has created a series of bush walks modelled on the Stations of the Cross which have become a pilgrimage destination for tourists.

The nuns are filmed in the New Zealand countryside, nursing orphaned lambs, harvesting herbs and crops and in silent contemplation.

Michael Luke Davies, a non-Catholic, said that filming the prioress sitting beside a river bank was for him the high point in the entire production. “I come from a fashion and beauty background,” he said. “I had been filming models all my life and then suddenly I found myself waist-deep in water filming this religious person by this river and I felt to myself: ‘This is what I am supposed to be doing.’ It was a massive moment in my life.”

Ecuador

The Monastery of the Gate of Heaven at Vilcabamba, Ecuador, is situated 5,000 feet above sea level in the Andean mountains. It dates from 2002 when the Bishop of Loja asked the nuns to establish a contemplative community to pray for the priests of his diocese and to help the local people find a more prayerful way of Christian life.

The film reveals how the nuns have transformed a mountainside “full of rubbish and weeds” into a vast sculptured garden with walkways, containing walls and packed with indigenous plants and flowers and medicinal herbs.

The film features the admission to the novitiate of Mother Fatima, when she takes the veil and begins to live under the rule of St Benedict, and the monastic profession of Mother Caridad.

Colombia

The Monastery of the Divine Paraclete is one of the newest of the convents. The Tyburn Nuns established their third Latin American house at the urgent and insistent requests of a bishop who wanted the nuns to specifically pray for peace in a land bedevilled by civil conflict and drugs trafficking.

The monastery, situated at Antioquia, high in the northern lakelands, is in an Italian medieval style.

Italy

The film concludes at the order’s newest religious house, the Monastery of Madonna dell’ Eucharistia in Via Cardinal Bofondi, near St Peter’s Basilica.

The order was invited to Rome by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 2005 to pray perpetually before the Blessed Sacrament for the Holy Father and the Church in Rome.

A group of the nuns, led by the Mother General, kneel before the Blessed’s tomb in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica to offer prayers of gratitude for the pope’s invitation to open a monastery in the Eternal City and for the gifts of a chalice bearing his coat of arms.

Davies says the filming in the Vatican represented for him another of the “high points” of the experience of making Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo.

He explained that the Vatican closed the crypt to pilgrims so he could shoot the moment when the nuns prayed at Blessed John Paul’s tomb.

He said: “It was Mother’s very positive wish that they go back and thank Pope John Paul.”

We have five copies of the DVD to give away. Just send us a postcard marked “Tyburn competition” with the answer to this question: who was the first Tyburn martyr? You can also email the answer to editorial@catholicherald.co.uk. The competition has closed.

Copies of Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo can be purchased for £15 either directly from Tyburn Convent, 8 Hyde Park Place, London W2 2LJ (tel: 020 7723 7262) or from Catholic bookshops

A London-based order of nuns is to open its seventh convent in the space of just 20 years.

The Tyburn Nuns, whose mother house is situated near Marble Arch, have started to build their first African monastery in the Diocese of Minna in Niger State in the north of Nigeria.

It will be their 11th monastery, the 10th since the Second World War and the seventh to open in a rapid global proliferation of religious houses under the order since 1993.

The contemplative Benedictines were invited to Nigeria to promote Eucharistic Adoration and to pray for peace in a country afflicted by a bloody conflict between local Christians and Muslims.

The monastery will be dedicated to Our Lady, Queen of Peace, and is expected to be fully completed, with a novitiate, by 2015.

Bishop Martin Igwe Uzoukwu of Minna laid the foundation stone of the monastery at Kafin-Koro last month.

He said he invited the nuns – whose proper name is the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre – because he wanted a place in his diocese that would serve as a “watershed for prayer”.

“Their specific apostolate is Adoration of the Eucharist so the Eucharistic Adoration will be taking place here and it is Perpetual Adoration morning, afternoon and night,” he said.
Bishop Uzoukwu said he flew to England to visit the order and was so impressed by their apostolate that he invited them to his diocese immediately and offered them land.

Mother Mary Xavier McMonagle, the Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said she visited several sites in his diocese before opting for Kafin-Koro.

“As soon as we came to Kafin-Koro and saw all those people and they all waved at us as if we were their long lost friends, and I don’t know why they did, but we felt we were warmly welcome by these so friendly people,” she said.

