Chairman's Report for 2007
The following report was delivered at the Confraternity's AGM on 19th January 2008, and will be published in a forthcoming Bulletin. You may quote reasonable extracts without permission, though we would appreciate an acknowledgement. For more substantial use, please contact the Secretary. |
The Confraternity of St James is 25 years old. It was on 13 January 1983 that Ian Dodd, Peter Johnson, the late Robin Neillands, Pat Quaife and Jocelyn Rix were invited to the home of Dr Mary Remnant and founded our Confraternity.That happy anniversary makes this annual meeting a special time for celebration, for giving thanks and for hope in what lies ahead. We were hoping to have with us today the person who assisted as midwife at the happy birth of the Confraternity. I mean Mlle Jeannine Warcollier, Secretary of the Société des Amis de Saint Jacques of France. She it was who wrote to our six founders, after they had individually joined the Société, to suggest that they should meet. Sadly, ill health prevents her from being with us today. We have other dear and distinguished guests with us. From the office of the Xacobeo, the section of the Xunta de Galicia that deals with the pilgrimage, we welcome Doña Rosa Vázquez Santos. From the Amigos del Camino de Santiago de El Bierzo, who are our partners in the Refugio Gaucelmo at Rabanal, we welcome their Presdident, Don Domingo Sánchez Álvarez and his wife Doña María Teresa de Sanchez, together with their Treasurer Don Bernardo Rodríguez Fernández and his wife Doña Irene de Rodríguez. From the Irish Society of the Friends of St James, we welcome Pádraig MacSweeney, their Chairman. I am delighted that in a week’s time I shall be able to give the Confraternity’s greetings to the Irish Society in person, as Pádraig has kindly invited me to attend their annual dinner.Finally, in a short while we will be privileged to hear one of our own members, Stuart Frost from the Victoria and Albert Museum, talk about the cast there of the Pórtico de la Gloria.
It seems to me fitting that on such a glorious and hopeful occasion we should be invited to contemplate the Pórtico de la Gloria. It reminds me of one of the great works of pilgrim poetry of the 20th Century, by Charles Péguy : “Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu”, “The Portal of the Mystery of Hope”. Charles Péguy, who was killed in the First World War, was largely responsible for the revival in modern times of the pilgrimage to Chartres. “The Portal of the Mystery of Hope” is the second of his great trilogy of poetic dramas. Why does he refer to it as a portal ? It seems that he was thinking of the great Cathedral porches of the Middle Ages, like the Pórtico de la Gloria, in which the mysteries of salvation were presented not only in sculpture but in drama, when used as a stage for mystery plays. All of us as pilgrims have learned by experience that hope is the virtue most needed by a pilgrim. All of us, entering that portal, would delight in the multiple images that Péguy offers us to contemplate hope. The main recurring image is of Hope as a little girl, contrasted with her fully-grown adult sisters Faith and Charity. Here is one passage, using much pilgrim imagery :
“On the uphill path, sandy and troublesome.
On the uphill road.
Dragged along, hanging from the arms of her two older sisters,
Who hold her by the hand,
The little Hope
Pushes on.
And in between her two older sisters she seems to let herself be carried.
Like a child who lacks the energy to walk
And is dragged along the road in spite of herself.
But in reality it is she who moves the other two
And who carries them,
And who moves the whole world.”
We are 25 years old. We celebrate, we give thanks, and we have hope, the virtue most needed by a pilgrim. You remember that Dante, in the “Paradiso” has three Apostles come to question him about Faith, Hope and Love . St Peter deals with Faith, St John with Love, but to learn about Hope Dante encounters St James:
“Behold ! see now the Baron for whose sake
Galicia’s shrine on earth is visited.”
Hope is the virtue most needed by a pilgrim. We are 25 years old, we celebrate , we have hope and hope seems to be in the air. It was only two months ago that Pope Benedict XVI, the Pope who delighted us by placing the scallop shell at the centre of his coat of arms, published his second encyclical letter, “Spe Salvi” on the subject of Hope. One doesn’t have to read far before coming on pilgrim imagery, right in the introductory paragraph:
“We have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present : the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey.”