“So that is how it happened. And then when the bishop brought us and showed us the place he would like us to have, we thought that this was just a gift from heaven, from God.

“The parish priest tells us that he has been praying for years to have nuns here. So I think it is God’s Holy Will.”

The nuns will be the first contemplative religious order in the diocese since it was erected in 1911.

The Tyburn Nuns are themselves a young order, having been formed into a community in Paris in 1898 by Mother Marie Adèle Garnier, a French mystic.

They soon fled to London to escape anti-clerical laws and in 1903 established themselves just yards form the site of the Tyburn gallows, where 105 beatified and canonised Catholics were martyred during the Protestant Reformation.

After the Second World War, the order expanded to Ireland, Australia and Peru and since 1993 the nuns have opened houses in Scotland, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy and two in New Zealand.

There are about 80 nuns in total and six will be sent to build the new monastery in Nigeria. The bishop is hoping that a chapel will be open on the site by March.

Five local women have already expressed an interest in joining the order.

A priest who was invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace has said the Queen asked him to convey her thanks to the Tyburn Nuns after learning that they prayed for her.

Fr Patrick Cope, a prison chaplain based at the Ministry of Justice prison headquarters, said he told the Queen he was also chaplain to London’s Tyburn Convent. He explained that the nuns had a plaque entitled: “For the Queen and England” at one of the main altar candles.

The Queen “showed great interest”, he said, and asked him to “convey her thanks to the nuns for their prayers and her greetings”.

Fr Cope had been invited to Buckingham Palace in recognition of his role as a prison chaplain and as a fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

The Tyburn Nuns are contemplative Benedictines. They have had a presence in Marble Arch, west London, for over a century. The site is where 105 canonised and beatified Catholics were martyred at the Tyburn gallows during the Reformation.

A London nun who saw the Eucharist turn to bloody flesh in the hands of a priest is to be put on the road to sainthood by Pope Francis.

The Vatican has agreed to open the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adele Garnier, the foundress of the Tyburn Nuns.

Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924, has been given the title “Servant of God” after the Congregation for the Cause of Saints concluded that there were “no obstacles” to her candidacy.

The development is likely to be formally announced in a declaration from the Vatican later in the year.

The Vatican had been petitioned to open the Cause by Bishop Joseph de Metz-Noblat of Langres, a French diocese close to where Mother Garnier grew up.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, wrote to the bishop during the summer to inform him that investigations could proceed and instructing him to establish a tribunal within his diocese to examine Mother Garnier’s life and writings.

The conclusions of the local tribunal will be eventually sent to the Vatican and scrutinised by theologians and historians ahead of the miracle needed for Mother Garnier’s beatification – when she will be given the title Blessed – and another for her canonisation, when she will be recognised as a saint.

Mother Xavier McMonagle, the assistant Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said the nuns had sought the opening of the cause for 20 years.

“It has been a long time, but that’s not such a bad thing,” she said. “It has given us time to research her writings.”

Mother Garnier was born near Dijon in 1838. She worked as a governess and turned down a marriage proposal so she could establish her religious order in Montmartre, Paris, at the end of the 19th century.

She gathered together a community of women dedicated to the “perpetual” – or non-stop – adoration of the Holy Eucharist.

The fledgling community was persecuted by the Devil, with cases of obsession and diabolical possession and objects overturned, picked up and thrown around rooms.

On one occasion the sisters were coated suddenly with particles of altar breads and one of them was struck by invisible blows.

But it was the anti-clerical Law of Associations which caused the nuns to flee to London in 1901.

They came first to Notting Hill then in 1903, with the help of a cash gift, purchased a house on the north side of Hyde Park, just yards from the site of the Tyburn gallows, upon which 105 Catholic martyrs perished during the Protestant Reformation.

Today Mother Garnier’s tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across the globe.

Her order of contemplative Benedictine nuns – properly called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre – has also spread rapidly around the world and in the last few decades has opened new convents in South America, Africa, France and New Zealand.

Pope St John Paul II also invited the nuns to open a convent close to the Vatican with the request to pray especially for him and his successors.

In 2012, Fr Gianmario Piga, an Italian priest, wrote a spiritual biography of the nun, in which he analysed her letters and other writings in great detail.

In the book, The Path of Mother Adele Garnier, Fr Piga revealed her to be a mystic who had experiences comparable to those recorded by such great spiritual writers as St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.

He showed how in one letter to Abbé Charles Sauvé, a priest friend, she described how she saw the Blessed Sacrament turn to bloody flesh.

“At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle,” she wrote.

“Oh, if you could know what I saw and how I am still moved and impressed by this vision,” she continued.

“The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the colour of blood and luminous at the same time … The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet.”

The Vatican Press not only volunteered to publish the work but also gave the book its premier launch in the Vatican’s Marconi Hall on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The key address was given by Fr Federico Lombardi, then Pope Benedict XVI’s spokesman, who stressed the importance of Mother Garner’s teachings.

A year later Pope Francis presented the nuns with an engraved gold chalice as a gift to mark the opening of their first French Convent at St Loup-sur-Aujon, near Dijon.

Last week, Cardinal Vincent Nichols celebrated Mass in Tyburn Convent to mark the golden jubilee of the Tyburn Association of Adoration, a lay movement which shares the perpetual adoration with the nuns.

In his homily, the cardinal described Tyburn Convent as “a visible representation of the goal towards which the entire Church is journeying”.

He said: “Mother Garnier wanted each one of her convents not only to be a place in which Jesus is continually adored in the Blessed Sacrament, but also to be a place in which lay people could share in this perpetual adoration. The association fulfils her deep desire.”

The Tyburn Nuns have bought the house in France where their foundress, Mother Marie Adèle Garnier, was born in 1838. The purchase of the property in Grancey-le-Château, a Burgundy town in the Archdiocese of Dijon, was completed just months after the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adèle was opened. The nuns, whose Mother House in London is sited yards from the site of the execution of...

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Tyburn Convent stands yards from the site of the former Tyburn Tree, the three-sided London gallows upon which 105 Catholics, including 20 canonised saints, were executed during the Protestant Reformation.

The convent’s very existence fulfils the prophecy made in 1585 by Fr Gregory Gunne when, during his own trial, he rebuked an Elizabethan court for having sentenced St Edmund Campion to death at Tyburn.

“You have slain the greatest man in England,” he said. “I will add that one day there, where you have put him to death, a religious house will arise, thanks to an important offering.”

Ever since March 4 1903, when the order’s French foundress, Mother Marie Adele Garnier, opened the convent, the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre OSB – also known as the Tyburn Nuns – have prayed at Tyburn in perpetual adoration of the Eucharist.

The order is now growing and is spreading rapidly around the world. In the last 15 years alone it has opened a succession of monasteries at the invitation of local bishops, most recently Blessed Pope John Paul II,who, in the 2005 Year of the Eucharist, invited the Tyburn Nuns to establish a house in Rome.

Yesterday, the Tyburn Nuns released the DVD Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo, a 90-minute film by Michael Luke Davies, a former West End fashion and beauty photographer, which offers a unique and fascinating window into life in their order’s nine monasteries.

London

Here, the viewer is introduced to the Tyburn Nuns and their foundress, Marie Adele Garnier, a French woman devoted to both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and adoration of the Eucharist.

She founded the order in Montmartre, Paris, in 1898 but fled to London three years later to evade anti-clerical laws. She re-established the order on England’s own “hill of martyrs” in 1903. The convent’s Crypt of the Martyrs has grown to become a centre of international pilgrimage.

Archbishop George Stack of Cardiff is filmed saying: “Whenever I think of Tyburn Convent I think of those beautiful words and that wonderful image of the English poet T S Eliot. He spoke about a still point in a turning world and that seems to me to sum up what Tyburn is. Tyburn Convent is situated at the very centre of the busiest city of our country, London, and it is situated at possibly the busiest junction, Marble Arch. But there is an invitation here from every walk of life, people in any need whatsoever, to participate in that wonderful world of heart speaking to heart in the silence of the heart.”

Ireland

The Tyburn Nuns are resident in St Benedict’s Priory, Cobh, a monastery in the colonial-style former Admiralty buildings of the Royal Navy, overlooking Cork Harbour, one of the most beautiful harbours in the world.