We have hope, we celebrate and we give thanks. For whom do we give thanks ? For St James and all the heavenly beings sent to support us in our hope. For each other : we are a Confraternity ; what we do we do together. We give thanks for our six founders, and all who helped them in those early days. We give thanks for all those, living and dead, who have been part of our pilgrimage over these 25 years. We give thanks for all of you, all 2000 or so of you, who are on our pilgrimage now. We give thanks for all who have given us help and hospitality in our pilgrimages. We give thanks for all we are linked with in the other associations of St James around the world. And as it is part of my task to be your mouthpiece in these matters, I give thanks for all those who have performed a special task in the Confraternity over the past year : our President, H.E. the Count of Casa Miranda. Those who serve on our Committee, our Vice-Chairmen Alison Raju and Revd Colin Jones, our Secretary Marion Marples, our Treasurer Tony Ward, our Systems Officer Alison Thorp, our Bulletin Editor Dr Gosia Brykczynska, (who has surpassed herself with issue no 100 to celebrate this anniversary), Sue Goddard, Catherine Kimmel, Mary Moseley, Angelika Schneider, Cristina Spink, Graeme Taylor, and Revd Ricky Yates. The Committee has been very grateful for the help of Pat Watson and Anne Froud in recording the minutes. In the Office, receiving members and enquirers, as well as Marion and Alison Thorp, we find Christine Pleasants, and many volunteers, notably Wendy Beecher, Willie Bossert, Robin Dorkings and Schzen Ooi, especially on the Saturday Open Days which I commend to you all. For the Library and the Website Howard Nelson, for the Slide Library John Hatfield, for the Digital Library Michael Krier. Assisting Gosia with the Bulletin are James Hatts and John Revell, and the band of stuffers. All those who write our much-admired guides and other publications, and the Publications Subcommittee under Ricky Yates, and Paul Turnbull who keeps the pilgrim register. Eric Walker, known to pilgrims for so many years as the man who has sent their pilgrim record, is standing down, knowing that every one of the pilgrims he has assisted joins us today in thanking him.
I have said nothing as yet about our two Refugios at Rabanal and Miraz, which are the two most public visible ways in which we assist pilgrims. I feel constrained by the fact that so many people have been involved in giving through Rabanal and Miraz: those who serve on the two Subcommittees, who serve as hospitaleros, on working parties, in fundraising. I shall leave Cristina Spink to tell you more fully about Rabanal, Colin Jones to tell you more fully about Miraz.And I can also reassure you that our link with the Amis de Saint Jacques of the Vézelay route, energetically fostered by John Hatfield, continues to thrive, with some 20 of our members serving this year as hospitaliers. But, in connection with Rabanal, I must give special thanks to two dynamic couples. Coming just after the wonderful year in which Rabanal welcomed its 100,000th pilgrim, Tricia Shaw is stepping down as co-ordinator of hospitaleros, the mission she has shared for most of these last years with her husband Stuart. And in overall charge of the Rabanal refugio we have had the wonderful double-act of Cristina and Paul Spink. Their energy, devotion, and tact have left a permanent monument in the warmth of our relationship with the people of Rabanal, our friends the monks, and our partners the El Bierzo Association. And finally, thanks to all of you who have spoken about pilgrimage at our Practical Pilgrim Days,at the Retreat for returned pilgrims led by Fr Benjamin Griffiths, at our meetings, and at meetings held in all the places where you live.
At that first meeting of the Confraternity 25 years ago, one task proposed by Mary Remnant was to track down the pioneer of pilgrimage research in this country, Constance Storrs. They did track her down, and after her death we instituted the series of Constance Storrs Memorial Lectures as our way of relating the finest scholars of the pilgrimage to that pioneer. Our Constance Storrs Lecture in 2007 was given by Professor Klaus Herbers, from Nürnberg, on the many faces of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, and I then had the pleasure of showing him and his wife Gertrud around some of the St James sites of London. I took them to a church which perhaps deserves to be better known, the Catholic Church of St John the Evangelist in Duncan Terrace, Islington, London N1. This church was founded in 1843, and is currently conducting an appeal for its restoration. Why is it a St James site ? Well, there is a statue of St James, once part of a Transfiguration scene. But there is something much rarer than that, something almost on a par with London’s copy of the Pórtico de la Gloria.You have heard that Mantegna in 1451 painted in a church in Padua a series of the Life of St James, including the colourful legendary figures such as Hermogenes and Josias who are named in the Codex Calixtinus. All except one of these paintings were destroyed in the Second World War. Fortunately, they had previously been photographed, and so we are able to appreciate Mantegna’s art in books such as the one in the Confraternity library. But we in London can do something much more concrete than that. In the Baptismal chapel of St John’s Church, Islington, is a Victorian copy of one of Mantegna’s paintings. Appropriately for the Baptismal chapel, it shows St James baptizing the repentant magician Hermogenes.
In 1993, two compatriots of mine, Charles Camilleri and Peter Serracino Inglott wrote an opera “Compostella” that was performed in Malta. My review of it was published in our Bulletin, no 49. The libretto draws heavily on Dante, and Hope appears as a character. The programme included photographs of the Mantegna St James cycle, and I took it with me to Islington to show Klaus and Gertrud. When we came out of the church, we stood in the portico and read the last few lines of the libretto, ending with the line “Speriamo !” “Let’s hope so !” We paused and reflected. “Well,” I said, “the Pope has just given us his new encyclical about Hope. “Yes”, replied Klaus, “and his last encyclical was about Caritas”. A woman had entered the portico and stopped to listen to us, seeming uncertain whether or not to enter the church. Hearing Klaus’s words, she began to sing the familiar chant from Taizé:
« Ubi caritas et amor
Ubi caritas
Deus ibi est »
Klaus, Gertrud and I joined her in singing for a few precious moments. Those moments were of the kind that we have all experienced on the Camino : a small miracle of St James.
Our Confraternity is 25 years old. Is this perhaps just a portico, leading into more glories of our Cathedral ? Let’s hope so.
William Griffiths