Here, the film examines the nuns’ life of prayer and work, under the Benedictine rule ora et labora. Devoted lay people are seen joining the nuns for Mass in the monastery church before nuns are filmed at work in the library, kitchen and garden.

Filming also takes place in the monastery’s Oratory of St Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland and the last of the Tyburn martyrs.

It includes footage of the Bible garden and of Veronica Brennan, who tragically lost her son, David, speaking in the Leanbh garden, which was specially constructed as a place of peace and reflection for the bereaved parents of deceased children.

Australia

Michael Luke Davies captures the extraordinary moment when 26-year-old Sister Mary Justin of the Divine Child, who grew up in Bordertown, South Australia, sings her solemn vows during her profession as a nun, having entered the convent at the age of 17, and receiving a ring from the Mother General with the solemn proclamation that she “is now forever espoused to Christ”.

“It was the first time I have ever attended one of those ceremonies and to be so close was very involving, and she had a beautiful voice,” said Davies. “Because of her voice, because of the light at the windows, the whole ceremony was just fantastic and very moving.”

The monastery at Riverstone in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, is one of the order’s oldest houses, dating back to 1956. Cardinal Norman Gilroy invited the nuns to New South Wales. As is typical of Tyburn Nuns’ houses, it enjoys the active support of local Catholics, some of whom not only attend early morning Mass but also join the nuns to help them with their work in their gardens, simply because they “want to be where the nuns are and close to God”.

Peru

The Monastery of the Sacred Heart in the fishing town of Sechura, Peru, was the first foundation of the Tyburn Nuns in a developing country. The nuns went there in 1976 at the invitation of the Archbishop of Piura who asked them specifically to pray for priests and seminarians. The nuns built a convent on the highest sand dune of one of the most isolated regions of the country. It opened in July 1981 and the following year the nuns found themselves at the heart of a humanitarian effort to help the victims of floods caused by the Corriente Niño.

The filming in Peru demonstrates once again just how very close the nuns are to the communities in which they flourish. In Sechura, they have opened both a hospital and a museum. They and the priests who serve them are assisted in their works of mercy by lay oblates.

Every morning, before dawn, the chapel is crammed with fishermen who go to pray there before starting work, asking God’s protection before they set out on the Pacific Ocean in their boats.

Scotland

The filming at the Benedictine Monastery in Largs on the west coast of Scotland caught the nuns as they sang, played musical instruments and meditated in the quiet seclusion of their walled garden. It observes the “silent succession of Sisters replacing one another in the monastery church for periods of silent Eucharistic Adoration”, which is at the heart of the life of the order.

The film tells how the Bishop of Galloway formally petitioned the Tyburn Nuns to open a monastery in Scotland in the 1980s and how they amalgamated with the Benedictine convent at Dumfries, inheriting its rich musical tradition, museum of hand-embroidered vestments as well as valuable oak church furniture.

New Zealand

The Tyburn Nuns came to New Zealand just 15 years ago at the invitation of Bishop Patrick Dunn and they now have a thriving monastery supported by the active enthusiasm of local people, including a 92-year-old man who has created a series of bush walks modelled on the Stations of the Cross which have become a pilgrimage destination for tourists.

The nuns are filmed in the New Zealand countryside, nursing orphaned lambs, harvesting herbs and crops and in silent contemplation.

Michael Luke Davies, a non-Catholic, said that filming the prioress sitting beside a river bank was for him the high point in the entire production. “I come from a fashion and beauty background,” he said. “I had been filming models all my life and then suddenly I found myself waist-deep in water filming this religious person by this river and I felt to myself: ‘This is what I am supposed to be doing.’ It was a massive moment in my life.”

Ecuador

The Monastery of the Gate of Heaven at Vilcabamba, Ecuador, is situated 5,000 feet above sea level in the Andean mountains. It dates from 2002 when the Bishop of Loja asked the nuns to establish a contemplative community to pray for the priests of his diocese and to help the local people find a more prayerful way of Christian life.

The film reveals how the nuns have transformed a mountainside “full of rubbish and weeds” into a vast sculptured garden with walkways, containing walls and packed with indigenous plants and flowers and medicinal herbs.

The film features the admission to the novitiate of Mother Fatima, when she takes the veil and begins to live under the rule of St Benedict, and the monastic profession of Mother Caridad.

Colombia

The Monastery of the Divine Paraclete is one of the newest of the convents. The Tyburn Nuns established their third Latin American house at the urgent and insistent requests of a bishop who wanted the nuns to specifically pray for peace in a land bedevilled by civil conflict and drugs trafficking.

The monastery, situated at Antioquia, high in the northern lakelands, is in an Italian medieval style.

Italy

The film concludes at the order’s newest religious house, the Monastery of Madonna dell’ Eucharistia in Via Cardinal Bofondi, near St Peter’s Basilica.

The order was invited to Rome by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 2005 to pray perpetually before the Blessed Sacrament for the Holy Father and the Church in Rome.

A group of the nuns, led by the Mother General, kneel before the Blessed’s tomb in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica to offer prayers of gratitude for the pope’s invitation to open a monastery in the Eternal City and for the gifts of a chalice bearing his coat of arms.

Davies says the filming in the Vatican represented for him another of the “high points” of the experience of making Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo.

He explained that the Vatican closed the crypt to pilgrims so he could shoot the moment when the nuns prayed at Blessed John Paul’s tomb.

He said: “It was Mother’s very positive wish that they go back and thank Pope John Paul.”

We have five copies of the DVD to give away. Just send us a postcard marked “Tyburn competition” with the answer to this question: who was the first Tyburn martyr? You can also email the answer to editorial@catholicherald.co.uk. The competition has closed.

Copies of Tyburn Convent Gloria Deo can be purchased for £15 either directly from Tyburn Convent, 8 Hyde Park Place, London W2 2LJ (tel: 020 7723 7262) or from Catholic bookshops

The post The Tyburn Tree bears abundant fruit appeared first on Catholic Herald.

A London-based order of nuns is to open its seventh convent in the space of just 20 years.

The Tyburn Nuns, whose mother house is situated near Marble Arch, have started to build their first African monastery in the Diocese of Minna in Niger State in the north of Nigeria.

It will be their 11th monastery, the 10th since the Second World War and the seventh to open in a rapid global proliferation of religious houses under the order since 1993.

The contemplative Benedictines were invited to Nigeria to promote Eucharistic Adoration and to pray for peace in a country afflicted by a bloody conflict between local Christians and Muslims.

The monastery will be dedicated to Our Lady, Queen of Peace, and is expected to be fully completed, with a novitiate, by 2015.

Bishop Martin Igwe Uzoukwu of Minna laid the foundation stone of the monastery at Kafin-Koro last month.

He said he invited the nuns – whose proper name is the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre – because he wanted a place in his diocese that would serve as a “watershed for prayer”.

“Their specific apostolate is Adoration of the Eucharist so the Eucharistic Adoration will be taking place here and it is Perpetual Adoration morning, afternoon and night,” he said.
Bishop Uzoukwu said he flew to England to visit the order and was so impressed by their apostolate that he invited them to his diocese immediately and offered them land.

Mother Mary Xavier McMonagle, the Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said she visited several sites in his diocese before opting for Kafin-Koro.

“As soon as we came to Kafin-Koro and saw all those people and they all waved at us as if we were their long lost friends, and I don’t know why they did, but we felt we were warmly welcome by these so friendly people,” she said.

“So that is how it happened. And then when the bishop brought us and showed us the place he would like us to have, we thought that this was just a gift from heaven, from God.

“The parish priest tells us that he has been praying for years to have nuns here. So I think it is God’s Holy Will.”

The nuns will be the first contemplative religious order in the diocese since it was erected in 1911.

The Tyburn Nuns are themselves a young order, having been formed into a community in Paris in 1898 by Mother Marie Adèle Garnier, a French mystic.

They soon fled to London to escape anti-clerical laws and in 1903 established themselves just yards form the site of the Tyburn gallows, where 105 beatified and canonised Catholics were martyred during the Protestant Reformation.

After the Second World War, the order expanded to Ireland, Australia and Peru and since 1993 the nuns have opened houses in Scotland, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy and two in New Zealand.

There are about 80 nuns in total and six will be sent to build the new monastery in Nigeria. The bishop is hoping that a chapel will be open on the site by March.

Five local women have already expressed an interest in joining the order.

The post Tyburn Nuns to open first convent in Africa as order grows worldwide appeared first on Catholic Herald.

A priest who was invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace has said the Queen asked him to convey her thanks to the Tyburn Nuns after learning that they prayed for her.

Fr Patrick Cope, a prison chaplain based at the Ministry of Justice prison headquarters, said he told the Queen he was also chaplain to London’s Tyburn Convent. He explained that the nuns had a plaque entitled: “For the Queen and England” at one of the main altar candles.

The Queen “showed great interest”, he said, and asked him to “convey her thanks to the nuns for their prayers and her greetings”.

Fr Cope had been invited to Buckingham Palace in recognition of his role as a prison chaplain and as a fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

The Tyburn Nuns are contemplative Benedictines. They have had a presence in Marble Arch, west London, for over a century. The site is where 105 canonised and beatified Catholics were martyred at the Tyburn gallows during the Reformation.

The post Queen thanks Tyburn Nuns for their prayers appeared first on Catholic Herald.

A London nun who saw the Eucharist turn to bloody flesh in the hands of a priest is to be put on the road to sainthood by Pope Francis.

The Vatican has agreed to open the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adele Garnier, the foundress of the Tyburn Nuns.

Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924, has been given the title “Servant of God” after the Congregation for the Cause of Saints concluded that there were “no obstacles” to her candidacy.

The development is likely to be formally announced in a declaration from the Vatican later in the year.

The Vatican had been petitioned to open the Cause by Bishop Joseph de Metz-Noblat of Langres, a French diocese close to where Mother Garnier grew up.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, wrote to the bishop during the summer to inform him that investigations could proceed and instructing him to establish a tribunal within his diocese to examine Mother Garnier’s life and writings.

The conclusions of the local tribunal will be eventually sent to the Vatican and scrutinised by theologians and historians ahead of the miracle needed for Mother Garnier’s beatification – when she will be given the title Blessed – and another for her canonisation, when she will be recognised as a saint.

Mother Xavier McMonagle, the assistant Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns, said the nuns had sought the opening of the cause for 20 years.

“It has been a long time, but that’s not such a bad thing,” she said. “It has given us time to research her writings.”

Mother Garnier was born near Dijon in 1838. She worked as a governess and turned down a marriage proposal so she could establish her religious order in Montmartre, Paris, at the end of the 19th century.

She gathered together a community of women dedicated to the “perpetual” – or non-stop – adoration of the Holy Eucharist.

The fledgling community was persecuted by the Devil, with cases of obsession and diabolical possession and objects overturned, picked up and thrown around rooms.

On one occasion the sisters were coated suddenly with particles of altar breads and one of them was struck by invisible blows.

But it was the anti-clerical Law of Associations which caused the nuns to flee to London in 1901.

They came first to Notting Hill then in 1903, with the help of a cash gift, purchased a house on the north side of Hyde Park, just yards from the site of the Tyburn gallows, upon which 105 Catholic martyrs perished during the Protestant Reformation.

Today Mother Garnier’s tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across the globe.

Her order of contemplative Benedictine nuns – properly called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre – has also spread rapidly around the world and in the last few decades has opened new convents in South America, Africa, France and New Zealand.

Pope St John Paul II also invited the nuns to open a convent close to the Vatican with the request to pray especially for him and his successors.

In 2012, Fr Gianmario Piga, an Italian priest, wrote a spiritual biography of the nun, in which he analysed her letters and other writings in great detail.

In the book, The Path of Mother Adele Garnier, Fr Piga revealed her to be a mystic who had experiences comparable to those recorded by such great spiritual writers as St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.

He showed how in one letter to Abbé Charles Sauvé, a priest friend, she described how she saw the Blessed Sacrament turn to bloody flesh.

“At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle,” she wrote.

“Oh, if you could know what I saw and how I am still moved and impressed by this vision,” she continued.

“The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the colour of blood and luminous at the same time … The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet.”

The Vatican Press not only volunteered to publish the work but also gave the book its premier launch in the Vatican’s Marconi Hall on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The key address was given by Fr Federico Lombardi, then Pope Benedict XVI’s spokesman, who stressed the importance of Mother Garner’s teachings.

A year later Pope Francis presented the nuns with an engraved gold chalice as a gift to mark the opening of their first French Convent at St Loup-sur-Aujon, near Dijon.

Last week, Cardinal Vincent Nichols celebrated Mass in Tyburn Convent to mark the golden jubilee of the Tyburn Association of Adoration, a lay movement which shares the perpetual adoration with the nuns.

In his homily, the cardinal described Tyburn Convent as “a visible representation of the goal towards which the entire Church is journeying”.

He said: “Mother Garnier wanted each one of her convents not only to be a place in which Jesus is continually adored in the Blessed Sacrament, but also to be a place in which lay people could share in this perpetual adoration. The association fulfils her deep desire.”

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The Tyburn Nuns have bought the house in France where their foundress, Mother Marie Adèle Garnier, was born in 1838.

The purchase of the property in Grancey-le-Château, a Burgundy town in the Archdiocese of Dijon, was completed just months after the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adèle was opened.

The nuns, whose Mother House in London is sited yards from the site of the execution of more than 100 Catholic martyrs of the Protestant Reformation, intend to install a chapel inside the house and to turn the property into a centre for pilgrimage as the Cause of their foundress progresses towards sainthood.

The nuns also intend to found a museum and information centre dedicated to the life of Mother Marie-Adèle at the site and to convert a large part of the house for use as a small conference and retreat centre for day groups and some overnight guests.

The Cause of Mother Marie-Adèle was opened on December 3 2016 by Bishop Joseph de Metz-Noblat of Langres, France, at a ceremony in the Convent of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, a monastery of the Tyburn Nuns within his diocese at St Loup-sur-Aujon, just 20 miles from Grancey.

The first contract for the purchase of the house, which had been previously used as a police station and most recently as a tourist information office, was signed on March 8.

Soon afterwards, the house was bought outright by the nuns for an undisclosed sum thanks to benefactors from all over the world who answered an appeal for help. They included villagers from poor areas of Peru.

The nuns still require funds for the renovation work and are actively seeking church pews and other furnishings.

The nuns hope to have the house ready to open to the public by autumn 2017 at the earliest following renovation work and the installation of the chapel.

At present, the house has six self-contained apartments and a large ground floor room which was previously the tourist office but which will be converted into a chapel.

Their intentions for the property have been welcomed by Archbishop Roland Minnerath of Dijon.

“I cannot but encourage you in this project of acquisition of the house and of the construction of a chapel,” Archbishop Minnerath said in a letter to Mother Marilla Aw, the Australian-born Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns.

“The diocese of Dijon rejoices at seeing the rise of Grancey-le-Château as a place of pilgrimage where your sisters will radiate the spirituality of the Sacred Heart,” he said. “We are also rejoicing at the opening of the Cause of beatification of Marie-Adèle Garnier. May the Lord bless your apostolate.”

Mother Marilla said that since St Loup was opened in 2013 the Nuns have been making pilgrimages to the house, which she described as the “Bethlehem of our congregation”, standing outside singing and praying in “rain, hail, shine or snow”.

Mother Marilla said: “The construction of a chapel in the house where our dear saintly foundress was born is significant for us as a congregation but also crucial now when her Cause for canonisation has just opened.

“Since 3 December there has been unexpectedly fervent international interest in her and her Eucharistic spirituality. Our foundress died at Tyburn, London, and her tomb has been for many years a place of pilgrimage for those who esteemed and venerated her privately. For decades those who have been in need have been visiting her tomb and we have many letters of favours received.

“In May, 2018, there will be a 12-day pilgrimage for our oblates and friends which will begin at Tyburn, London, and will include Paris, Pontmain, Lourdes, Nevers, Saint Loup sur Aujon, Dijon and Grancey-le-Château.

“On 21 May this year, Rev Mother Xavier McMonagle, the Assistant General of our congregation has been invited to speak about Mother Marie-Adèle Garnier at a retreat on Long Island, New York, run by the Missionaries of the Most Holy Eucharist. She was also invited to be on a programme on EWTN with Fr Mitch Pacwa. We also will be in Boston between 23–29 May and hope to speak about the charism of our Mother Foundress there.

“There are so many things that are happening all around the world in regard to the cause of canonisation of our Mother Foundress that it truly appears that she is very impatient to be canonised. Therefore, if anyone thinks they have need for her prayers now is a good time to ask.”

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